The New York state attorney general has asked a court to enforce subpoenas that could reveal sensitive financial information about the Trump Organization, potentially pulling back the curtain on the president’s private business and throwing Donald Trump into legal jeopardy.
Letitia James filed a petition in state trial court in New York City naming the Trump Organization as a respondent, along with other business entities. The filing also named Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, and Seven Springs, a New York estate owned by the Trump family.
If the court agrees with the petition, sensitive tax documents and other material relating to Trump family holdings could come to light. The information could also feed investigations by prosecutors into whether Trump and his associates misrepresented the value of assets in order to either avoid taxes or win loans.
Either activity could constitute fraud. Trump has denied all wrongdoing, as has the Trump organization. The president has said that investigations of his businesses are politically motivated.
In 2018 the Guardian revealed that paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Wells Fargo Securities on Trump’s behalf in 2012 indicated that the real estate developer was then worth less than half of the $10bn net worth he insisted upon during the 2016 election.
A 2018 New York Times investigation based on documents provided by Mary Trump, the president’s niece and author of the bestselling tell-all Too Much and Never Enough, indicated that Donald Trump had grossly undervalued real estate assets to avoid taxes.
James’ office is investigating whether the Trump Organization and its agents improperly inflated the value of the Seven Springs estate, north of the city.
In the court filings, the attorney general’s office wrote that “information regarding the valuation of Seven Springs is significant” to the office’s investigation.
Emails seeking comment were sent to lawyers for the Trump Organization and Eric Trump.
The investigation was launched in March 2019 after Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress Trump had inflated the value of his assets to obtain more favorable terms for loans and insurance coverage.
Since then, the attorney general’s office has issued “a number of subpoenas and has taken testimony seeking information material to these matters”, the court filing said. Investigators have not yet determined whether the law was broken.
James’s office issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization and to Seven Springs LLC in December 2019, seeking financial documents, the filing said. Since then, both have “engaged in extensive good-faith discussions concerning the Trump Organization’s compliance with the subpoenas”.
The attorney general’s office is also attempting to collect information about several other Trump-related properties, including the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago and an office building on Wall Street in Manhattan where the Trump Organization “owns a ‘ground lease’ pertaining to the property”.
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