After reading virtually every word of Judge Arthur Engoron’s 92-page statement which calls for Donald Trump and his two sons to come up with $362,898,416 plus interest dating back to 2019, I end up wondering how could someone create such a massive and valuable portfolio of real estate properties and be so goddamn dumb?
Because Trump had to know, or at last he should have known that the moment he got into politics by announcing his Presidential campaign in 2015, that everything having to do with his business affairs would come under the microscope, in many instances microscopes being held and used by people who wanted to find something wrong, or something bad, or both.
What jumps out from the pages of this report is not only are so many of the scams he pulled so obvious that anyone could figure them out, but the evidence is right in the documents and testimony supplied by the Trump Organization to the Court!
These documents included financial statements used to secure bank loans which both overstated the value of various properties, as well aa understated the amount of money that was lost in other ventures.
For example:
· Trump’s Mar-a-Lago deed required that the property only be used as a social club, even though it was appraised and listed as a residence.
· The office building at 40 Wall Street ran yearly operating deficits even though the property was describe as returning yearly profits.
· Trump’s private residence in Trump Tower was listed as covering more than 30,000 square feet when it actually covered 11,000 square feet.
· Trump listed a real estate partnership as a cash asset even though the contract establishing the partnership specifically denied his ability to draw cash from the ongoing operation.
In his own testimony, Trump justified all these scams and others by insisting that ‘nobody was hurt’ and that ‘everyone got paid.’ Such testimony effectively justified the conscious decisions to falsify documents so that the company could receive business loans at interest rates it didn’t deserve.
If Trump wants to continue to insist that he ‘did nothing wrong,’ then the only people who will believe him will be people who really don’t care whether he did anything illegal or not. Today’s New York Post is carrying a story which claims that at least 10 members of the ‘Trucker’s Convoy’ that camped out on the Texas border have stated they will no longer deliver goods to New York as a protest against the court decision.
Of course, this so-called piece of ‘news’ is nothing more than some putz putting up a video on his YouTube channel and if Trump is depending on this groundswell of support to carry him forward to another four-year stint in the Oval Office – good luck.
I happen to believe that inflating real estate values to get cheaper bank loans is probably SOP in the New York real estate industry as well as everywhere else. And in Trump’s case, let’s not forget that for all his boasting about his great business deals over the years, there have also been some spectacular failures, such as those Atlantic City casinos, the United States Football League, and Trump Air.
How much of the money Trump got from Deutsche Bank and other lenders was used to prop up various failing ventures – who the Hell Knows? What jumps out in Engoron’s report is that Trump’s accountant, Allen Weisselberg, who was the Chief Financial Officer, wasn’t a certified accountant nor did he understand basic accounting procedures as defined in GAAP.
Granted, many financial operations rely on hired accounting firms to make sure that all their financial documents follow the rules. But Weisselberg wasn’t just a bookkeeper for the Trump Organization, he was the guy who made sure that all the phony documents concocted by Trump would be prepared in ways that circumvented the rules.
This decision not only hits Trump with a huge financial whack in the rear end but prohibits him for three years from having any connection to a business which operates in New York.
Which raises a very interesting question: Since Trump owns the MAGA copyright, can he continue to lead the so-called MAGA ‘movement’ for the next three years?
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