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Trump’s New York fraud trial is often framed as a fight over whether he “exaggerated” his net worth.
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But the case is far more than a mere difference in opinion over the dollar value of Trump’s assets.
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Here are the four kinds of schemes New York officials say Trump used to hike his net worth.
Donald Trump “exaggerated” his net worth by billions of dollars, countless stories in the press say, in what’s been a popular shorthand for the allegations in his civil fraud trial in New York.
No, he didn’t, the defense has long disagreed, arguing that a skyscraper’s or golf resort’s worth is subjective and that Trump is “an artist with real estate” and a “dreamer” who finds value “where others see nothing.”
But framing the trial as a mere difference of opinion over price tags —with Mar-a-Lago worth well over $1 billion if you ask Trump, or closer to $28 million if you ask the state — misses the point.
To put a new spin on that slogan from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run, when it comes to the Trump fraud trial, it’s the chicanery, stupid.
As both sides get ready for a January verdict that could cripple Trump’s real-estate empire, here’s a guide to the schemes he’s accused of using to pretend in official net-worth statements that he was as much as $3.6 billion a year richer than he really was.
These four “deceptive strategies” let him pocket over $250 million more in interest savings and sales profits than he’d otherwise have been entitled to, lawyers for Attorney General Letitia James of New York argued in October.
1. ‘The sky is green’
We’ll use this name for the attorney general’s first category of sketchy valuation tactics, for the times she’s said Trump just flat-out lied about objective facts.
You say the sky is blue? For Trump’s net-worth statements, he picks the color, his former attorney and his current assistant vice president described in trial testimony.
The example James trots out most often is Trump telling banks for five years, from 2012 to 2016, that his Trump Tower triplex penthouse was 30,000 square feet. It’s actually just under 11,000 square feet.
It was Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s then-chief financial officer, who came up with the fact-defiant number, Kevin Sneddon, an in-house real-estate broker at Trump Org, said on the final day of trial testimony.
It happened like this, the broker said on the stand, describing an incriminating internal 2012 email chain:
Weisselberg asked the broker to come up with a number for Trump’s triplex, a valuation they could use in that year’s net-worth statement.
Can I see the triplex? Sneddon asked. No, Weisselberg said.
Then can I see the specs? The floor plan? Sneddon asked.
No, Weisselberg answered again, though prior testimony revealed that these documents were in file cabinets just around the corner from his desk.
“He said, ‘It’s quite large. I think it’s around 30,000 square feet,'” Sneddon testified the chief financial officer assured him.
So for the next five years, Trump’s annual net-worth statements repeated the bogus square footage, attributing the number to the broker.
Trump would value his “quite large” triplex at as high as $327 million. That’s an “absurd” value for its time, James said, given that no other apartment in the city had sold for nearly that much money.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the trial judge, Justice Arthur Engoron of the New York Supreme Court, wrote in his consequential September pretrial fraud finding.
Kevin Wallace, a lead state lawyer on the case, said the Trump Organization used the 30,000 number one last time despite a Forbes reporter alerting company executives to the giant discrepancy four days prior.
“This is direct evidence that the inflated penthouse valuation was not an innocent mistake but an…
Read More: What we all forget about the upcoming Trump fraud verdict: It’s the chicanery, stupid