God, there are days when I love coming to work! The last week especially, since Mazars dropped Trump like a radioactive turd, have been pretty much nonstop nuggets of joy-joy information. And today just keeps getting better.
As I previously wrote earlier, today the New York judge ordered Trump and his spawn to appear to be deposed in 3 weeks, and turn over documents in 2 weeks. The judge specifically mentioned The Mazars Letter in his ruling as a legitimate reason for AG James to question him. As I previously wrote, that letter was a neutron bomb to Trump, since if lenders investigated and found fraudulent information, they could call in their loans immediately.
It is widely reported that Trump has somewhere in the vicinity of $600 million in debt, some personally guaranteed coming in over the next 3-5 years. His largest lender, Deutsche Bank has already announced it will no longer deal with him. Trump nonetheless found a way to make lemonade out of lemons. Now that he’s not President anymore, Trump agreed to sell his money losing flagship Trump DC hotel to a Florida consortium for $375 million, well above market value. Half the problem solved, right?
Well, maybe not. Because today a House committee wrote a letter the the General Accounting Office, which actually owns the lease on the DC hotel Trump is trying to sell. The core of the letter is that, having relied on Mazar’s issued financial documents to bid on and win the lease, and since Mazar’s now says that more than a decade of their financial filings on Trump’s behalf ain’t worth shit, the GAO should just cut to the chase and cancel Trump’s lease on the hotel. Adios to $375 million, Amigo!
But because this is Trumptopia, where the weather is always rainy, and the beer is always warm, the fun never stops. When Trump got the lease for the DC hotel, the first thing he did was to run to Deutsche Bank and turn it into a $170 million loan for construction and renovation. Obviously GIGO financial documents from Mazar’s would have played heavily on their decision to grant the loan. If it starts to appear that the GAO may actually move to cancel Trump’s lease, then Deutsche Bank has nothing to lose by going to court to sue to void the loan for fraudulent information, and try to claw back at least some of their money.
This is exactly what I was talking about a couple of days ago when I wrote about a salmon run on Trump’s company. That Mazar’s letter allows Trump’s lenders to hold their own investigations into the legitimacy of the information in the documents Trump provided. And if they find fraud, then they are free to call in their chips immediately. Now I’m no MBA, but from what I know of business, just the fact that the GAO may even be thinking about voiding Trump’s DC hotel lease should be enough to make the Florida consortium pull their offer from the table. Don’t touch that dial.
My first thought when I heard this was, similar to you, that consortium should just wait until the GAO pulls the lease and get it directly from them, probably for a lot less. There’s been something a little fishy about that consortium offer from the beginning. Everyone says their offer is WAY above fair market value. Also, didn’t they make that offer months ago. What’s taking so long? I’ve never bought a hotel or hotel lease, but I have bought a few houses and I’ve always been able to close in 30 days whether I had financing arranged beforehand or not.
The GAO should have (and had grounds to) void that lease the moment he was sworn in. Of course, for “reasons” he would have been given a little time to find someone to sell it to or at least try to do so. Probably some rich conservative asshole would have ponied up the cost of bailing him out but with all the scrutiny he wouldn’t have walked away with a dollar’s worth of profit. What he did of course was ensure a spineless lackey was put in to run the GAO. Remember, when Biden was declared the winner we saw for the first time the GAO refusing to hand over the keys and provide access to funds for the transition offices. Since the Jan. 6 committee is going back in time to address various attempts to stop Biden from being sworn in I think she should get her own subpoena and have to have a chat with investigators. Lawyers fees should more that eat up whatever bribe she took to do Trump’s bidding!
If I held the lease….never more.