Last year, billionaire
Democrat JB Pritzker derided Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump for not releasing detailed income tax filings.
“The
question is who his investors are, and whether there are any in China
or Russia that are affecting his personal income,” Pritzker said of
Trump, adding that the future president was “obfuscating in order to
avoid being discovered as a liar.”
And
then last week, Pritzker released only the first two pages of his
income tax returns going back three years. Pritzker told reporters for
weeks that he hadn’t released the returns sooner because the task was so
“complex.” Um, two pages ain’t “complex.”
Pritzker’s
real income appears to come from various private trust funds. He
disclosed last week that his trusts paid $25 million in state taxes and
$129 million in federal taxes between 2014 and 2016. Pritzker’s personal
income taxes were a tiny fraction of that amount. During the same time
period, he revealed that he paid only $636,000 in state income taxes and
$7.7 million in federal income taxes on his personal income.
He
refused to divulge the tax returns for those trusts (which really would
be “complex”) because, his campaign claimed, other members of his
extended family also benefit from those trusts. OK, fine. But how about
divulging the names of his trusts? Tracking down these trusts is a
difficult business because they’re shrouded in such secrecy. Names would
help.
When a
politician refuses to divulge something, particularly after criticizing
others for not doing so, you gotta wonder what that person is hiding.
The
Pritzker family all but invented off-shore trusts. “No family in the
U.S. can copy the Pritzkers in using offshore entities to gain tax
advantages,” claimed Forbes magazine back in 2003.
But, try as I might, I couldn’t convince Pritzker’s campaign to release the names of his trust funds.
So,
in an attempt to pry Pritzker’s information loose, I reached out to
Chris Kennedy’s gubernatorial campaign and asked if they would release
the names of the trust funds Kennedy benefits from. They did.
Here’s the list: Robert F.
Kennedy
1959 Trust; The Christopher G. Kennedy 1987 Trust; The Sheila B.
Kennedy 2011 Trust; the Christopher G. Kennedy 2001 Trusts for Children;
Trusts U/W George Skakel and Ann Skakel; Trusts U/W Robert F. Kennedy;
The Scudder Trust; Christopher G. Kennedy 1997 Irrevocable Life
Insurance Trust; [street address deleted by me] Melrose Avenue Resident
Trust I and Trust II and [street address deleted by me] Island Avenue
Residence Trust I and Trust II.
George
Skakel was Kennedy’s maternal grandfather. He was from Chicago and
founded the fabulously successful Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. “U/W”
is an acronym for “under the will of” and means it was created as part
of somebody’s last will and testament. The Scudder Trust appears to
invest in renewable energy and environmental stuff.
That
Island Avenue trust is for a 14-room summer house in Hyannis Port,
Massachusetts, called Brambletyde, which was recently described by
Curbed. com as a “stately waterfront mansion” with “magnificent views of
Nantucket Sound and just one neighbor.” President John F. Kennedy and
his family stayed in the mansion during the summer of 1963. The Zillow
website pegs the worth of the four-bedroom, 6.5 bathroom, 3,379 square
foot house at $6.3 million. Taxes are $66K per year.
Ah,
the rich. But Kennedy’s a pauper when compared to Pritzker. As
mentioned above, Pritzker’s paternal grandfather was a pioneer in using
trusts to avoid taxation. AN Pritzker “took the family fortune from
$250,000 in the 1920s to an estimated $2 billion at his death in 1986,”
according to Forbes. But when he died in 1986, his heirs
told the IRS that AN’s net worth was a mere $25,000. The feds didn’t buy
it, and the Pritzker family ended up paying the government $9.5 million
plus interest nine years later, Forbes reported.
JB
Pritzker’s sister Penny, who served as President Barack Obama’s
Secretary of Commerce, is mentioned in the so-called “Paradise Papers,” a
massive ongoing research project into the uber-wealthy and
megacorporations conducted by journalists all over the world. Ms.
Pritzker transferred shares from two Bermuda companies to a company
owned by trusts that benefit her children after she was confirmed for
the Cabinet post. Her family’s myriad offshore trusts were a big issue
during her confirmation hearing.
Alas,
Kennedy’s decision to reveal his trust funds’ names did not move the
Pritzker campaign one iota closer to disclosing the names of Pritzker’s
trusts.
This ain’t over.