I taught tax accounting at the undergraduate and graduate levels for more than 35 years (Ph.D accounting). Fraudulent financial statements led to loans being granted that may not have been granted otherwise, lower interest rates, insurance policies being written that may not have been written otherwise, lower insurance rates, and then deflating the FMV of assets for purposes of lower property and other taxes. There are victims in these cases, just not in the sense that we're used to thinking about victims. This is not just FPOTUS inflating his statements to get higher up on Forbes list of billionaires. He, and all others involved, purposefully lied on these statements, in a most brazen way, to gain financial benefits. I'm not an expert on NY city and state business taxes, but it's possible that this scheme also lowered city and state taxes in addition to state property taxes. This could have also affected their federal taxes. And, keep in mind, all FPOTUS entities are flow throughs which means the entity generally doesn't pay tax, the owners pay it. Fraudulent statements affect not only the entities involved, but also the owners at the city, state and federal levels.
How many customers paid higher interest and insurance rates because of the lower rates FPOTUS arranged? How many people in NY did not receive state sponsored benefits because FPOTUS paid too little in taxes? FPOTUS intentionally issued non-audited financial statements because he'd never have gotten away with this if he had audited financial statements. I also have questions about Mazars since, even if you're doing a compilation, you're supposed to compare the current year with the past year to see if anything is "out of wack". There should have been a lot of questions about the constantly increasing values of the assets. Our systems only work if everyone attempts to follow the rules. When certain individuals and entities are allowed to flaunt the rules everyone in the system suffers.
Thank you for pointing out the absurdity calling people in their late 30’s to early 40’s “children”. I note that this is often done by trump sympathizers who deny the same protection to Hunter Biden whom they claim to be a shiftless criminal. All four of these persons are ADULT!
Scotch and Butter! And they just keep getting cuter! Who's the pup? (I know, I'm fairly new here, and trying to catch up.)
Not petty at all to believe adults in their 30's and 40's be referred to as adults. Wealthy, grifting adults.
Thanks for the guide on the amazing AG James' rigorous efforts. She's very impressive. And seems to feel just like Liz Cheney! Two women who one day will be honored with medals and accolades.
I'm particularly intrigued by #5... I mean, who has seen the documents that belong to the US, that tRump stole and crammed into his desk? (I mean who, other than Lavrov, has seen the docs?)
It's pleasant to consider TFG having to cough up $250M... although his supporters will just send it to him when he goes begging on Go Fund Me, or "Truth" Social.
Why do they keep sending him money? If they think he's so rich, and so good with money, why do they believe he needs their hard-earned cash? Another mystery.
Question: I'm confused about the Manhattan criminal case... what exactly was it? Why was it dropped? Why do you guess DA Bragg is hemming and hawing about it now? I cannot figure out anything about this non-maybe-case. At one point, I just assumed one of the tRumps bribed or blackmailed someone.
Thanks again for your clarity and for making me look smarter than I am!
I'd like to ask any attorneys who read this substack to take a look at the following, which was in my most recent Puck News update from their Wall Street/finance guy, William D. Cohan. He wants to see Trump wearing a barrel like all of us do, but he brings these items from his collection of Wall Street gurus, and they appear to me to be Items In Need Of Serious Consideration:
But the thing we don’t know, and what remains an intriguing mystery, is whether these misdeeds are actually crimes that can be provable in court and punishable by civil penalties, which is the only club James is wielding. Alas, what I am hearing repeatedly about the lawsuit from my Wall Street brethren is various versions of: There is no victim here. Put another way: is it a crime for a huckster to overinflate his net worth and the value of his assets to make himself feel better and more important? If Trump wants to play pretend and believe that his already huge 10,000-foot apartment in Trump Tower is really 30,000 feet, is that a crime or evidence of mental illness?
If, for some deranged reason, Trump wants to believe that Mar-a-Lago is worth $739 million, or that Trump National Golf Club, in Jupiter, Florida, for which he paid $5 million, is worth $62 million, or that his spread in Aberdeen, Scotland is somehow worth $327 million because he can develop it into luxury condos… is that a crime or just more evidence that Trump is a wacked-out, shitty businessman?
James is leaning on a specific statute in New York, known as Executive Law 63 (12), that gives the attorney general broad powers to take action against businesses that have demonstrated “persistent fraud or illegality.” Theoretically, under this statute, the attorney general does not need to demonstrate that any of Trump’s creditors or insurers suffered a financial loss.
Of course, the problem here for James is that it takes two to tango on Wall Street. Trump could delude himself all he wanted in his triplex in Trump Tower into thinking he was 10 times or 20 times richer than he really is, while browbeating Forbes into including him on the list of wealthiest Americans, but it would be meaningless without OPM—Other Peoples’ Money. It takes banks and other financial institutions, like Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital, that are willing to lend money, or underwrite some mortgage-related securities, to get the money that make such business ventures possible. The real question here is why Deutsche Bank lent him the hundreds of millions of dollars he needed, regardless of the insane valuations he happened to put on them at various points along the way.
Let’s be clear: Deutsche Bank has a very sophisticated credit committee that makes the decisions about providing loans to each and every borrower. Loans do not get made without credit committee approval. Even Donald Trump, for all his claims about knowing how to play the game better than anyone else, can’t get the approval of a bank credit committee without, you know, the credit committee’s approval. We can ask why the Deutsche Bank credit committee could be so stupid as to decide to lend money to Donald Trump, after his legendary track record of stiffing Wall Street creditors, which was the subject of my 2013 Atlantic article about him and his tortured relationship with Wall Street. The answer is not that Donald Trump fooled Deutsche Bank into thinking that the projects that they were lending to—among them, the Doral in Miami, the Old Post Office Building in Washington, and the Chicago hotel and condominium—were worth 10 times more than they actually were. No, the presumable reason Deutsche Bank made loans to Trump despite his horrific track record as a debtor was because the bank, after haircutting The Donald’s projections or valuations, thought it could make money, lots of money. Money from fees. Money from interest payments. Money from syndicating the loans.
Take but one head-scratching example: The Trump International Hotel & Tower, in Chicago. Starting in roughly 2004, Deutsche Bank, and other creditors, including a hedge fund run by Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s future Treasury Secretary, lent the Trump Organization the money it needed to build the building. Trump invested $40 million of his own money. In 2008, Trump claimed that the financial crisis constituted an “act of God” and that he would no longer pay back the money he had borrowed for the Chicago project. Trump sued Deutsche Bank in a court in Queens; Deutsche Bank sued Trump. Eventually, the two sides worked out their differences, settled the dispute, and the project was completed. Despite the dueling lawsuits—in 2012 and again in 2014—according to James’s complaint, Deutsche Bank lent the Trump Organization another $152 million on the Chicago project. And guess what, I’m sure the loan at that time made sense and Deutsche Bank got its money back and the Deutsche Bank credit committee approved it all. So good luck, Letitia James.
Now, there may be one aspect of the suit where there could be real provable fraud, and that involves a sprawling property, Seven Springs, that Trump owns in Westchester County that used to be owned by Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, who once upon a time bought the Washington Post out of bankruptcy for $825,000. (He was also a former partner at Lazard, my alma mater, the fifth Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the first president of the World Bank.) Trump acquired the property in 1995, for $7.5 million. There are two mansions on the 212-acre estate, plus other buildings and undeveloped land. The question with Seven Springs is whether the Trump Organization—Trump, and his son, Eric, who for a period of time lived at Seven Springs—got an appraisal done on the property that so overvalued it that Trump got a bigger tax benefit than he should have after donating an easement on the property to charity. If there would be a victim in this instance, it’s U.S. taxpayers.
According to James’s lawsuit, Trump valued Seven Springs as high as $291 million because he claimed he could develop the property into a series of mansions that he could sell for some $35 million each. But, of course, he couldn’t, didn’t, and hasn’t. Instead he decided, not ungenerously, to donate a development easement on the property in March 2016, which would limit his ability to develop the project since he couldn’t anyway. For that, according to James’s lawsuit, he got a federal tax deduction of $3.5 million, based on an appraisal prepared by Cushman & Wakefield that was submitted to the I.R.S.
The Cushman & Wakefield appraisal came in at $56.5 million, a far cry from $291 million. “But even the 2016 appraisal is overstated and fraudulent,” according to James. “Among other things, the March 2016 appraisal omits consideration of central facts known to (and indeed negotiated by) the Trump Organization regarding the number of lots that could be developed and sold based on the restrictions imposed by local authorities, and relies on other false assumptions, like an impossibly accelerated pace of planning and obtaining environmental approvals.” After laying out several specific details of how the Trump Organization allegedly deceived Cushman & Wakefield as it did its appraisal, James wrote, “Each of these facts would have significantly lowered the valuation of the Seven Springs property. Because the Trump Organization concealed this information, the Cushman appraisal materially overstated the value of the Seven Springs property by tens of millions of dollars.” She then described how Trump “and his agents” went about covering up their “scheme.”
If James can prove what she claims Trump did at Silver Springs, then we might have our smoking gun.
"If I can sound petty for a moment, it constantly annoys me that three adults in their 30’s and 40’s with children of their own, are referred to as the former president’s “children.”
You are not being petty you are being prophetic (and keep it up!).
Thanks for taking the "reading and writing time" to provide us your thoughts on the AG's case, Joyce. Amazing insights! Would you agree that a RICO (sp?) approach is the best way to nab Trump, et al from a criminal perspective? Tie in to a money laundering scheme?
It is easy to forget in a forlorn and hopeless world that “victory for democracy” in refutation of Trump and his minions is not victory, really. If Ukraine drives out the “orcs” and resumes control of all its lands, it is not fully victory. For it is a wounded land after the desecration of war. Until they build back better, it is not yet victory. Likewise, until America builds back better a more sturdy democracy, the struggle against tyranny is not finished. We need our own Marshall Plan, of a sort, to cleanse and strengthen our country..
This is helpful, Joyce. You mentioned "I wonder if the lawyer saw any classified material while conducting the search for the New York AG? It mentions places the FBI ultimately recovered sensitive materials from."
When the FBI later searched Mar-a-Lago for DOJ, if a box of documents requested by James was seized, would it have been returned to Trump by the filter team or sent to the Special Master? If the latter, then what?
Joyce, didn't trump just recently claim that all his loans have been paid off? In the last week, I believe I heard him make that claim. My belief was that he NEVER paid anything off, and as a banker for 22 yrs, I often wondered how any bank could let him get away with this type of thing. Plus, wasn't his bank loan officer at Deutsche Bank the son of the former SCOTUS justice whom trump basically told to step down so he could put Neil Gorsuch in his place, sort of blackmailed....?? Could some of that surface at some point to help bring trump down?? Thanks.
I'll pass on the chicks. I am more interest in the pup in the background. Is he a boxer? If so is he chocolate -my favorite coloring. Let us see a good pic!
Another wonderful roadmap to the week ahead. Thank you for giving us a framework to rest the chaos ahead upon.
and thank you for "These are people who’ve made multi-million dollar business deals and in Ivanka’s case, served as a senior advisor to the president of the United States. They are not children. They should be held responsible for their own actions."
Most of all, thank you for closing today's missive with the chickens (with trusty dog companion resting in the background).
I can't get too excited about AG James lawsuit against the Trump's.... They have gotten away for years...I just want him unable to run for any political office again along with anyone named trump.
You know, people who just don’t feel the love for Trump could Crowdsource a fund to buy a slice of Trump’s debt, then demand immediate liquidity, like a run on a bank. It might jostle lenders into a wholesale slaughter.
I taught tax accounting at the undergraduate and graduate levels for more than 35 years (Ph.D accounting). Fraudulent financial statements led to loans being granted that may not have been granted otherwise, lower interest rates, insurance policies being written that may not have been written otherwise, lower insurance rates, and then deflating the FMV of assets for purposes of lower property and other taxes. There are victims in these cases, just not in the sense that we're used to thinking about victims. This is not just FPOTUS inflating his statements to get higher up on Forbes list of billionaires. He, and all others involved, purposefully lied on these statements, in a most brazen way, to gain financial benefits. I'm not an expert on NY city and state business taxes, but it's possible that this scheme also lowered city and state taxes in addition to state property taxes. This could have also affected their federal taxes. And, keep in mind, all FPOTUS entities are flow throughs which means the entity generally doesn't pay tax, the owners pay it. Fraudulent statements affect not only the entities involved, but also the owners at the city, state and federal levels.
How many customers paid higher interest and insurance rates because of the lower rates FPOTUS arranged? How many people in NY did not receive state sponsored benefits because FPOTUS paid too little in taxes? FPOTUS intentionally issued non-audited financial statements because he'd never have gotten away with this if he had audited financial statements. I also have questions about Mazars since, even if you're doing a compilation, you're supposed to compare the current year with the past year to see if anything is "out of wack". There should have been a lot of questions about the constantly increasing values of the assets. Our systems only work if everyone attempts to follow the rules. When certain individuals and entities are allowed to flaunt the rules everyone in the system suffers.
Thank you for pointing out the absurdity calling people in their late 30’s to early 40’s “children”. I note that this is often done by trump sympathizers who deny the same protection to Hunter Biden whom they claim to be a shiftless criminal. All four of these persons are ADULT!
And thank you for the chick pics.
L’Shana Tova, Joyce.
Scotch and Butter! And they just keep getting cuter! Who's the pup? (I know, I'm fairly new here, and trying to catch up.)
Not petty at all to believe adults in their 30's and 40's be referred to as adults. Wealthy, grifting adults.
Thanks for the guide on the amazing AG James' rigorous efforts. She's very impressive. And seems to feel just like Liz Cheney! Two women who one day will be honored with medals and accolades.
I'm particularly intrigued by #5... I mean, who has seen the documents that belong to the US, that tRump stole and crammed into his desk? (I mean who, other than Lavrov, has seen the docs?)
It's pleasant to consider TFG having to cough up $250M... although his supporters will just send it to him when he goes begging on Go Fund Me, or "Truth" Social.
Why do they keep sending him money? If they think he's so rich, and so good with money, why do they believe he needs their hard-earned cash? Another mystery.
Question: I'm confused about the Manhattan criminal case... what exactly was it? Why was it dropped? Why do you guess DA Bragg is hemming and hawing about it now? I cannot figure out anything about this non-maybe-case. At one point, I just assumed one of the tRumps bribed or blackmailed someone.
Thanks again for your clarity and for making me look smarter than I am!
I'd like to ask any attorneys who read this substack to take a look at the following, which was in my most recent Puck News update from their Wall Street/finance guy, William D. Cohan. He wants to see Trump wearing a barrel like all of us do, but he brings these items from his collection of Wall Street gurus, and they appear to me to be Items In Need Of Serious Consideration:
But the thing we don’t know, and what remains an intriguing mystery, is whether these misdeeds are actually crimes that can be provable in court and punishable by civil penalties, which is the only club James is wielding. Alas, what I am hearing repeatedly about the lawsuit from my Wall Street brethren is various versions of: There is no victim here. Put another way: is it a crime for a huckster to overinflate his net worth and the value of his assets to make himself feel better and more important? If Trump wants to play pretend and believe that his already huge 10,000-foot apartment in Trump Tower is really 30,000 feet, is that a crime or evidence of mental illness?
If, for some deranged reason, Trump wants to believe that Mar-a-Lago is worth $739 million, or that Trump National Golf Club, in Jupiter, Florida, for which he paid $5 million, is worth $62 million, or that his spread in Aberdeen, Scotland is somehow worth $327 million because he can develop it into luxury condos… is that a crime or just more evidence that Trump is a wacked-out, shitty businessman?
James is leaning on a specific statute in New York, known as Executive Law 63 (12), that gives the attorney general broad powers to take action against businesses that have demonstrated “persistent fraud or illegality.” Theoretically, under this statute, the attorney general does not need to demonstrate that any of Trump’s creditors or insurers suffered a financial loss.
Of course, the problem here for James is that it takes two to tango on Wall Street. Trump could delude himself all he wanted in his triplex in Trump Tower into thinking he was 10 times or 20 times richer than he really is, while browbeating Forbes into including him on the list of wealthiest Americans, but it would be meaningless without OPM—Other Peoples’ Money. It takes banks and other financial institutions, like Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital, that are willing to lend money, or underwrite some mortgage-related securities, to get the money that make such business ventures possible. The real question here is why Deutsche Bank lent him the hundreds of millions of dollars he needed, regardless of the insane valuations he happened to put on them at various points along the way.
Let’s be clear: Deutsche Bank has a very sophisticated credit committee that makes the decisions about providing loans to each and every borrower. Loans do not get made without credit committee approval. Even Donald Trump, for all his claims about knowing how to play the game better than anyone else, can’t get the approval of a bank credit committee without, you know, the credit committee’s approval. We can ask why the Deutsche Bank credit committee could be so stupid as to decide to lend money to Donald Trump, after his legendary track record of stiffing Wall Street creditors, which was the subject of my 2013 Atlantic article about him and his tortured relationship with Wall Street. The answer is not that Donald Trump fooled Deutsche Bank into thinking that the projects that they were lending to—among them, the Doral in Miami, the Old Post Office Building in Washington, and the Chicago hotel and condominium—were worth 10 times more than they actually were. No, the presumable reason Deutsche Bank made loans to Trump despite his horrific track record as a debtor was because the bank, after haircutting The Donald’s projections or valuations, thought it could make money, lots of money. Money from fees. Money from interest payments. Money from syndicating the loans.
Take but one head-scratching example: The Trump International Hotel & Tower, in Chicago. Starting in roughly 2004, Deutsche Bank, and other creditors, including a hedge fund run by Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s future Treasury Secretary, lent the Trump Organization the money it needed to build the building. Trump invested $40 million of his own money. In 2008, Trump claimed that the financial crisis constituted an “act of God” and that he would no longer pay back the money he had borrowed for the Chicago project. Trump sued Deutsche Bank in a court in Queens; Deutsche Bank sued Trump. Eventually, the two sides worked out their differences, settled the dispute, and the project was completed. Despite the dueling lawsuits—in 2012 and again in 2014—according to James’s complaint, Deutsche Bank lent the Trump Organization another $152 million on the Chicago project. And guess what, I’m sure the loan at that time made sense and Deutsche Bank got its money back and the Deutsche Bank credit committee approved it all. So good luck, Letitia James.
Now, there may be one aspect of the suit where there could be real provable fraud, and that involves a sprawling property, Seven Springs, that Trump owns in Westchester County that used to be owned by Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, who once upon a time bought the Washington Post out of bankruptcy for $825,000. (He was also a former partner at Lazard, my alma mater, the fifth Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the first president of the World Bank.) Trump acquired the property in 1995, for $7.5 million. There are two mansions on the 212-acre estate, plus other buildings and undeveloped land. The question with Seven Springs is whether the Trump Organization—Trump, and his son, Eric, who for a period of time lived at Seven Springs—got an appraisal done on the property that so overvalued it that Trump got a bigger tax benefit than he should have after donating an easement on the property to charity. If there would be a victim in this instance, it’s U.S. taxpayers.
According to James’s lawsuit, Trump valued Seven Springs as high as $291 million because he claimed he could develop the property into a series of mansions that he could sell for some $35 million each. But, of course, he couldn’t, didn’t, and hasn’t. Instead he decided, not ungenerously, to donate a development easement on the property in March 2016, which would limit his ability to develop the project since he couldn’t anyway. For that, according to James’s lawsuit, he got a federal tax deduction of $3.5 million, based on an appraisal prepared by Cushman & Wakefield that was submitted to the I.R.S.
The Cushman & Wakefield appraisal came in at $56.5 million, a far cry from $291 million. “But even the 2016 appraisal is overstated and fraudulent,” according to James. “Among other things, the March 2016 appraisal omits consideration of central facts known to (and indeed negotiated by) the Trump Organization regarding the number of lots that could be developed and sold based on the restrictions imposed by local authorities, and relies on other false assumptions, like an impossibly accelerated pace of planning and obtaining environmental approvals.” After laying out several specific details of how the Trump Organization allegedly deceived Cushman & Wakefield as it did its appraisal, James wrote, “Each of these facts would have significantly lowered the valuation of the Seven Springs property. Because the Trump Organization concealed this information, the Cushman appraisal materially overstated the value of the Seven Springs property by tens of millions of dollars.” She then described how Trump “and his agents” went about covering up their “scheme.”
If James can prove what she claims Trump did at Silver Springs, then we might have our smoking gun.
Last week was a good week for us. Would like to see another one this week. USA 🇺🇸 wins The President’s Cup! Starting the week off right.
Hope for more of the same for the disgraced twice impeached ex president. Not good for him...more please...
Happy Rosh Hashanah! 🍎🍯
"If I can sound petty for a moment, it constantly annoys me that three adults in their 30’s and 40’s with children of their own, are referred to as the former president’s “children.”
You are not being petty you are being prophetic (and keep it up!).
Thanks for taking the "reading and writing time" to provide us your thoughts on the AG's case, Joyce. Amazing insights! Would you agree that a RICO (sp?) approach is the best way to nab Trump, et al from a criminal perspective? Tie in to a money laundering scheme?
It is easy to forget in a forlorn and hopeless world that “victory for democracy” in refutation of Trump and his minions is not victory, really. If Ukraine drives out the “orcs” and resumes control of all its lands, it is not fully victory. For it is a wounded land after the desecration of war. Until they build back better, it is not yet victory. Likewise, until America builds back better a more sturdy democracy, the struggle against tyranny is not finished. We need our own Marshall Plan, of a sort, to cleanse and strengthen our country..
This is helpful, Joyce. You mentioned "I wonder if the lawyer saw any classified material while conducting the search for the New York AG? It mentions places the FBI ultimately recovered sensitive materials from."
When the FBI later searched Mar-a-Lago for DOJ, if a box of documents requested by James was seized, would it have been returned to Trump by the filter team or sent to the Special Master? If the latter, then what?
Joyce, didn't trump just recently claim that all his loans have been paid off? In the last week, I believe I heard him make that claim. My belief was that he NEVER paid anything off, and as a banker for 22 yrs, I often wondered how any bank could let him get away with this type of thing. Plus, wasn't his bank loan officer at Deutsche Bank the son of the former SCOTUS justice whom trump basically told to step down so he could put Neil Gorsuch in his place, sort of blackmailed....?? Could some of that surface at some point to help bring trump down?? Thanks.
I'll pass on the chicks. I am more interest in the pup in the background. Is he a boxer? If so is he chocolate -my favorite coloring. Let us see a good pic!
Another wonderful roadmap to the week ahead. Thank you for giving us a framework to rest the chaos ahead upon.
and thank you for "These are people who’ve made multi-million dollar business deals and in Ivanka’s case, served as a senior advisor to the president of the United States. They are not children. They should be held responsible for their own actions."
Most of all, thank you for closing today's missive with the chickens (with trusty dog companion resting in the background).
I can't get too excited about AG James lawsuit against the Trump's.... They have gotten away for years...I just want him unable to run for any political office again along with anyone named trump.
You know, people who just don’t feel the love for Trump could Crowdsource a fund to buy a slice of Trump’s debt, then demand immediate liquidity, like a run on a bank. It might jostle lenders into a wholesale slaughter.