homeowner’s insurance in 2010, he personally showed an appraiser around the unit for 15 minutes but ushered him out before the expert could take any measurements. Trump’s company then declared that the 11,000-square-foot unit measured 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size.
Trump, his adult sons and top executives allegedly ignored or sidelined those experts, exchanging their figures for numbers from another source: Trump’s own intuition. James’s office has been investigating Trump’s business for more than four-and-a-half years, using a team of lawyers and forensic accountants to acquire documents through subpoenas to his company, banks, insurers and business partners, many of which would otherwise have remained confidential.interviewed 65 witnesses, including his adult children and nearly all of his closest business confidants.
At issue in the trial that opened last week in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan are allegations that “His self-worth is completely tied up in money and a pecking order that he associates with wealth,” O’Brien said. “He spent the better part of his 77 years lobbying the media and banks — and anyone else who wanted to listen — to consider him far, far wealthier than he is because that’s what he associates with success.”
The vivid courtroom display threatens to undermine the persona that Trump aggressively crafted throughout his career — one that carried him to stardom on “The Apprentice” and to the White House in 2016 — and may help explain why the case has appeared to particularly enrage the former president. In 2006, he filed a lawsuit against author O’Brien, claiming the journalist defamed him by asserting in a book that Trump was only worth $250 million. In that case, Trump was caught by O’Brien’s attorneys falsely representingIn a 2007 deposition, Donald Trump had to face up to a his own falsehoods and exaggerations. And he did. Sort of.
In depositions, Deutsche Bank employees testified that the bank recorded millions of dollars in profits as a result of loans to the Trump Organization. decade later, for $84.5 million— still far below what the Trump Organization claimed properties were worth, documents show.Asked on the stand if he and Weisselberg discussed misrepresenting the value of the rent-regulated New York apartments, McConney responded: “I believe so, yes.”
In his deposition, Trump said the letter included a “worthless clause” — a line that he said was intended to notify recipients that they needed to do their own analysis.