Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan in 2012. He said he was worth $4.6 billion that year, but New York officials say he was worth $1.8 billion.
Jennifer S. Altman/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump’s New York fraud trial is often framed as a fight over whether he “exaggerated” his net worth.But the case is far more than a mere difference in opinion over the dollar value of Trump’s assets.Here are the four kinds of schemes New York officials say Trump used to hike his net worth.
Donald Trump “exaggerated” his net worth by billions of dollars, countless stories in the press say, in what’s been a popular shorthand for the allegations in his civil fraud trial in New York.
No, he didn’t, the defense has long disagreed, arguing that a skyscraper’s or golf resort’s worth is subjective and that Trump is “an artist with real estate” and a “dreamer” who finds value “where others see nothing.”
But framing the trial as a mere difference of opinion over price tags —with Mar-a-Lago worth well over $1 billion if you ask Trump, or closer to $28 million if you ask the state — misses the point.
To put a new spin on that slogan from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run, when it comes to the Trump fraud trial, it’s the chicanery, stupid.
As both sides get ready for a January verdict that could cripple Trump’s real-estate empire, here’s a guide to the schemes he’s accused of using to pretend in official net-worth statements that he was as much as $3.6 billion a year richer than he really was.
These four “deceptive strategies” let him pocket over $250 million more in interest savings and sales profits than he’d otherwise have been entitled to, lawyers for Attorney General Letitia James of New York argued in October.
Trump Tower.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
1. ‘The sky is green’
We’ll use this name for the attorney general’s first category of sketchy valuation tactics, for the times she’s said Trump just flat-out lied about objective facts.
You say the sky is blue? For Trump’s net-worth statements, he picks the color, his former attorney and his current assistant vice president described in trial testimony.
The example James trots out most often is Trump telling banks for five years, from 2012 to 2016, that his Trump Tower triplex penthouse was 30,000 square feet. It’s actually just under 11,000 square feet.
It was Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s then-chief financial officer, who came up with the fact-defiant number, Kevin Sneddon, an in-house real-estate broker at Trump Org, said on the final day of trial testimony.
It happened like this, the broker said on the stand, describing an incriminating internal 2012 email chain:
Weisselberg asked the broker to come up with a number for Trump’s triplex, a valuation they could use in that year’s net-worth statement.
Can I see the triplex? Sneddon asked. No, Weisselberg said.
Then can I see the specs? The floor plan? Sneddon asked.
No, Weisselberg answered again, though prior testimony revealed that these documents were in file cabinets just around the corner from his desk.
“He said, ‘It’s quite large. I think it’s around 30,000 square feet,'” Sneddon testified the chief financial officer assured him.
Trump and Allen Weisselberg, his now former chief financial officer.
Evan Vucci/AP
So for the next five years, Trump’s annual net-worth statements repeated the bogus square footage, attributing the number to the broker.
Trump would value his “quite large” triplex at as high as $327 million. That’s an “absurd” value for its time, James said, given that no other apartment in the city had sold for nearly that much money.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the trial judge, Justice Arthur Engoron of the New York Supreme Court, wrote in his consequential September pretrial fraud finding.
Kevin Wallace, a lead state lawyer on the case, said the Trump Organization used the 30,000 number one last time despite a Forbes reporter alerting company executives to the giant discrepancy four days prior.
“This is direct evidence that the inflated penthouse valuation was not an innocent mistake but an intentional lie,” Wallace said in opening statements.
Weisselberg, a codefendant in the case, testified in the trial’s second week that the error was meaningless because the penthouse was a minor, or “de minimis,” asset.
Outside of Trump Park Avenue on August 22, 2018 in New York City, where President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has an apartment. Cohen entered a plea deal over tax and bank fraud, as well as campaign finance violations, the previous day.
Yana Paskova/Getty Images
2. ‘Strings? What strings?’
For the second category of schemes, James alleges Trump valued assets as if there were no strings attached, or, as state lawyers put it, “in disregard of legal restrictions that diminished their value.”
Let’s call this category: “Strings? What strings?”
In one example, Trump repeatedly “valued rent-stabilized apartments at the Trump Park Avenue building as if the apartments could be sold without rent-stabilized restrictions,” the state said in October.
By ignoring that they were rent-stabilized, Trump inflated the value of each unit by as much as 700%, as happened in 2014, the judge said before the trial.
The defense countered that the units “have the potential at some point in the future” to be converted to market-value condominiums.
But net-worth statements are required to state current values, not “someday, maybe,” values, the judge wrote.
Trump at the airport in Aberdeen, Scotland.
David Moir/Reuters
Trump’s golf resort in Aberdeen, Scotland, James says, is another example of, “What strings?”
He valued the resort “as if over 2,000 homes could be constructed on the property and sold as private residences,” when the most the local government would allow was 550 homes, her lawyers wrote in October.
Trump also valued Mar-a-Lago “as if it could be sold as a private residence,” the judge wrote, “even though Mr. Trump had personally signed deeds” that relinquished any right for the property to be used as anything other than a (far-less-valuable) social club.
Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, outside Los Angeles.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
3. A ‘Madness to his methods’
Trump also misrepresented the various methods he used for valuing his assets, the attorney general says.
We’ll call this the “madness to his methods” scheme.
James offered Trump’s golf resorts as an example.
Trump’s net-worth statements “explicitly stated” that he had not, in any way, raised the value of his golf properties to reflect “goodwill attached to the Trump name,” also known as brand value, she said.
But from 2013 to 2020, Trump “surreptitiously” added a 15% or 30% brand premium to the values of seven of his golf resorts, including in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Jupiter, Florida, James said.
Trump speaking with journalists outside the courtroom of his civil fraud trial in New York.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Trump continues to insist that he never added a brand-value premium to his worth, despite the explicit line items to the contrary seen in trial evidence.
“I didn’t even include that,” Trump said in a pretrial deposition.
“I mean I became president because of the brand, OK?” he said. “I became president. I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”
He doubled down in his November 6 trial testimony.
“If I wanted to build up a statement,” he said from the witness stand, “I would have added brand value, and I would have increased it by tens of millions of dollars.”
In similar method madness, James’ lawyers wrote, Trump secretly added the value of licensing deals with outside parties without noting that the deals were not actually signed yet.
“It was flatly false and misleading ” to include these, the judge wrote in his September pretrial order, saying that they added between $97 million and $224 million to Trump’s claimed net worth each year.
Trump’s Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, New York.
Johnny Milano for The Washington Post via Getty Images
4. ‘Damn the appraisals’
The attorney general’s final sketchy-valuation bucket is filled with sky-high valuations that bear no resemblance to appraisals by outside professionals.
We’ll call this the “damn the appraisals” scheme.
“For example, after obtaining appraisals that valued the Seven Springs and 40 Wall Street properties,” Trump valued the properties in his net-worth statements at “hundreds of millions of dollars over the appraised values,” James’ lawyers wrote in October.
In the case of Seven Springs, Trump’s over 200-acre estate in Westchester County, New York, four separate appraisals done between 2000 and 2014 all valued the property at below $30 million.
Despite this, Trump valued Seven Springs at $261 million in 2011 and at $291 million for the following three years, the judge said in his pretrial finding of fraud.
Trump “added hundreds of millions of dollars” to the appraised values of several other properties he held through a partnership with outside parties, the attorney general’s lawyers wrote in October.
The judge has already found, pretrial, that Trump, his company, and his executives are liable for fraud. The nonjury trial will determine whether these frauds violated specific New York criminal codes and which civil penalties the defendants face.
The trial is on break for the holidays; the parties have until January 5 to submit closing briefs to the judge, with closing arguments set for January 11.