And good morning to you, Madame Attorney General. "This was not the art of the deal," Letitia James told a press conference this morning, "this was the art of the steal."
From NBC News:
In its 220-page suit, James’ office details efforts by the former president to inflate his personal net worth to attract favorable loan agreements. For Trump’s alleged wrongdoing, James seeks to bar the Trump family from being in the office of any New York-based company for five years. Additionally, James seeks to bar them from receiving loans from any New York registered financial institution for five years[…]James’ office seeks approximately $250 million in penalties. The suit alleges more than 200 instances of fraud over 10 years. James alleges years of large-scale fraud, saying the Trump Organization inflated the values of its properties in seeking bank loans or deflated them to pay less taxes. Her office has said in court filings that it “uncovered substantial evidence establishing numerous misrepresentations” in the company's financial statements to banks, insurers and the IRS.
This is as far as James and her office could go. She is referring anything she finds in violation of state and federal laws to the relevant law enforcement agencies that might be interested.
Make no mistake, however, this is a gutting—not only of the former president*’s entire business career, but also of his fundamental public identity. All of his glittering celebrity relied upon his image as a bull-goose financial genius. What James presented on Wednesday was a strong argument that the former president*’s entire career was based on fraud and deceit as fundamentally as were the careers of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. In the public court of celebrity, in which the former president* has insisted on being judged, this is damning. And James knows it.
The suit had its inception in the testimony of his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, before a congressional committee in which Cohen explained how the former president* inflated and deflated the value of his properties depending on which action made him the most money or better enabled him to finagle loans out of one bank or another. (Let’s also not forget that it was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who elicited this information from Cohen.) As the AG’s office put it in its public statement:
Over the course of OAG’s three-year investigation, OAG found that between 2011-2021, Mr. Trump’s statements were fraudulent and misleading in both their composition and their presentation. Mr. Trump made known through Mr. Weisselberg that he wanted his net worth on his statements to increase every year, and the statements were the vehicle by which his net worth was fraudulently inflated by billions of dollars year after year. All told, Mr. Trump, his children, the Trump Organization, and the other defendants as part of a repeated pattern and common scheme, derived more than 200 false and misleading valuations of assets for the 11 statements covering 2011 through 2021.
Each statement represented that the values were prepared by Mr. Trump and others at the Trump Organization in consultation with “professionals,” however, no outside professionals were retained to prepare any of the asset valuations for the statements. To the extent Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization received any advice from outside professionals that had any bearing on how to approach valuing the assets, they routinely ignored or contradicted such advice.
One of the most glaring examples cited in the lawsuit involves the former president*’s inflated valuation of his apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan. From the lawsuit:
Between 2011 and 2015, the value of Mr. Trump’s triplex incorporated into the Statements of Financial Condition increased by more than 400 percent — from $80 million to $327 million[…]The bulk of this fraudulently inflated value came from the misrepresentation in the years 2012 through 2016 that the apartment was 30,000 square feet, when in reality the apartment was only 10,996 square feet. That wildly overstated size was then multiplied by an unreasonable price per square foot.
He wanted it known not only that his apartment was worth more than it was, but also that it was bigger than it was—and this was not merely for financial reasons, which were admittedly considerable. It was of the greatest importance to him to be known to be wealthier than he actually was, not merely to make negotiating loans easier, but also to be The Donald Trump, the one who lived on Page Six, in People magazine, and (one suspects) in his own head. That was the persona he sold to the American people and, ultimately, the one that has led him, however improbably, into the leadership of the most dangerous political movement in this country since the establishment of the Confederate States of America.
“Vanity of vanities,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns us, “vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
