Although lots of attention remains focused on President Donald Trump’s attempt to extract dirt on the Bidens from Ukraine in exchange for military aid and a summit in D.C. with his team, the president was engaging in documented corruption before he ever assumed his present position. Now, ProPublica has revealed major discrepancies in the tax and loan filings associated with none other than Trump Tower in Manhattan, where the president himself used to live. There was large gaps in the occupancy rates reported on those respective filings, which could have made him appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax authorities.
It’s not the first time that Trump properties in NYC have been revealed to be based in fraud. ProPublica recently published similar fraud revelations covering “a skyscraper located at 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower near Columbus Circle,” they note, also explaining:
‘In the latest case, the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials, records show.’
Notably enough, the lender in question — Ladder Capital, which arranged a refinancing of Trump Tower around the time of the documents — has an additional questionable connection to the Trump Organization. Jack Weisselberg works as an executive at the company, and he’s also the son of the Trump family business’s Chief Financial Officer Allen — who’s currently under investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance over his role in fraud surrounding hush money payments for adult film star Stormy Daniels, who says she had an affair with the now president.
That’s not where the issues end, though. In December 2011 and June 2012, the Trump Organization told Ladder Capital that their commercial space at Trump Tower was 99 and 98.7 percent occupied, respectively. In January 2012, the business told tax authorities that the commercial space was only 83 percent occupied, making a big difference.
Unsurprisingly, the Trump Organization insisted that there’s nothing to see here, although the discrepancies fit right into a pattern that former longtime Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen told Congress was intentional. A spokesperson “said that “comparing the various reports is comparing apples to oranges” because reporting requirements differ.” Meanwhile, University of California professor Nancy Wallace insisted that the ‘discrepancies were “versions of fraud,”‘ which is definitely pretty blunt.
Much of the difference, when the overall numbers are broken down, comes from different assertions about how much of the space that the Trump Organization itself was occupying. In mid-2012, they told loan officials that they were occupying some 31 percent of it, but they about halved the number down to 18 percent when reporting to tax officials before and after that.
The fraud figures among a whole host of legal issues that the president and those closest to him are facing. Recently, the House Intelligence Committee concluded their initial round of public hearings in their impeachment inquiry, and the House Judiciary Committee has already set another hearing for December 4 as the process continues.
