Trump eventually turned over the corporate records, but only after much prodding.Īt one point, the Trumps tried to get a federal judge to intervene and call the whole thing off, a move that also bombed. Trump then tried to delay even further by claiming that a third-party digital forensics company hired to gather evidence was only doing some of the job, annoying investigators and the judge. Meanwhile, Trump himself refused to turn over documents, prompting Engoron to slap him with $110,000 in fines. The Trumps stalled further by appealing the decision to the state’s First Department, where they lost again. and Ivanka, refused to show up for their scheduled depositions, Engoron had to order them to show up in February. When Trump and two of his other adult kids, Don Jr. In the year-plus that followed, the AG’s office had to return to the judge several times to force Trump and his company to comply with subpoenas. 2020, Eric Trump was ordered to show up to his deposition, where he remained quiet and pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination more than 500 times. Engoron, a tough judge with an even tougher law clerk, Allison Greenfield, neither of whom is known to tolerate obstruction or delay. Trump then got a bad draw: The case was assigned to Justice Arthur F. What would have remained a quiet investigation spilled out into the public view when one of Trump’s adult sons, Eric, refused to testify behind closed doors-forcing the AG’s office to seek help from a state judge in 2020. Investigators also explored how Trump simply made up non-existent real estate space at Trump Tower to jack up the value there, as well as financial games he played with a golf course that siphoned money away from a local public school system. Three small towns north of New York City received subpoenas, first made public by The Daily Beast, in which investigators probed how Trump had inflated the price of his forested estate to dodge taxes-an odd arrangement that involved wildly inflating the value of undeveloped land before setting it aside as a conservation site and taking a tax write-off. James opened her investigation in March 2019, shortly after one-time Trump right-hand attorney Michael Cohen gave Congress copies of old Trump financial statements, which he said reflected Trump’s underhanded tactics: lying about real estate values by either inflating them to qualify for better bank loans or deflating them to minimize real estate taxes. The AG's suit demands some long-deferred accountability from the Trump Organization, which Trump used to propel himself to national fame in the 1980s and long touted as an example of his business acumen and financial success-an image that helped him win the presidency in 2016. She called it “intentional and deliberate fraud, not an honest mistake.” She also noted how Trump’s appraisers valued the neo-gothic tower at 40 Wall Street (just across the street from the AG’s office) at nearly $200 million, a number that Trump more than doubled the next year when he estimated it on official documents at $524 million-claiming that it was based on his appraiser’s figures. James pointed to the way Trump used “objectively false numbers” to calculate the value of his real estate, claiming at one point that his luxury Manhattan apartment was 30,000 square feet-tripling its actual size. And the New York AG's office found that Trump personally certified financial statements that were blatant lies, opening himself up to criminal charges of bank fraud that she hopes the feds will pursue. She said investigators relied on millions of pages of evidence, as well as the testimony of more than 65 witnesses. From a podium in her office, James said investigators uncovered evidence that, for an entire decade ending in 2021, Trump “fraudulently inflated” the value of his real estate “by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat the system-thereby cheating all of us.”
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