New York’s Attorney General alleges former President Donald Trump, his family members, and business associates carried out “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentation” in a suit filed Wednesday (September 21) morning.
Announcing the suit filed in the New York Supreme Court, Attorney General Letitia James claimed Trump — with the help of his children, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric Trump — “inflated his net worth by billions of dollars.”
James alleged the former President and the Trump Organization “repeatedly and persistently manipulated the value of assets to induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms than would otherwise have been available to the company.”
She added the scheme would also be used “to pay lower taxes, to satisfy continuing loan agreements and to induce insurance companies to provide insurance coverage for higher limits and at lower premiums.”
Substantiating the claims, James explained that her office interviewed 65 witnesses and reviewed millions of documents during the investigation. She added that this had uncovered the former President had submitted “more than 200 false and misleading asset valuations.”
She also detailed how some of the misrepresentations included ignoring restrictions that would impact a property’s value and claiming he had cash on hand when that wasn’t the case.
Elaborating on the latter, James said, “Claiming you have money that you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal, it’s the art of the steal.” The AG’s comments were a reference to Trump’s 1987 bestseller, the accuracy of which has since been contested, even by the book’s co-author Tony Schwartz.
