The New York Times is standing by its bombshell investigation into the Trump family's real estate empire, reporting Tuesday that President Donald Trump "engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father."
Interested in Donald Trump?
Add Donald Trump as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Donald Trump news, video, and analysis from ABC News.The president's lawyer signaled in a statement the possibility of a defamation lawsuit "should the Times state or imply" that he engaged in "fraud, tax evasion, or any other crime," but one of the reporters who broke the story, Susanne Craig, is "not at all" concerned about the warning, she told "Good Morning America" Wednesday.
Trump mocked the report Tuesday morning, calling it an "old, boring and often told hit piece" in a tweet.
The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen done before. They used the concept of “time value of money” in doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me. Added up, this means that 97% of their stories on me are bad. Never recovered from bad election call!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2018
The Times' 18-month investigation puts the president's finances under scrutiny, without analyzing Trump's personal tax returns or current businesses. The president declined repeated requests from the Times to comment on the findings, the newspaper said.
But Craig noted "what we were able to piece together about Donald Trump just through his father's [tax] returns."
Recounting the "unbelievable journey" that culminated in Tuesday's report, Craig said that after part of Trump's 2005 tax returns were made public in 2017, "We started with a simple question. It was when back last year, when two or three pages of the 2005 tax returns were released, we were struck to see that he made money that year."
"It was such a juxtaposition from ten years earlier ... he had logged a $1 billion loss," she said, adding, "We started to just look at Fred Trump's empire and from that we just kept going and going and going."
The New York Times alleged that Trump helped his parents "dodge taxes" in the 1990s and deployed a series of tactics and "outright fraud" to amass his vast fortune.
The Times said it based its allegations — that Trump helped his father defraud the federal government and avoid paying taxes — on "interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the inner workings and immense profitability of his empire."