Ivanka Trump — terrified of NY AG — throws the rest of the family under the bus
Ivanka Trump, daughter of former President Donald Trump, broke with her father’s defense in a New York fraud case.
Bloomberg News correspondent Erik Larson reported that Trump had joined her father and brothers in asking for a trial delay, but she offered a very different reason.
According to Larson, Trump’s lawyer has argued that the case is “not simple” because she left the Trump organization in 2017 and has a “unique” defense because she has not been accused of lying about the company’s finances.
“The Complaint does not contain a single allegation that Ms. Trump directly or indirectly created, prepared, reviewed, or certified any of her father’s financial statements,” Trump’s attorney said in a court filing this week.
The document alleges “that other individuals were responsible for those tasks.”
Earlier this week, attorneys for the former president requested a delay to push the fraud trial from Oct. 2 to deeper into the 2024 presidential campaign.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused Donald Trump and his children of fraudulently manipulating real estate values for profit.
Judge Arthur Engoron previously said that the trial would be held on Oct. 2 “come hell or high water.”
Trump Org. suddenly goes silent about their finances
Two months after the Trump Organization was fined $1.6 million dollars over tax fraud, the company headed by Donald Trump has suddenly gone dark on its financial situation which could be a sign it is in trouble.
According to a report from the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery, a report that was released last week by a retired judge who was assigned to “babysit” the embattled company stated the company and its executives have “…not provided a 2022 statement of financial condition to any third parties, and do not intend to do so.”
As the Daily Beast report notes, the “statement of financial condition” is a legal document that lists the “company’s assets and liabilities. But notably, it must also include disclosures describing how the numbers were put together. These are the very documents the Trumps are accused of faking for years, padding the numbers with nonexistent real estate space in Trump Tower and hyperinflated values for undeveloped land.”
The lack of transparency will likely set off alarms.
“The Trump Organization’s financial statements are now the center of the New York attorney general’s massive fraud investigation; and any large real estate company would have to regularly make financial condition statements anytime it seeks to borrow money for a project from a reputable lender,” Pagliery wrote before adding, “That means that, either the Trump Organization has fallen on hard times, found a bank willing to do business without responsible paperwork, or isn’t telling the truth.”
The Beast report also adds that the information black-out could also be a sign that the company has found a “sketchy” financial partner to help it stay afloat which could be an object of a future investigation.
You can read more here.