Donald Trump may cry witch hunt, witch hunt, but to do that is one thing and to refute the actual facts and figures which Letitia James’ office has come up with is another thing altogether. The fact that he kept two sets of books, giving one line of bull to prospective lenders and insurers and another to the IRS is not new. The specifics, however, are stunning to read. New York Times:
Ms. James has been investigating Mr. Trump’s business practices since March 2019. In previous filings, she described the properties she was scrutinizing and said that her investigators were looking into whether Mr. Trump had inflated the value of various properties across the country in order to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.
In Tuesday’s filing, she went further, giving specific examples in which she said the former president’s business had misrepresented the worth of some of its properties and showing how those misrepresentations had benefited the company, allowing it to receive favorable loans, insurance coverage and tax benefits.
The accusations center on Mr. Trump’s statements of financial condition, the annual record of his assets and liabilities that he gave to lenders and insurers. Ms. James’s office said that he “was personally involved in reviewing and approving the statements of financial condition before their issuance.”
The filing argued that the statements made “frequent use of misleading asset valuations in order to obtain financial benefits.”
In 2015, for example, while seeking to refinance a loan on his 40 Wall Street tower in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s statement of financial condition estimated that the property was worth $735 million. Yet one lender concluded it was worth only $257 million.
Ms. James’s lawyers argue that Mr. Trump submitted at least two misleading statements to the Internal Revenue Service, saying that he substantially overstated the value of land at both his Seven Springs Estate in Westchester County and his Los Angeles Golf Club. The value of Seven Springs, Ms. James said, had been boosted by counting the value of seven nonexistent mansions, said to be worth $61 million.
They also accused the Organization of calculating the value of Trump Tower by falsely inflating the size of Mr. Trump’s longtime home: While Mr. Trump had claimed since 2012 that his triplex penthouse apartment in the building was 30,000 square feet, he had signed documents stating its size as 10,996 square feet.
Only two characters in all of history would think it necessary to inflate the size of their respective mansions by this much. One was the insane emperor Caligula, and the other is Trump, who has been compared to Caligula on many occasions.
The additional square footage allowed the company to claim a $327 million value for the apartment in statements of financial condition. Ms. James said that Allen H. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, had said during questioning by Ms. James’s investigators that the apartment was overvalued by “give or take” $200 million.
The man is a liar, a cheat, and a fraud. He’s been getting away with murder for decades. Maybe not literal murder on 5th Avenue but financial murder, absolutely.
It would be a wonderful thing for the New York attorney general to take down this kind of a crook in any event, but when you consider the fact that Trump wants to run for president again? Please put him in prison, Ms. James. It would be a service to your country.
They’re washing down pain pills at Fox News tonight, trying to figure out how to spin this one. Maybe they won’t even try, and we’ll be looking at years old video about Hillary’s emails or car chases.
Ms. James’ investigation is purely civil, so the most she can do is lighten his bank account. The Manhattan DA is looking at criminal and hopefully will be indicting shortly. In legal circles, they are predicting the Fulton County GA DA will probably be the first to indict. I’m surprised they haven’t moved more quickly, they have him on tape trying to get the SOS to “find” him more votes.
You know they didn’t go after Donnie John Jr over the meeting with the Russians because they said he was too stupid to know it was a crime. The rule of law has been dead in this country for a long, long time.
I’ve seen worse than this by Republicans I have worked for. One had a sole proprietorship and a C corp. The C corp leased equipment from the SP. He reported everything on a cash basis to the IRS. He reported the Lease payments as expenses when he wrote the checks, but the SP would not cash the checks till much later and would not report the income till they cashed the checks. He also used the insurance certificate from the SP with the C corp so the C corp didn’t have to insure the vast majority of the employees. He also expensed the building materials for his house and improvements to his property.
He only hired me because he was going to be audited and he needed to set up two new accounting systems. I really showed the IRS examiner what was going on, but he ignored it or just didn’t understand. They aren’t really auditors. They are examiners that run their protocols and that is it. Oh, well. When I set up the new systems, I didn’t report the uncashed checks as expenses till they were cashed. He was clever, but not smart enough to see what I was doing. The IRS during the 20 years I spent fooling with them were not set up to really find the bad boys.
Republicans are just crooks. Some are small time, but all are crooks and racist and no one cares it seems. I didn’t carry this any further because I had with another and they didn’t do anything.
That’s really disheartening. A former friend, who never made more than 60k/yr, was audited several times and usually ended up paying more w/ interest.