“Smoking gun” in financial fraud case against Donald Trump
Getting your story straight is not normally a big deal for the average person. However, when you lack a soul and a moral compass and your life’s mission is to feed your insatiable sense of entitlement, then getting your story straight inevitably becomes a tricky business.
When greed leads you to be intentionally inconsistent, it is only a matter of time until people discover and expose the grift. We have seen Donald Trump try to have things both ways and reap the benefits of parallel universes when it comes to the value of his properties, for example. Trump has had a habit of inflating values to maximize loan qualification while deflating those same values to minimize tax liability.
The plaintiffs behind a newly amended class-action complaint against Trump and several of his relatives have now uncovered another such Trumpian inconsistency that they believe may be the “smoking gun” in their effort to collect from the pathological fraudster, according to a report from Reuters. The lawsuit, brought by tenants who live in rent-regulated apartments that were once owned by Trump’s father, Fred, alleges fraud and racketeering by raising rents based on artificially high prices of major appliances.
These plaintiffs are seizing the opportunity to stop Trump from lying his way through two different lawsuits with impunity. The other lawsuit at issue involves Mary Trump’s own fraud allegations against her uncle and other relatives. Mary claims Trump and his relatives fraudulently diverted money from her and other stakeholders into an entity called All County. The tenants claim that All County made its money by negotiating wholesale purchase prices for major appliances and apartment supplies only to then hike tenants’ rent regardless.
Conveniently for the tenants, evidence cited in Mary’s case includes earlier deposition testimony from Trump’s brother, Robert, asserting that his family used All County so “we could increase the cost of items and then get higher rents.” Further testimony by John Walter, a cousin of the Trumps, reveals that the idea of tenants benefiting from negotiated prices bothered Fred so much that they established All County to ensure that the Trumps—and not the tenants—would reap the benefits of Fred’s business savvy.
Thanks to the Trumps’ statements in Mary’s case, the aggrieved tenants can now credibly argue that they “were unknowingly defrauded into paying unlawful rent increases based on the fraudulent and inflated costs of the purported improvements.” Indeed, Trump and his relatives’ complex web of greed, lies, and wrongdoing has ensnared them once again. As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed”—and he never met the Trumps.
Ron Leshnower is a lawyer and the author of several books, including President Trump’s Month