Then-President Donald Trump and daughter Ivanka Trump make their way to board Air Force One.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
On Friday, Trump’s NY fraud-trial judge ruled Ivanka Trump must testify next week.She had tried to quash her subpoena, saying it was overly broad and improperly served.As Trump’s top loan negotiator, she used his fraudulent net-worth math to secure $400M from Deutsche Bank, NY officials say.
“It doesn’t get better than this,” Ivanka Trump boasted in 2011, in an email celebrating the low interest rate she’d just won on a $125 million loan her father needed for his Miami golf course.
Lawyers for the New York attorney general’s office, who plan to call Ivanka Trump to the witness stand on Friday at their ongoing, $250 million Trump fraud trial, agree it was quite the deal.
As Donald Trump’s top loan negotiator, Ivanka Trump indeed excelled at securing rock-bottom interest rates, they say, saving her father as much as $150 million on $400 million in Deutsche Bank loans used to develop Trump’s palm-studded Florida golf course, his luxury hotel in Washington, DC, and the Chicago tower that is his tallest skyscraper.
The terms on the golf course loan were so good, “She didn’t even want to negotiate on it,” Kevin Wallace, James’ senior enforcement counsel, noted four weeks ago, during opening statements.
But the interest-rate savings, which ranged as high as 8 percent, were won through fraud, Attorney General Letitia James argues, and the trial judge has already found. And when she takes the stand, Ivanka Trump will be asked to describe how she turned this underlying fraud – in the form of Trump’s annual, widely exaggerated net worth statements – into easy cash for the family business.
Her testimony at the non-jury trial could prove highly damaging to her father and two eldest brothers, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump – Trump Organization vice presidents who, like their father, are defendants in James’ lawsuit. Through this lawsuit, James seeks to permanently ban them and the company from doing business in New York.
Someone Ivanka Trump’s testimony won’t damage — other than, perhaps, reputationally — is herself. She was originally a defendant for her alleged complicity in using the fraudulent statements to win loans. But she was cut from the case on statute of limitation grounds in an appellate decision over the summer.
“Until 2017,” when she left New York to work in the Trump White House, “Ms. Trump was the primary contact for the Trump Organization’s largest lender, Deutsche Bank,” James said in first laying out a detailed case against the Trumps in a court filing nearly two years ago.
“In connection with this work,” the AG wrote then, “Ms. Trump caused misleading financial statements to be submitted to Deutsche Bank and the federal government.”
Ivanka Trump will certainly be asked about using the net worth statements to win and maintain the three Deutsche Bank loans, and about what representations she may have made to the bank’s private wealth management group, which underwrote them.
She’ll also likely be asked about one number she did negotiate with Deutsche Bank. The private wealth management group demanded Trump maintain a net worth of $3 billion.
“Ivanka Trump tried to negotiate the number down to 2 billion,” Wallace said in openings, “before agreeing to 2.5 billion.”
She’ll also likely be asked to describe the far higher interest she would have been stuck with had the Trump Organization continued to use Deutsche Bank’s commercial real estate loan division, which did not rely on net worth statements.
Ivanka Trump didn’t just negotiate loans, however.
She played a key role in the Trump Organization’s effort to win a ground lease from the US government for the Old Post Office property in Washington, the historic building Trump converted into a luxury hotel.
When the federal General Services Administration began seeking requests for proposals for the property’s development, Ivanka Trump was the one who presented the Trump Organization’s bid, the AG alleges.
She cited “Donald J. Trump’s significant net worth” in her bid, which included his most recent net worth statement, and instructed, “Please find Trump’s Statement of Financial Condition in an envelope submitted with each copy of this proposal.”
Ivanka Trump can also expect to be asked about the apartment she and her husband, Jared Kushner, rented more than a decade ago in her father’s Trump Park Avenue property in Manhattan.
The couple paid a rent that was a mere fraction of that of other penthouses in the building, the AG alleges.
In 2011 and 2012, the couple had an option to purchase the unit for $8.5 million, documents already in evidence show. But during the same period, Donald Trump’s net worth statements valued the exact same unit at $20.8 million.
Ivanka Trump is scheduled to testify Friday, though it’s possible a last-minute appeal could delay or cancel that timing.
Her brothers are scheduled to take the stand earlier in the week, with Donald Trump, Jr. slated for Wednesday, and Eric Trump slated for Thursday.
Donald Trump himself is scheduled to be the last of the Trumps to testify, on Monday, November 6.