Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
The New York trial that could bankrupt Donald Trump’s corporate empire is only three weeks away, and the former president has bet the farm on the notion that his deals were too long ago to investigate—a ploy that increasingly looks like a dud.
Trump wants to direct Justice Arthur F. Engoron’s attention to the dates he finalized some sizable real estate deals in Chicago, Miami, Washington, and elsewhere. But according to a source familiar with the case, the real action will be focused on the way he kept filing personal financial statements with bogus numbers years later that kept inflating his net worth by what investigators estimate to be some $2.2 billion.
That amount sounds ridiculous, but it added up overtime. For example, the real estate tycoon bizarrely faked the size of his own gold-encrusted and marbled Louis XIV-style penthouse at Trump Tower in Manhattan by simply tripling the space from 10,000 to more than 30,000 square feet.