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- The verdict in Trump’s fraud trial targets Trump’s cash, his New York business address and control of the Trump Organization.
- The verdict said Trump continued to commit fraud while under investigation.
- Now, any vague calculations will be sent back to President Trump for revision by court-appointed monitors.
Donald Trump’s fraud conviction targets three things he holds dear: his cash, his New York work address, and his Trump Organization handle.
It will take months of appeals to get there. But if Friday’s ruling is upheld, Trump would have to forfeit $355 million in ill-gotten gains, plus interest that could reach $100 million that has yet to be counted.
He will be prohibited from operating a business in New York, borrowing money from a New York-registered bank, or purchasing commercial real estate in the state for three years.
And while his finances will continue to be monitored by a now-strengthened court-appointed monitor, appeal efforts have so far been unsuccessful.
Those penalties, for a decade of fraud-riddled financial statements he sent to banks and insurance companies, did not creep up on the Republican front-runner.
For the past five years, Mr. Trump has known that he would first be investigated for financial fraud, then indicted, then tried.
I’ve known I was being watched since March 2019, when New York Attorney General Letitia James sent out the first subpoenas to banks, accountants and adjusters.
Yet Trump has spent the last five years fraud Like no one was watching.
He evaded the subpoena. He continued to inflate his value on his financial statements by up to $3.6 billion annually.
And they still concealed $40 million in transfers, even though they were monitored by an independent court monitor for the past 14 months, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron wrote in Friday’s ruling. did.
This verdict actually set back many of the penalties James had sought. Mr. Trump’s assets will be placed into receivership and will not be sold, and Mr. Trump will lose his handle on the Trump Organization for three years rather than permanently.
But even after five years under the investigative watch, Trump’s continued reliance on wrongdoing means he will come under even greater scrutiny.
President Trump’s watchdog, former federal judge Barbara Jones, who remains in office despite an earlier appeal, will scrutinize all of Trump’s company financial disclosures to third parties for 14 months. I’ve done it. rear they were sent away.
Now, as the verdict mandates, “The Trump Organization Before Approval (not currently ex-post review) from Judge Jones is required before financial disclosures are submitted to third parties, so that such disclosures are pre-screened for material misstatement. That will happen. ”
That means Jones will be checking the Trump Organization’s calculations in advance for at least the next three years.
This is the disclosure of all financial information to banks, insurance companies, or potential buyers of real estate. That includes his many branding and licensing agreements, as well as his corporate tax returns.
Jones sends the fugazi calculations back for correction. Meanwhile, under the ruling, Trump must continue to give Jones 30 days’ notice of any restructuring, refinancing or asset sales.
Otherwise, as Mr. Engoron noted in his verdict, Mr. Trump, his company, and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are “likely to continue their fraudulent conduct.”
knew he was being watched
The Office of the Auditor General believes Trump knew he was under investigation in March 2019. That’s when the auditor general served its first fraud subpoena demanding records from Deutsche Bank, Trump’s favorite financier.
Two months later, Trump’s outside accountant, Mazars USA, received a subpoena. Cushman Wakefield, President Trump’s go-to evaluator, received his evaluation a month later. Trump.org lawyers met with the AG’s office regarding these subpoenas throughout the summer of 2019.
However, after the following Halloween, President Trump still issued statements that intentionally inflated his 2019 net worth, claiming he was worth $6.1 billion, far more than twice his actual value, the AG said. the office said. The accuracy of this statement was attested to by Donald Trump Jr. and then-Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.
Trump was still president in 2019 and clearly preoccupied with other things.But Trump continued: fraud A judge found that for the next four years, as a private citizen, he inflated his net worth on official bank documents even as the AG’s investigation progressed.
2020 saw more AG subpoenas rain down. The Trump Organization has it. So did the company’s top executives, from Mr. Trump to his financial assistant, Patrick Burney, court evidence showed.
(Some interesting facts about the 2020 deposition: In response to the subpoena, Bernie impressively said that Weisselberg, Trump.org’s CFO, said, “Donald likes to see it go up.”) (And Weisselberg and Eric Trump each invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 500 times in subpoena-ordered depositions.)
Still, even with the AG’s microscope now in sharper focus than ever, Trump’s net worth once again more than doubled in his 2020 financial report, issued at the end of the year, and officials believe that in fact It turned out to be $4.7 billion, not the $2.2 billion it claimed to be.
Even though Mazars publicly removed Trump as a client in 2021, Trump continued to do so, the AG alleged. Even when Weisselberg and Trump.org were indicted on payroll tax fraud charges and a jury found them guilty a year later.
“While the investigation was ongoing, the defendants continued to actively seek to conceal their misconduct,” state attorneys said in a filing last month.
These include Trump’s “failure to produce over one million pages of documents” in defiance of the attorney general’s subpoena and his “refusal to testify unless ordered by a court.”
October 29, 2021 — AG Microscope, damn it — Trump claims he’s worth $4.5 billion, nearly $2 billion more than he’s actually worth. And Eric Trump has certified his claims as accurate.
“The defendants have known about our investigation since mid-March 2019,” James’s lawyer, Andrew Ammar, concluded.
However, over the next three years, “the fraud continued as they issued three more financial statements knowing they were being investigated for this activity.”
This isn’t his first scam rodeo.
AG’s lawyers pointed out that this was not President Trump’s first fraudulent rodeo.
In closing, Amer noted that over the past few years, Trump has resolved allegations of fraud involving the Trump Foundation, Trump University and his 2017 inaugural committee.
None of these legal revelations slowed Trump down. The same goes for the AG’s fraud lawsuit itself.
September 21, 2022, the same day James concluded her initial investigation and filed her massive Trump fraud lawsuit, which Trump was concerned was an attempt by her office to transfer and protect assets. Incorporated “Trump Organization II” into the organization.
At this point, Engoron had already been presiding over the AG’s corruption probe for two years and had repeatedly ordered Trump to stop defying her subpoenas for testimony and documents.
The judge quickly agreed to the AG’s request for an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization, citing Trump’s “obvious propensity to engage in persistent fraud.”
Violations occur everywhere
Since taking office nearly a year ago, Jones has repeatedly criticized Trump.org for its transparency and sometimes questionable money transfers.
Last August, she cited “incomplete” data with the company’s lenders and accused the company of hiding debts such as “refundable golf club membership deposits” in its reports.
November — this is the middle of the monthtrial Jones accused the company of not immediately disclosing $40 million in funds that President Trump used to pay off $29 million in taxes and a $5 million civil judgment in the original E. Jean Carroll defamation suit. did.
“This shows an inability to follow the law,” the AG’s attorney, Kevin Wallace, said at the closing last month.
And Jones suggested in January that Trump hid $48 million worth of tax-exempt loans, internal transfers from the Trump Organization.
“Even after an independent monitor was installed, defendant still failed to comply with the court’s orders,” the AG’s lawyers wrote last month.
“In short, President Trump and the leadership of the Trump Organization have proven time and time again that they are incapable of following the law,” they added.
However, it’s not a complete scam
Mr. Trump’s lawyers said any discrepancies or requests for additional data were quickly resolved and that Mr. Jones had made no overt allegations of fraud.
“The monitor has issued five reports so far,” Trump’s attorney Christopher Kiss said in closing arguments in his fraud trial last month.
“The word fraud does not appear in any reports,” Kise asserted.
But as Jones pointed out in his report to the judge, he does not have the authority to charge Trump with fraud. She is only there to alert the court if there is anything suspicious. And there was a lot of it.
The ruling cited Jones’ findings and found that Trump “submitted disclosures to third parties that did not include material debts.”
Moreover, “the Trump Organization’s internal accounting structure continues to be plagued by mathematical and reporting errors,” the verdict said.
“The Trump Organization does not have adequate internal controls in place over financial reporting to ensure that misstatements and errors continue to exist,” Engoron said.
until now.
If President Trump continues to cheat as if no one is watching, Jones and her yet-to-be-appointed “Independent Compliance Director” will have to do something “to preserve the defendant’s honesty.” may propose even more drastic supervision and punishment, however necessary.
The ruling includes “possible reorganization and dissolution” of Trump’s estate.
And all this surveillance? A team of skeptical accountants sticking their noses in his books for at least the next three years? Trump will pay their salaries in addition to the $355 million judgment plus interest.
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