Letitia James, Donald Trump
New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that she is suing former President Donald Trump and three of his children for fraud stemming from her three-year civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s business dealings.
The civil lawsuit seeks at least $250 million in damages.
It also seeks to permanently bar Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump from serving as an officer of a company in New York, and permanently prohibit the Trump companies named in the suit from doing business in New York state.
James said she has asked federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the IRS to investigate Trump for possible federal crimes. She said that evidence obtained during her three-year civil probe of Trump indicated possible crimes of bank fraud and making false statements to financial institutions.
James said Trump massively overstated the values of his assets in statements to banks, insurance companies and the IRS to obtain more favorable loan and insurance terms for his company, as well as to lower its tax obligations.
The lawsuit alleges that from 2011 to 2021, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization knowingly and intentionally created more than 200 false and misleading valuations of assets on his annual Statements of Financial Condition to defraud financial institutions.
James said that Trump had falsely claimed that his apartment in Manhattan was more than triple its actual size as part of the alleged fraud.
And the suit says Trump valued his Mar-a-Lago club property in Palm Beach, Florida, on the false premise that it sat on unrestricted property and could be developed for residential use, even though he allegedly knew that property was subject to a variety of tight restrictions.
James said that in reality, Mar-a-Lago generated less than $25 million in annual revenue and should have been valued at about $75 million, not the $739 million that was claimed.
In addition to the Trumps, the defendants in the suit include Allen Weisselberg, who acted for years as chief financial officer of the Trump Organization.
Both Weisselberg and the Trump Organization were criminally charged last year by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for an alleged scheme to avoid paying taxes on portions of the compensation given to company executives, among them Weisselberg.
Other defendants in the suit include Weisselberg’s lieutenant, Jeffrey McConney, as well as several Trump companies, among them ones that own properties in Manhattan, Westchester County, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
The seven-count suit alleges persistent and repeated fraud; falsifying business records; conspiracy to falsify business records; issuing false financial statements; conspiracy to falsify false financial statements; insurance fraud; and conspiracy to commit insurance fraud.
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