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It’s Just Fraud All the Way Down

The complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James is remarkable not for the shrewdness of the misconduct it alleges, but for its audacity.

By David A. Graham
September 21, 2022, 1:26 PM ET

At times in his prepresidential life, Donald Trump represented himself as a real-estate mogul, a television star, a business visionary, and a salesman par excellence.
But according to a complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Trump Organization was actually just a massive fraud with incidental sidelines in property development, merchandising, and entertainment.

The basic scheme alleged in the complaint is straightforward.
Trump would use different valuations for properties depending on what he needed: When he wanted to lower his taxes, he’d claim a low valuation; if he wanted to obtain loans on more favorable terms, he would inflate the valuation. His overarching goal was to inflate his claimed personal net worth year over year, which in turn allowed him to obtain better loans by personally guaranteeing them—all built on bogus claims about his assets.

“Claiming you have money you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal,” James said at a press conference. “It’s the art of the steal.”

The way Trump did this was often brazen, in James’s account. In 2011, for example, he obtained an appraisal for his property at 40 Wall Street, valuing the building at $200 million. But Trump claimed the building was worth nearly $525 million (even while attributing the valuation to information from the appraiser). In another case, he calculated an astronomical value of his apartment at Trump Tower by claiming that its square footage was roughly triple the true figure. He also changed values by shifting the methods he used to calculate them from year to year, so that, for example, the claimed value of undeveloped land at a golf course in Westchester County, New York, quadrupled from about $25 million in 2012 to nearly $102 million in 2013.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/ny-attorney-general-trump-organization-was-fraud/671500/