the news continues tonight, i want to hand it over for chris. >> the president's dirty secrets have been exposed. tonight we can finally answer the question of why the president didn't want you to see his taxes. this is more than ample proof of all kinds of problems for the president. you'll see tonight that between what we have learned and now we have a much better understanding of what we need to know. we're own an entirely new footing in terms of this analysis of this president and potential problems for him. you will now understand why the president has done certain things with the covid relief bill, with his tax bill.

you will understand why he structured it the way he did. what it means to him. what you won't understand, but will all be on the same page, we need to know who has lent this president unbelievable sums of millions that are personally guaranteed. i'll tell you why that matters? and are due in just a few years. this much we know, okay? all of this time that he has been spending, trying to deal with this, and what it means, he wanted to keep this from you because he is not what he has told you, and because he doesn't have what he says. because he has money coming in from places that he didn't want you to know, and because he has money going out that is not only undercutting the idea of his wealth, but raises significant questions about who would lend him this money? why would he be personally guaranteed? very unusual in high net worth

situations like his own, with all these different corporate entities. why would he personally guarantee? why would he have to. who is it too? national security issues. ideas of his policies. what his personal conflicts are. we have john bolton tonight. head of national security. he didn't know about these loans. can you imagine that? you'll hear that conversation for yourself. now, i want to tell you that -- let's set the stage. everything i'm about to play for you, we now know is b.s. >> i'm really rich. i built a great company, one of the best companies. i built a great company. >> no, he built a great brand. not a company in terms of something that makes something. that sells things and takes thing in and has managed and

grows and has staff, and has underlying equity asset value. that means something you can borrow against. if he were such a great businessman. donald trump would not have to be personally on the hook for $421 million. personally. okay? when is it due? it starts coming due in the next four years. personally liable. his great company, what does that mean? whoever was lending him the money didn't think he had a great enough company to use it as collateral. think about that. you've grown accustomed to politicians selling you a fairy tale. i get it, i get why you don't want politicians telling you that donald trump is a lying no good nick. is this is about the facts and donald trump has been lying to you in ways that you'll see matter more than expected, he's

been doing it for almost a decade. >> i paid a lot of tax. and, you know, i don't mind, i'm proud to pay it. if i owe it, i pay it. >> not true. >> one of the few honest things he has said was when he didn't know he was being recorded. listen to this. >> when you're a star they let you do it, you can do anything. >> donald trump's celebrity pays really well. he makes a ton of money. now, he may think that entitles him to a different set of rules, because that's how he's been playing. this is not -- i know you heard a lot today and yesterday and you'll hear tomorrow and other places. i can't believe he doesn't pay any taxes. we all know these rich people pay their accountants, so they can get away with what they get away with. no one wants to pay more taxes than they absolutely need to. this isn't that. this isn't just another rich

guy. working the system. he's in control of that same system. he was hired to blow up that system, to drain the swamp, to give you more leverage. what has he done? he has ensured the system continuings and has even bigger loopholes in it, not for people like you, people like him. >> because of our tax cuts, you can keep more of your hard earned money. >> it's not true. he has helped mostly people like him. if you work for a living, you've likely seen your tax bill go up, these are the numbers, and i know they can slice it a million different ways. some people paid less. it was very specific. it was not a middle class tax cut. his policies make it harder for

you to buy a house, but better for people like him to build them. the most powerful man on the planet urgently needs to make money. his push to lift life saving restrictions in the spring look a whole lot different when you realize his revenue is tied to things like golf courses, hotels, real estate, everything that's suffering in the pandemic. so what we don't know may be the biggest threat. absolutely. one to our national security. who lent him the money? because it's personally guaranteed. he's on the hook. there is zero chance that he cannot care about it, and it is a tremendous sum of emergency. $421 million, all right? that's real money. you don't pay a percentage. that's money they're looking for. now, remember, before the political need for silence his son told a reporter something in

2014. we have all the funding we need out of russia. this level of outstanding debt would be reason enough to deny security clearances to any government worker. you would not get one if you had personal loan guarantees on the hook, let alone coming from abroad. now, what irony -- how sickening is it that it doesn't apply to the person we should care about this most? the commander in chief. that much power placed in the hands of one man is why another republican president said this. >> people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. well, i'm not a crook. >> infamous words, right? it had nothing to do with watergate, but nixon was dramatically underpaying his income taxes. here's where we are, i'm telling you, the people around this

president did not know what came out in his taxes. i've been scrubbing it, a lot of other pros have been scrubbing it, they didn't know. the people keeping us safe have no idea who he owes and how much. now, let's get thigh men in here who are intimately familiar with why trump does his taxes this way, a former attorney of his, mitchell zachary, someone whom i've been working on this for 15 years for this moment to come out. tim o'brien. obviously with bloomberg, you remember him from the bloomberg campaign, he's been on msnbc and he's here with me tonight. he literally was a mentor of mine in understanding the structures we were trying to identify. and david cajkay johnston to he us understand what this means. thank you all. tim, i start with you, you had some access, david had some

access also. you always wanted more to come out so people can understand what you understand without you violating any of the rules of litigation that revealed the tax records to you during your litigation against then citizen donald trump with the new york times. what jumps out for you in this chunk of stuff that the new york times processed? >> i think two broad issues, the first one is that donald trump embodies a national security threat. he owns businesses that are in the most vulnerable sectors of the economy right now, that are getting ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. real estate, both commercial and residential travel and leisure, he has debts coming due. donald trump, when he is cornered with debts, usually acts like a caged animal. he has two approaches to this, he either sells his assets to get a handle on the debt, and i think he has significantly more debt than the new york times

disclosed, i think he has north of a billion. he either sells assets or goes for a loan. >> why do you think he has that much, tim? >> it's publicly documented. it's public records on mortgages he's got, chris. it's not spec taking. i think there's a certain portion of that that comes due sooner that's putting more pressure on him. it's certainly north of a billion dollars, that's indisputable. >> let's bring in mitch here for a second. we'll keep it rolling around. mitch, you did his taxes, you started back in the '80s, so nobody's going to tell you anything about his practices and his predilections, but $421 million personally guaranteed after all the money he's had come in, and all the different businesses he's been able to put together. are you surprised by that number? >> of course not. when i worked on it, he was going through terrible times, the divorce with ivana, the taj

mahal debacle. he actually took down some major banks -- i don't know if anyone remembers banker's trust, he had a $100 million unsecured line of credit with them. he paid 3/4 of a point as a fee. and the guys at banker's trust were thrilled, except he paid one months interest and defaulted. lo and behold deutche bank had to take over banker's trust. >> he'll say, i owe $400 million, yeah, that's how you do business, you borrow money, and then you pay it back. i'm worth billions and billions in assets. i can pay this, they don't know what they're talking about. >> well, listen, first of all, i want to comment on what i said before, personal tax returns do not reveal the amount of personal debt, okay? so i'm not sure how the new york

times came up with that number, but i agree it's probably much higher. >> explain that to me. assume i know nothing about taxes. >> on an individual tax return, all you talk about is income and expenses, not assets and liabilities. on a corporate return you would have that. but if this debt is personal, than it won't be reflected in anyway on his tax return. i'm not sure how the new york times came up with that number? >> where would it be? >> it's in his personal financial disclosure, these are government filings, at least $300 million disclosed in there, we've known that for 2 1/2 years. >> let's bring the professor in here on this. you're going to hear from john bolton later in the show, i had to tape him before the show because of time constraints. can you believe that no one in our national security apparatus, allegedly, knew he had this kind of money that he owed personally

to lenders that may include foreign lenders? >> well, i'm not sure why they necessarily would ask. but i want to emphasize, we have other records on donald's debt. and it's much more likely in the neighborhood of a billion dollars, if he were solid, he wouldn't be signing personal notes to secure that debt. we shouldn't make the assumption that donald trump's reporting are actual losses. donald has a history of fabricating tax deductions, some of the losses he took are fabricated. it raises another national security question. where did the money go. >> and just to be clear, mitchell zachary has said before, this is something that can happen, he knows new york was looking at it, he was never a part of it, but if that's what he was doing, he could be in

real trouble. so we have what this means. the biggest question that we're left after with this, is not a fishing expedition. how does the president get around disclosing who he owes the money to? >> well, again, chris, some of this has been disclosed. a large portion of it is to deutche bank. we know lots of money came into his organization, from eastern europe in the mid-2000s, when he went on a shopping spree. the trump soho hotel was built with a lot of money from eastern europe. there's a lot of stuff that we don't know about from precise countries of origin. some comes from turkey, the philippines. the unifying tether in all of these is that you have a president in the oval office who either is indebted to foreign powers or is going to go with his hand out to foreign powers. it's going to taint every public

policy decision he makes, particularly anything involving national reform policy. >> let's go toe break on this idea. what are we worried about? the president doing something desperate to accommodate his own financial situation and forget about his fiduciary responsibility to the american people. what do you know about the president in a situation like that that people should know? >> i don't want to get too political, because i don't want to make enemies. right now it appears the president's only concern is getting re-elected. and know we can see why. more importantly, we can see why he did not want these returns revealed. why he fought it so hard, all the way up to the supreme court. and then going back up the courts again. this shows he is not who he pretends to be and never was. >> it's not just about puffery, that's fine. he wants to say he's really rich. it's what does it mean in terms of how vulnerable he is, and how much he needs cashflow, and how much he needs to do that to secure it.

let's talk about that, all right? >> we're going to talk about what that means in terms of understanding what has to happen here. mitchell zachary, timothy o'brien, david kay johnson, i couldn't ask for better guys than you on this. we're going to talk about what matters, there's a lot of questions that are going to have to be asked, let's get after that.

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i believe in interrupt because he's made so much emergency. if you define your wealth by assets minus liabilities, you don't know much. if you say, well, i trust him because i know he's looking out for me, he gets how that game is played, he's going to help me, he's going to drain the swamp, why doesn't he pay taxes, and make sure guys like him benefit more than the rest of us? that's what he's doing. he's helping people like him not pay taxes and not people like

you. we go from politics to real problems. $400 million, personally guaranteed with his cashflow sucking wind because of the pandemic? so much so that he's showing losses and not even paying taxes, because he's losing so much money? the question every one of you should be asking is, whom does he owe all this money? some of it is in public, but not all of it, some of it is covered with corporate institutions, it doesn't mean that people are not behind those businesses that he owes. it makes him a target for foreign adversaries around the world. what do they know about what our president needs to make happen that we don't. we discuss this and the implications with the author of the room where it happened, a white house memoir, trump's former national security adviser, embass door john bolton. mr. ambassador, thank you for joining us on an important

night. >> glad to be with you, thanks for having me. >> so, sir, what is your general reaction to this news of the significant debt that our president owes that is personally guaranteed. were you aware of this before now? >> no, i was not, i've seen reporting on it, and it certainly leads to a lot more questions than we've got answers at this point. obviously, the new york times has a lot of information, but it's also incomplete. i think prosecutors around the country are trying to get some of that information. they may have it more complete. the nature, the complexity of the trump organization finances, trump's personal finances lead to a lot of questions about how many of the trans ablgss we know about are legitimate, and how many are sham to avoid taxation or other obligations. >> for those at home, the ambassador has another title. he's also a lawyer. it's not just national security

expertise, he understands the law generally enough to understand this, who lent him the money? personal guarantees are different, it's not that they're going to come after his business. it's that this is something that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on him, obviously personally, so from a nat sec perspective, what do you want to know about those loans. forget about the tax burden. >> you need to know the sources of the loans. and you need to know the circumstances under which they were negotiated. you need to know more about the terms of the loan, you need to know whether they could be rolled over. as i said, the times, the new york times has a lot of information. >> not that. >> you can see that from what they've written. whether they've got enough to make a convincing case, the jury is still out on that, honestly. >> i don't think we do. we don't know who he owes the money to. we know in the first two years, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million.

now you have a con nation here, you have two things coming together. $73 million is a lot of money. just like with the loans, do you think a president of the united states should disclose the source of that kind of income from outside america? >> well, i'm personally opposed to a lot of the obligations that are put on all candidates to disclose things like their tax returns, their medical history. if candidates want to do it, it's in their interest that's fine, i'd like to know. you have to be careful on this business of money coming from overseas. maybe it comes from turnberry in scotland. maybe it comes from other sources that are not so benign. these are the sorts of things that somebody with trump's business skills and experience, i would think would be eager to tell the american public to show what a great businessman he is. >> we're not talking economics here, i would push back gently

on that by saying, if he were a great businessman, he wouldn't have to guarantee these loans. we both understand that world, it's very rare for someone who says they have the kind of money and access and leverage that the president does, to be personally guaranteeing these types of situations. the reason i'm asking, though, is about -- you say you don't like a lot of these disclosures, you also said the president doesn't like to pay attention to intelligence assessments and doesn't like to read any reports. so what is framing his disposition toward foreign countries where he has interests. if he's not leading the intel, if he's not listening to you, where does he get opinions on these people and places? >> a lot of people have drawn the conclusion that he's making decisions based on potential personal or corporate economic gain in some of these countries. in moscow, where he wants the

trump tower, in turkey, where they already have a building in istanbul, that sort of thing. i think that's possible, i don't think we have evidence there that proves it, and i think -- i've not been shy about criticizing donald trump at all, just think, when you make the criticism, you better have the evidence to back it up, right now, we're in agreement on this, there's not enough there. >> i'm only talking about the debt, i agree with you, if we want to talk about his tax burden and what he said before he pays. that's all fair game, we're dealing with that elsewhere in the show. my biggest concerning is what we don't know, and not because i don't like to do a fishing expedition. i disagree with you about the disclosure requirements for candidates. especially this sophisticated of somebody with financial transactions, because from a national security perspective, how can you keep the country safe. if you don't know where the president may have potential conflicts.

>> that's why each candidate should make the decision whether it's in their interest to put it out there. if people don't care where the money comes from, that's a choice they can make too. from donald trump's perspective, his holdings are so varied, his success is so great, why wouldn't he want to tell people -- why doesn't he want us to have them. think about it, if you had personally guaranteed loans, okay, of a significant amount, you have a hard time with the government in your scleerns process, would you not? especially in terms of confidentiality and what level of classification they give you? >> sure, they would ask a lot of questions. to find out the answers to whether you would be compromised because of the sources of the day. i think that's perfectly legitimate, i think when trump refuses to give the answer to those questions, people would be perfectly entitled to hold that against him. if he has nothing to hide, i

shouldn't hide it. >> if you were trying to hire some big hedge fund guy, you found out he had guaranteed loans, he said, none of your business. i'm going to work this job for free for you, don't worry, you're good. would you give him a job? >> of course not. that's why i think it's legitimate. we'll see in the debate tomorrow night if biden calls him on this. i don't think the new york times timing of the publication is accidental. it's up for grabs tomorrow night in the first debate. >> it's right here on the eve of the big debate, and to be honest, we've been asking for this information for years. ambassador john bolton thank you for your perspective. >> thanks for having me. >> there you have jong bolton saying, you wouldn't be able to hire someone in the kind of situation that donald trump is, he can be our commander in chief and not tell us any of these things. yes, some of them are in public, some of them have been in filings, what are the

connections, who are the people? you need to know, how could we not know? he just told you he couldn't hire someone like that. we did. >> let's bring in the former fbi espionage chief compromise the counter intelligence and the threat of donald j. trump. thank you for joining us. >> it's good to be here. >> we don't have to do high finance 101 about leverage. if you have a great business you have plenty of collateral for people to lend against. that is the case with donald trump, though, because what he says about what he owns and all of that. guys around him. the men and women keeping us safe don't know the extent of who he owes money to, and what it is and didn't ask him about it, in all likelihood, at least it seems that way talking to bolton. what does that lead us to understand? >> what it leads us to understand, is if donald trump

applied for the job, he would never get a clearance. he wouldn't make it in the front door. countless times in my career, i either turninged down people for clearances or recommended they be removed for two reasons. one is income from foreign sources. two is indebtedness. any large in debt period. when you look at trump, you look at the figure you just threw out, $73 million in foreign income. almost half a billion dollars of debt coming due in the next 4 or 5 years, no one would ever get a clearance based on that. there's no way the president of our nation would be allowed to have that undisclosed financial indebtedness or connections. >> do you agree with what bolton was saying? >> look, i think i disagree with what the ambassador was saying, i don the think it's so much an issue of whether or not it's up to trump whether to decide to disclose this information. the problem is, the president is actively concealing this information. it is not a choice, it's the

fact that as time and time again, he's saying things that are not only concealing truth, but he's also lying about it. when you hear all this money that's coming out of russia, the $13 million coming out of turkey, the philippines, nation after nation after nation, it's not so much that it's there and he chose not to disclose it, it's the fact that it's there, he's actively hiding it and fighting tooth and nail from preventing it to become public. all of that is known to all of those foreign nations. >> why do you think the fbi or mueller didn't pull his taxes? >> i don't know what the fbi ultimately did, with mueller, i think it's because it was outside of the scope of what he was mandated to do. he reported to the attorney general. and they also said his activities are bound to the inquiry. that's very limiting. i think this is absolutely something the fbi should have done. maybe they did it, but i suspect

they didn't. because i would have expected to hear about it if they had. it's clear we have to get to the bottom of his financial picture. >> what jumps out at you from the taxes, and that we haven't discussed if anything, and what do you think the main questions are posed by what you've learned from the times reporting? >> the biggest thing that worries me right now, is what is coming due in the years ahead, i think back to eric trump's statement in 2014, we don't rely on american banks, we have all the funding we need out of russia. think about that, if you don't need to rely on american banks, you have nearly half a billion dollars in debt coming due. who's going to back up that debt? who are you going to turn to, and who are you going to do that in the context of everything you've refused to say? we have to get to the bottom of understanding this, because we need to understand what foreign adversaries are doing to attack america and help shore up our national security.

>> you know who should want to tell us the most? >> donald john trump. >> the president should. that's absolutely right. >> if he's like, this is not fair, it's deutche bank, and who's giving them their money to loan to me, i don't know, that's their business. he should want us to know. if this is unfair, these questions are easily satisfied, because the suggestion of the question is not a good one for the president. so he can answer it. and he should want to do it most, just to shut it up. we'll see if he does. peter strzok, thank you very much. >> chris, great to be here. thank you. something breaking on our watch that we have to deal with. bombshell report again from the new york times, trump officials are accused of trying to pressure the cdc to downplay the risk of sending our kids back to school. i know the president just said, we're going to ramp up testing. yeah, he's doing that right before the first debate and as we're winding down to the election, 150 tests. that would have helped.

it would have helped a lot more, six weeks ago. we may not be dealing with the suck we're dealing with our kids when it comes to schooling. up next, we're going to talk to the former white house staffer who says she played a key role in this effort and now regrets it, the one and only olivia troy former top aid to mike pence. that back bencher stuff is b.s., she was the top aide to make pence on these issues.

we have new reporting from the new york times tonight, not about trump's taxes, this one just came out and it details how top white house officials pressured the cdc over the summer to downplay the risk of sending kids back to school.

that effort included doctor deb deborah birx. but also, officials working for the vp, mark short. one of the sources for this reporting is former staff member olivia troy. short dispatched, she says junior members of the vice president's staff to circumvent the cdc in search of data he thought might better support the white house's position. the report notes one instance in late june, in which white house officials including troy spoke to top cdc officers asking for data that could show the low risk of infection and death for school aged children, a snazzy easy to read document. olivia troy resigned last month. she was the homeland security

adviser. not a back bencher. she left, they say she was fired. they've put out no proof that's true. she has been publicly speaking out since then, and has endorsed joe biden. i'm not here to talk politics, i'm here to talk policy. welcome to prime time. olivia, can you hear me? >> i can. hi, chris, how are you? >> thank you for taking the opportunity. all this goes away as wrong if people like you and everybody else involved all were in good faith saying scrub the data, maybe it's not as bad as people say it is, the suggestion in the peace is, no, they knew it wasn't asking for the truth, it was asking for some way to get around the truth. what's your take? >> i think that's an accurate statement chris. i saw this firsthand, i lived it. it's my nightmare to tell,

unfortunately. this was an effort, at times where i would get blindsided there would be different junior staffers to find data for charts to show the virus wasn't as bad for certain populations, ages or demographics, it was hard for me. i was seeing what dr. birx was briefing on a daily basis, i was seeing what the cdc was writing, they were doing the work, they were the scientists, far be it for me to spin it -- i don't know even where i would begin to get the data. i'm a security professional working on a crisis, on this invisible enemy. so it was -- it was what was going on behind the scenes. >> what was the motivation to deceive people about the risks our kids would face if we went back to school. especially the way we are being forced to go back to school. without the kind of tests we need, the number of tests we

need, the kind of guidance for how to trace cases and staff it, and fund all that, what was the rationale for why you needed to do this anyway? >> well, i think you've seen from the beginning the president's narrative has been, everything's fine, everything's okay. time to go back to normal, let's get the economy going again. that's what he ran on, that was his platform, he wanted states to -- show that they were opening back up. he told the governors, you know, you need to open the schools, you need to try to make it seem like everything's okay, when in reality it's not. and i think it's because his response has been so broken along the way, that it was anything to tell anything but the truth. and the fact of the matter is, these are children and teachers that we're talking about. >> and their families. >> our future generation. >> and everybody who they come into contact with. you're right. everybody always loves to say,

we have to take care of the kids, we have to do the right thing by the kids. on the cdc side. what was the response as far as you were aware of birx and the other ones to hedge on the reality? >> i think it put these task force members and doctors in a challenging position. i saw them struggle firsthand on a daily basis. i have spoken about the fact that i have not been critical of the task force because i've seen it, how hard it's been for them on a daily basis. i've seen dr. redfield try to figure out how he's going to navigate this political landscape, while representing the true evidence of what the scientists and the experts back at cdc were telling them. >> redfield, there's reporting out that he was heard on a plane saying dr. atlas, that everything he says atlas isn't true. were you aware of that animosity

when you were there? >> i didn't see scott atlas, he got there shortly after my departure. i certainly know this is in keeping with the president wanting to hear from experts or people who are in line with what his truth and his own personnel reality is. i ensure it's got to be very challenging for people like dr. redfield, including dr. birx and others, and dr. fauci who's been talking about this, who were trying to tell the president the facts of the reality of the situation, and you have one voice in the room who's specifically been brought in to push the other voices out and be the loudest, and that's the one that he will hear and repeat, and you saw that dr. atlas was at one of the briefings, you haven't seen the others that have been working on this from day one. >> the vp, was he aware of the effort to pull a fast one on all the families that were going to

be sending their kids back to school, give them a false sense of security? >> chris, i'm going to be honest with you, i struggle with that morally on a daily basis, but the vice president's wife is a schoolteacher, and i know he had very strong feelings about making sure we were looking out for their safety and looking out for the good of children. i don't know what kind of information mark shared about what he was tasking behind the scenes, that was part of my decision on why i left, to be honest with you, it was a difficult dynamic i was navigating. >> did you tell the vp what was going on when you decided to leave? >> i think i'd rather not address personal conversations with the vice president. that's a conversation between me and him. >> that's fine. why am i asking? if he was concerned about giving the straight deal to families because his wife is a teacher, he's certainly never said it.

he never said, going to school has got to be done the right way. we need more money, more resources, you know, this is dangerous stuff. it seems like if that was something he cared about, he could speak to it, is this one more example of how the message is controlled in house? >> absolutely. you know, everyone has a boss, and unfortunately for vice president pence his boss is donald trump. >> olivia troy, i appreciate you coming on. especially with the timing of this report. thank you for giving us a look inside our government. and what's being done supposedly in our name in our service. thank you very much. >> thank you, chris for having me on. i've been praying for you, and i hope you're feeling so much better. >> the more we learn about the reality, the better i feel. thank you very much. thank you. i mean that, by the way, why? because we knew this stuff has to be going on.

it doesn't make any sense. how can you send kids back to school, when you know you can't test them? and you know they don't have the resources? and you know we're in all these crazy -- listen to my kid's schedule. my senior is going to go one out of every four weeks in person. my freshman at a private school, he's going two days a week. every tuesday and thursday. my little one, who's not that little any more, she's in fifth grade, she's at the big shot school she's in once every other week. so one every four weeks, one every other week and one two days a week. are you kidding me that -- i'm lucky, i got the money, i got people that can help me, we have a full family to be able to do things. this is the best we can do for our kids? it makes perfect sense that they've been jazzing us about

what the reality is about the risk. they don't want to control it, they don't want to own it, the more this president is exposed to the reality that he ignored this pandemic, and now we know from the taxes that he has absolutely no personal interest in owning this, every day it goes on, where he gets his money, is closed down. where is the incentive to do the right thing by us in this administration. the kids tell the story. we couldn't do better for schools in the united states of america? come on. now, look, that's about our leadership and our politics. and there's an election coming up, there are bigger questions raised by these taxes, okay? law, criminality, okay? what? where would that lead, why is that real to look at? no one knows better than a former irs commissioner and a former state attorney general and prosecutor. they're here next to tell you the real deal.

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we know the now that the president has problems with the irs. and we know that those problems have nothing to do with his faith in the almighty. after what you know about his taxes can you believe that when i asked him why he gets audited in 2016 he told me this. >> i'm always audited by the irs. which i think is unfair. i don't know because of religion. because of something else. maybe because i'm doing this. although this is recently. >> religion? >> the fact i'm a strong christian. maybe there's a bias. >> he thinks he gets audited because of his strong faith? maybe he gets audited because his faith and his ability to cheat or subvert the system. doesn't mean it's illegal. but maybe that's why they look. he says for the entire world

that he's worth a zillion dollars and doesn't pay taxes. that's why he gets flagged. two people who know the world of tax law. former irs commissioner and former new jersey ag. good to see you both. >> good to be here. >> let's do this for dummies version. professor, what's the difference -- when does evasion. not paying taxes because you can find a way to work it or fudge it. become a problem legally. >> that's one of the key questions. one of the sort of dividing lines is often about what someone intends. and what the conduct is encompasses. people make mistakes on the taxes all the time. there's a real difference between calculated intentional fraudulent conduct. and the question here and you

know remember we only have the tax returns. and we don't have there's a will the of other behind the scenes information about the president net worth and who he owes this money to. a ton of pieces here that we would want more if we're thinking about a tax fraud case. on its face is raises questions about president intent to circumvent the tax laws. >> tax avoid dance. maximize after tax income. tax evasion the failure to pay for deliberate under payment of taxes. obviously the second one gets you in trouble. the first is what we're all trying to do. what we learned nd here was that he finds a lot of ways to say that he doesn't make any money and not pay tax. the problem is if you are -- at what point does giving a bank

one set of qualifications for lending to you, but a different one to the irs in terms of your tax burden. when does that become a problem? you have to be lying to somebody? >> let me start by saying that no commissioner ever sees an individuals tax returns. i haven't seen anybody's tax returns including the president. it's clear there are legal ramifications of misrepresenting financial information to a bank. laws surround the need to be forthcoming and fair. and obvious clear rules about misrepresenting your assets and income. and expenses on the tax return to the irs. if there are conflicts between those, as you say you would expect they would be more or less similar. if there are conflicts in the misrepresenting in one place and another. whoever you have been providing

the wrong information to has a legal action against you. >> what did you see in the reporting from the "new york times" that popped your eyebrow? >> what's interesting is i have always told people there's a limited amount you learn from a tax return. you'll have income and deductions and the chartable contribution. it doesn't tell you anything about your asset and liability. or who you are in business with. you need to know more for instance you wouldn't know how much you owe and when it's due on just the straightforward tax return. the article talks about tax records. concludes the writers have more than just the tax return and have tax records that give them information such as how much money is owed and when it's coming due. >> when you look at how the tax return shows the president and the company treating the kids.

that ivanka is seems in some way double dipping. when is that -- not to use it as a a nefarious term. paid as a project manager and consultant. when does that get sticky? when does don jr. using those kinds of fund to pay money to be defended. when do those become more than a tax event? there are a lot of red flags. there's what you first started talking about the kid seem to have been listed as business consultants and there's over $20 million that appears to have been paid out to particularly ivanka. "new york times" did work to link up assets with the payment as a business consultant. while she was working at the trump organization. if you are an employee of an organization you are an employee of the organization and you can be paid whether you are paid as

an employee or consultant. but all of that is subject to payroll taxes and other things and it looks like that's not what the intent was here. it looks like it was to have a bunch of money they could use to write off. you're talking about $20 million in business expenses being written and consultant expenses written off. and we need to see more to know whether an actual crime was committed there. it looks like it's a potential effort to avoid paying taxes and a couple other areas where the kids also come into play. with the seven springs and the residents. a compound taken as an investment property. they don't look right and prosecutors will want to look further and dig deeper into this. >> first of all. thank you for the insight into this. and we will probably have to rely on one or both of you again

and soon. as we learn more about the context. again, in the reporting of this, it's not about accusing the president of anything. or doing anything wrong. a will the of ways to work the system. it's about the questions. and we have an answer to one of them. if nothing else. which is, you know why he didn't want you to see the taxes. the debate tonight. watch is right here. special coverage begins at 7:00 p.m. that's all for me. time for the best part of my night. "cnn tonight." right now. we will be on the real deal shift tomorrow night. >> cnn after dark. >> yes. you're ready. stay tuned i have some reporting about the biden debate prep. that i'll give to the viewers. there you go. tantalizing. >> are you ready? you know it's just us talking. they turn the camera on and we go.