This has been a long time coming:
The New York State attorney general, Letitia James, accused Donald J. Trump’s family business late Tuesday of repeatedly misrepresenting the value of its assets to bolster its bottom line, saying in court papers that the company had engaged in “fraudulent or misleading” practices.
The filing came in response to Mr. Trump’s recent effort to block Ms. James from questioning him and two of his adult children under oath as part of a civil investigation of his business, the Trump Organization. Ms. James’s inquiry into Mr. Trump and the company is ongoing, and it is unclear whether her lawyers will ultimately file a lawsuit against them.
Still, the filing marked the first time that the attorney general’s office leveled such specific accusations against the former president’s company. Her broadside ratchets up the pressure on Mr. Trump as he seeks to shut down her investigation, which he has called a partisan witch hunt. Ms. James is a Democrat.
The filing outlined what Ms. James’s office termed misleading statements about the value of six Trump properties, as well as the “Trump brand.” The properties included golf clubs in Westchester County, N.Y., and Scotland, and flagship buildings such as Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street in Manhattan.
Ms. James’s filing argued that the company misstated the value of the properties to lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service. Many of the statements, the filing argued, were “generally inflated as part of a pattern to suggest that Mr. Trump’s net worth was higher than it otherwise would have appeared.”
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and his company could not immediately be reached for comment.
Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she can sue Mr. Trump and his company but cannot file criminal charges. Her inquiry is running parallel to a criminal investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, which is examining some of the same conduct. Lawyers from Ms. James’s office are working on that separate investigation, which is continuing. Mr. Bragg, also a Democrat, inherited the inquiry from his predecessor after taking office on Jan. 1.
In early December, Ms. James issued a subpoena for Mr. Trump as well as for Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, seeking to question them as part of her civil inquiry. Ms. James already questioned another of Mr. Trump’s sons, Eric Trump, in October 2020.
After receiving the subpoenas, lawyers for Mr. Trump filed a federal lawsuit seeking to halt Ms. James’s civil investigation and to bar her office from participating in the district attorney’s criminal investigation. The lawsuit, which accused Ms. James of violating Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights, argued that her investigation was politically motivated and cited a long list of her public attacks on Mr. Trump.
This month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers also filed court papers in New York State seeking to block Ms. James’s subpoenas, prompting her filing on Tuesday.
Ms. James, who is running for re-election this year, argued in the court filing that while her office had compiled substantial evidence that Mr. Trump’s company had engaged in possible fraud, investigators needed to question Mr. Trump in order to determine who was responsible for “the numerous misstatements and omissions made by him or on his behalf” — and whether they were intentional.
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.”
Of course he lied about his assets. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. The family has been exposed on this for many years. I wrote about it many times over the course of the Trump administration as did many others. His corruption is overwhelming and the fact that he’s gotten away with it all these years is stunning. Has he come to the end of the line?
I wrote this last year. I still don’t know if this is really going anywhere. But it needs to be:
There is some hope, however, that Trump will be held accountable and possibly even held criminally liable for his corruption. After the Supreme Court ruled this term that Trump could not withhold his tax returns from grand jury subpoena in a state criminal matter, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which has jurisdiction over the Trump Organization, revealed that it has already obtained a whole boatload of documents from Deutsche Bank, which loaned the Trumps billions of dollars when no other bank would touch them. According to its filing with the court seeking Trump’s tax records, prosecutors are not simply looking at hush-money payments to porn stars, but at potentially major fraud charges.
We already knew from the New York Times’ 13,000-word examination about the massive criminal tax fraud scheme concocted by Fred Trump, Donald’s father. Considering the lengths to which he’s gone to hide his tax returns, it’s fair to suspect that Fred’s son has adopted similar practices. According to exposés by ProPublica and WNYC for their series “Trump, Inc.”, the Trump Organization may have misled banks, investors and buyers in many of their real estate licensing deals. There are many questions about money laundering and Trump’s odd special relationship with Deutsche Bank.
Much as I would love to see Trump held accountable for his crimes as president, it would be poetic justice to see his business exposed as a scam and see him prosecuted for ripping off taxpayers and clients. Apparently that won’t happen unless Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. can get his hands on those tax returns. Trump will fight that to the end, so there’s no telling whether anything will come of it. But at least someone, somewhere, is trying to bring him to justice. It’s hard to imagine how anyone can have faith in the system ever again if Donald Trump walks away scot-free after everything he’s done.