Speaker 1: Well folks it is starting.
Donald Trump hid a $19.8 million loan from a North Korea linked company while he was
president.
Very quickly paid that off, never disclosed it.
And the questions are growing and growing and growing.
A number of important and detailed articles to look at, including a Forbes article called
Trump Owed Hidden Debt While in Office.
This is clearly only the very beginning.
And remember, his tax returns haven't even leaked yet.
The House Ways and Means Committee has them, but they have not yet even leak.
Let's dig into this first story.
Donald Trump's business attracted so much scrutiny during his time in office that it
would be easy to conclude that all the information about its foreign entanglements would be out
by now.
But it's not.
Buried in a heap of recently released financial paperwork.
Sits a surprising revelation.
Donald Trump had a foreign creditor he failed to disclose while running for president in
2016.
And after assuming office in 2017, the documents compiled by the Trump Organization and obtained
by the New York Attorney General show a previously unreported liability of $19.8 million listed
as LP Daewoo.
The debt stems from an agreement Trump struck to share some of his licensing fees with Daewoo,
which is a South Korean conglomerate that partnered with Trump on a project near the
U.N. headquarters in New York City.
Trump eliminated the debt five and a half months into his tenure as president, according
to the documents.
He seems to have acted with urgency to wipe the liability off his balance sheet from 2011
to 2016.
The balance stayed static at 19.8 million paperwork capturing Trump's financial picture
as of June 30, 2017, five months into his presidency, appear to show the balance dropped
to 4.3 million.
Trump got rid of the debt altogether.
Shortly after that, Daewoo was bought out of its position on July five, 2017.
Doesn't say who paid off the loan.
Although the debt appeared on the Trump Organization's internal paperwork, it did not show up on
Trump's public financial disclosure report documents he was required to submit to federal
officials while running for president and after taking office.
Trump's former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, told The New York Times in 2016, his boss disclosed
all debt connected to companies in which Trump held a 100% stake on the documents.
That was not true.
It's also important to understand that there is a North Korean connection here, although
it is not necessarily the most important or titillating aspect of this.
The very same Forbes article reads There's little doubt that if the work world had known
about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflict of interest
concerns, perhaps heightened by De Woo's historical ties to North Korea.
In the mid 1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business
inside North Korea.
Most people, as rich as Trump, would not be heavily influenced by a $20 million loan.
Regardless, the fact that Trump managed to keep the debt secret for so long underscores
how weak the government's ethics safeguards are, how difficult they are to strengthen,
and how easily Trump could barrel right through them as he runs for president again in 2024.
So there are a few issues here.
I would say that there are four issues here.
Number one, is this also still just the tip of the iceberg?
This has been a question as far as Trump's taxes go now for more than five years.
What we what we know is already really bad.
And every time we learn a little bit more, we are brought inevitably to the question
of how much more is there that we don't even know about?
Is this.
That's issue number one.
Issue number two.
This was hidden.
That this was deliberately hidden and that is a problem.
Number three, the sudden rapid payoff of the debt while having made no progress on the
debt for a very long period of time.
What was the reason for the apparent sense of urgency?
It would be important to learn about that.
And then number four, maybe I skipped, I don't know, number four, the North Korea connection.
And is it possible that this might have influenced in some way Donald Trump's obsession, quite
frankly, with Kim Jong un and North Korea and the meetings and the handshakes and all
of that stuff.
Again, as the article says, normally someone this rich isn't going to alter their behavior
dramatically, over 20 million.
But we have good reason to suspect Trump's not actually as rich as he claims to be, and
also because it was hidden.
It only raises the alarm around that as well.
The by the way, it is continuing to stun and surprise shock that the obsession from the
right is with Hunter Biden's laptop and references they claim are to Joe Biden, for which there
is no proof.
And meanwhile, we have all of this actual proof and financial records where there is
not even a doubt that it's all about Trump.
Trump's name is on all of it.
Refuses to release his tax returns.
We figure out he owes money to South Korea, to North Korean link company.
He hid it.
And then you've got examples from Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, all these different things.
The guy we have to look at what might be, but there is no evidence has anything to do
with Joe Biden in documents.
It is continued hypocrisy.
This is almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg.
And indeed, if those tax returns ever leak.
I'm not saying leak them to anyone.
I'm just saying if they leak, I would expect way more of exactly
this type
of stuff.