President Donald Trump is facing an ongoing investigation from New York Attorney General Letitia James over a $21 million tax break that he received after pledging to conserve most of the land on a New York property that he owns that’s known as Seven Springs. The problem is that the size of the tax break is based on an appraisal for the property, and the Trump Organization relied on a potentially artificially inflated appraisal for the property. This appraisal was conducted by a third-party firm called Cushman & Wakefield, which set the value at $56.5 million — which is “more than double the value assessed by the three Westchester county towns that each contained a piece of the property,” The Washington Post reports.
After legal wrangling over his reluctance to comply with a subpoena, Eric Trump — who has been helping run for the family business in his father’s absence — recently sat for a deposition in the New York Attorney General’s investigation. According to the Post, Cushman & Wakefield founded their high appraisal for Seven Springs on the assumption that “a future buyer could build and sell 24 mansions on the land, without providing evidence that such a subdivision would meet local regulations.” Trump himself spent years trying to build on the property, to no avail. Thus, this assumption that a future buyer could construct these homes of great value on the land seems unsupported by evidence.
One appraiser who viewed the Cushman & Wakefield document at the request of The Washington Post commented:
‘This is not a good appraisal, and it’s misleading, and it’s thin as all get out. What you get is appraised values for these 24 hypothetical lots that appear to be much higher than they ought to be.’
There’s another glaring issue with the Trump Organization’s treatment of the Seven Springs property, which Trump originally purchased all the way back in 1995. In 2014, Trump categorized the property as an investment property (rather than a personal residence) and concurrently wrote off a staggering $2.2 million in property taxes as a business expense, according to The New York Times, which recently published details from Trump’s tax returns. The problem is that “Trump’s family members have described the home as a family retreat in the past, and the Trump Organization’s website still characterizes Seven Springs that way,” as the Post reports. The Trump Organization may have misrepresented their actual usage of the property in those original records.
Besides the investigation from Letitia James, Manhattan-area District Attorney Cy Vance has also been investigating potential financial crimes at the Trump Organization. He has subpoenaed financial records including the president’s tax returns as a part of that case. The James and Vance investigations “both appear to be issues the president and his family will have to deal with whether he wins in November or not,” according to the Post.
The president and his closest allies have consistently claimed that the New York investigations are politically motivated. As it turns out, these sham arguments aren’t enough to stop the wheels of justice from turning.
