Speaker 1: Major, major, major news yesterday.
Donald Trump and his family are getting sued.
New York.
Yes, they are suing Trump.
And the case is being referred to the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, for criminal prosecution.
This is this is really important.
The key detail here is this is totally separate from the FBI search warrant.
This is unrelated.
This is a totally different thing as the legal problems are stacking up, up, up, higher and
higher to the moon for Donald Trump and his family.
This relates to the fraudulent representations of asset values exactly as our friend Michael
Cohen testified about.
And we'll talk to us about when he joins us later this month on the program CNBC article.
New York sues Trump Company and family members over widespread fraud claims seeking at least
$250 million in penalties.
New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Trump.
Trump.
Org.
As well as eric don jr and ivanka for allegedly widespread fraud, as Trump says, involving
false financial statements related to the company.
Mr. Trump's statements of financial condition from 2011 to 2021 were fraudulent and misleading
in both their composition and presentation.
That's CNBC.
Patch dot com explains more about what is believed that Donald Trump and his family
did.
Claiming money that you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal, said Letitia
James in the civil suit Wednesday.
James says Trump repeatedly and grossly inflated the value of properties in a long standing
game of smoke and mirrors.
So I'll explain the gist of this.
And I think to some in our audience, you already know this, but it's worth explaining what
is the point of saying a property you have is worth more or is worth less than it really
is?
And it has to do with are you trying to get a loan using that property as collateral or
are you trying to avoid property taxes on a particular property?
Let's say I have not a perfect building in New York, but a nice building and it's worth
$10 million in reality.
Now, in reality, Trump's defense is that property values are subjective.
And of course, that's true.
But let's say that on average, independent appraisers say a building is worth $10 million.
If you need a $15 million loan, the $10 million building is not going to suffice as collateral.
In general, you can get know, generally speaking, 80% loan to value meaning.
For a $10 million building, you can only get a loan of $8 million against it.
So in order to justify the $15 million loan, Trump can say this.
This is a great building.
This is a $20 million building.
And now that would enable him, if the bank believes it, to give him a $15 loan against
it.
So that's when you inflate the asset value.
On the other hand, incomes, the property tax collector, the real estate tax collector and
says, you've got a $10 million building here.
You owe us money for property taxes based on 10 million.
And then Trump can make a completely different case and say, Now, listen, the toilets aren't
so good.
You got to flush them 10 to 15 times, as Trump often complains about.
And, you know, Jared Kushner is evicting people and all these different things.
It's not worth 10 million.
It's only worth 5 million.
So tax me on the 5 million.
It's a type of fraud and it relates to keeping two sets of books and it relates to a whole
bunch of other accounting and different types of fraud.
So this is the crux of it.
Now, we've got a couple of videos here from the attorney general, Letitia James, and she
has quite a bit to say about all of this.
Speaker 5: Mr. Trump also blatantly ignored legal restrictions at Mar a Lago.
Mar a Lago was valued on the false premise that it sat on unrestricted property and could
be developed for residential use.
However, Mr. Trump knew that Mar a Lago was subject to a host of onerous restrictions
and limitations.
Mr. Trump himself signed deeds sharply, restricting changes to the property and donating his residential
development rights in an effort to get a tax deduction and later to lower his property
taxes on the property.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 5: The deeds also require Mr. Trump to donate over 23% of Mar a Lago value to
the Historic Trust for Historic Preservation if he ever sold it.
Despite these significant restrictions, Mr. Trump value the property based on the false
premise that it was an unrestricted residential 18 acre plot of land that could be sold and
used as a private home.
In fact the valuations represent that these restrictions.
Don't even exist.
The club generated annual revenues of less than $25 million.
And should have been valued at more than.
Valued at about $75 million, however.
Mar a Lago.
It was valued as high as $739 million.
Speaker 1: Bit of an exaggeration, that's for sure.
And Letitia James there outlining just more examples of the type of thing that I'm talking
about now.
What is she seeking?
Well, in addition to $250 million in damages, her goal is to prohibit any of Trump's companies
from doing business in the state of New York.
Speaker 5: The last thing to cancel any certificate filed under and by virtue of the provisions
of Section 130 of the general business law for the corporate entities named as defendants,
and any other entity controlled by or beneficially owned by Donald Trump, which participated
in or benefited from the ongoing financial scheme.
In other words.
Permanently prohibit any of these companies from doing business in the state of New York.
Speaker 1: Now, we don't know whether any of these things are going to happen.
We don't know whether a single dollar is going to be collected here in this lawsuit.
We don't know whether Trump and his family will actually be barred from doing business
in New York.
But what we do know is that the legal problems are mounting and the legal bills are exploding
dramatically here.
Now, Donald Trump is, of course, on a tirade about this, and we'll get to that in a moment.
But understand that these are mechanisms which anyone, in a sense, could could try to take
advantage of.
If you have a house that's worth $300,000, you could try to get a favorable, favorable
appraisal if you want to get a home equity line of credit.
And you could also call the local tax assessor and say the property is terrible.
It's not worth that much to lower your property taxes a little bit.
But we're talking about thousands of dollars there.
Here we are talking about tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that impact dramatically
tax collections and loan money that is put at risk by financial corporations.
This is very serious, though.
It should be taken seriously.
We are going to follow where this goes.
Two points that have been made about why it will be difficult for Letitia James to prevail
in this lawsuit.
Number one, there is a disclaimer that is included in these valuation documents by the
Trump Organization, which says property valuations are subjective.
Now, whether that is enough to clear someone of fraud, liability is going to have to be
investigated.
But one claim is we say this is subject to.
It is subjective period.
And the number two, proving that Donald Trump really meant to deceive and that he was even
personally involved.
All of these are obstacles, certainly, to holding Trump accountable.
But the legal problems mounting and Donald Trump completely exploding about this