This piece in Forbes takes a look at Trump’s signature building Trump Tower. Let’s just say that like everything else about Trump it’s more BS than reality:
The offices of the New York attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney have both focused on Trump Tower as part of their probes into Donald Trump’s efforts to mislead lenders about the value of his assets. The attorney general filed a $250 million civil suit in September, accusing Trump, his business and his underlings of fraud. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg inherited a related criminal probe when he took office last year, but he hesitated to file charges, and two top prosecutors resigned. Bragg’s office says it is still investigating. Perhaps the district attorney is hoping to turn up additional information.
Forbes has some. Since the early 1980s, long before our efforts had anything to do with a quarter-billion-dollar lawsuit or potential criminal charges, we have been scrutinizing various aspects of Trump’s properties. Our latest look at Trump Tower uncovered three new pieces of potential evidence:
-Property records show that the real estate mogul has been lying about the financial performance of the building since it first opened in 1983.
-Tax and lending documents indicate that Trump lied about the square footage of the office and retail space at the base of the property (not to be confused with his lying about size of the penthouse atop the building, which Forbes previously exposed).
-Portions of a 2015 audio recording, released here for the first time, prove that Trump was personally involved in the efforts to lie about the value of Trump Tower’s commercial space.
Nine days ago, Forbes reached out to the Trump Organization to ask for explanations about various discrepancies in its past statements. An attorney for the firm replied by asking for four weeks to respond, explaining that the legal team was “already quite busy.” Forbes granted a few extra days. A spokesperson for the Trump Organization then sent a statement that did not address the discrepancies but instead took issue with the attorney general’s case. “The attorney general’s attempt to interfere with private loan transactions between sophisticated business parties is utterly baseless and a complete overreach,” the statement said. “Not only was there never a loan default, but all the loans are either current or have been completely paid back in full in the ordinary course of business. Indeed, all of the Wall Street banks that issued these loans profited handsomely.”
It is true that Donald Trump has already taken care of some of the loans at issue in the attorney general’s case. But it is also true that Forbes’ latest revelations, combined with earlier reporting and stacks of documents now in prosecutors’ hands, all point to a simple conclusion: The Trump Organization lied about the value of its properties to lenders for years, and although multiple people inside the firm participated in those efforts, the person at the center of the deceit was Donald Trump.
The article goes on to document in fine detail just how much of a liar he’s been on this topic. It’s voluminous. And it concludes:
There is no doubt about Trump’s personal involvement in this. His 2015 financial statement is explicit: “The estimated current value of $880,900,000 is based on an evaluation by Mr. Trump in conjunction with his associates and outside professionals.” Over the years, similar lines appeared throughout his pumped-up statements, in reference to various assets. He once testified, under oath, that he reviews the annual statements with his chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and that he generally keeps them handy at his own desk. Despite the absurd numbers that the documents contain, Trump has also signed paperwork in his own hand certifying their accuracy. And he has personally sent the statements to banks. “Hopefully you will be impressed!” he said in a 2011 note to the CEO of Deutsche Bank Securities.
He dispatched his employees to help push the numbers. In one instance, Trump’s CFO Weisselberg told a reporter that the building’s commercial space measured 257,000 square feet, a figure that also appeared on some city filings but was higher than the number listed on lending and tax documents. But no one took things as far as Trump, as became evident in a September 2015 interview with Forbes inside Trump Tower.
“If I wanted to sell Trump Tower today, I’d get $2.5 billion,” he said, roughly doubling the number that Weisselberg had previously suggested to Forbes and tripling the figure listed on his pumped-up financial statement.
“We tried to tell it to [another reporter],” Weisselberg jumped in, perhaps forgetting that the number he tried to tell the other reporter was a fraction of the figure Trump was now claiming. “There’s a comp right across the street for $1.8 billion. Ignored me. Just totally—”
“That sold for $1.8 billion, and it’s smaller,” Trump said, referring to the neighboring Crown Building, which was in fact nearly 150,000 square feet larger than his space in Trump Tower, according to the Trump Organization’s own documents.
Trump then upped the sales price of the Crown Building, suggesting that its storefronts alone fetched $1.8 billion and lamenting the much-lower estimate Forbes had suggested. “When this thing sells, the retail over here sells, for $1.8 billion, and you got me down at $469 million?” Trump said. “It’s a joke.”
Later in the conversation, one of the reporters asked Trump about the profits at his building.
Weisselberg jumped in. “Go by the comp,” he said, referring to the recent sale, even though the Trump Organization valued the building in other years based on its profitability. “You have a comp. You have a real comp.”
But Trump couldn’t resist an opportunity to pump up his profits, too. “What’ll it make, $80 [million]? $70?” he asked Weisselberg, before answering himself. “It’ll make $80, $90 million this year.” The building actually earned more like $15 million of net operating income that year, according to both lending and tax records.
The lies were as clear as they were endless, a continuation of Trump’s years-long crusade to convince everyone—his lenders, the media and the public—that he was billions of dollars richer than he actually was.
If the Manhattan DA or even possibly the SDNY ever decide to take up this obvious fraud in a criminal case, he will just blame everyone but himself. I suspect they know that and it’s probably not easy to prove what everyone knows is true — that Trump, a pathological liar, is the one who directed all this.
I have no illusions that he will ever be held accountable for this stuff. I don’t know if he’ll ever be held accountable for anything. He’s so over the top with his lies that I think he proves that sheer chutzpah can often provide a get out of jail free card.
His election as president was the inevitable consequences of our celebrity culture. Someone was bound to figure out how to game it for the purpose of gaining political power. That it was that orange ignoramus who managed to do it is a sad comment on our society.