John Oliver Used Tax Loophole Created by Trump On $9.5M NYC Apartment

[Ubiquitous]

Last Week Tonight host John Oliver has emerged as one of the leading anti-
Donald Trump personalities in the entire media landscape, with his biting
critiques often shared, discussed, and debated in the mainstream press. But
according to a Wednesday report in the Observer, the late-night funnyman used
a tax loophole created in part by Trump in the 1970s to allegedly avoid paying
a large tax bill on the $9.5 million New York City apartment he purchased in
2014, weeks before deriding tax breaks for the wealthy during a segment on his
HBO show.

>The Observer’s Ken Silverstein reports [1]:
>
>Donald Trump is wildly unpopular with coastal elites, but few despise
>him as feverishly as the Hollywood Brigades, led by Meryl Streep, and
>the late night comedian squadrons, headed by The Tonight Show’s Stephen
>Colbert, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, and Last Week Tonight’s John
>Oliver.
>
>…
>
>The hypocrisy really gets ratcheted up with John Oliver, the No. 1
>darling to so many liberal anti-Trumpies, who regularly attacks GOP tax
>schemes as giveaways to the rich and detrimental to the poor. (Again,
>that’s an apt description, but they evinced less rage about Obama’s
>economic and tax policies, which also funneled money upward to an
>extreme degree.)
>
>For years, Oliver has criticized the estate tax, which defenders, in a
>smart linguistic move dreamed up by Frank Luntz, long ago labeled the
>“death tax”; and the tax code’s raft of loopholes that benefit special
>interests he identified as oil companies and hedge fund managers.
>Oliver even briefly established the bogus Our Lady of Perpetual
>Exemption to draw attention to tax-exempt status granted to churches
>and charities.
>
>Back in July 2014, in an episode in which he lamented the Wealth Gap in
>America” (which has resulted in the richest one percent of Americans
>controlling 20 percent of annual income), Oliver said, “At this point
>the rich are just running up the score…What sets America apart is that
>we are actively introducing policies that disproportionately benefit
>the wealthy,” such as tax cuts and loopholes like trusts.
>
>So it’s a little surprising to discover that just months before, Oliver
>had a tax attorney set up two revocable trusts, one for him and one for
>his wife, to hide the couple’s purchase of a $9.5 million Manhattan
>penthouse. Then he used a tax loophole created by Donald Trump himself
>back in the 1970s, when the current president was merely a prominent
>New York real estate developer and aspiring celebrity author.

[1]: http://observer.com/2017/05/john-oliver-property-tax-scam-trump/

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very minute they figure out how they're sppsd to feel about Trump firing
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