Ivanka Trump is set to testify in person as part of her disgraced father’s New York City real estate fraud case. Ivanka’s position in Trump’s business world has always been prominent, and most experts believe her testimony may reveal itself to be rather damaging.
According to Forbes, back in September of 2015, they conducted an interview with Donald and Ivanka Trump as well as former CFO of the Trump Organization (and tax fraud) Allen Weisselberg. The occasion was Trump’s promotional attempt to get onto the “Forbes 400” list. Ivanka’s active participation in inflating her father’s real estate wealth was very much on display, and the details of her participation will likely be the subject of many a prosecutor’s questions on Friday.
It was during this interview with three financial specialists sent to assess what Trump was actually worth that Ivanka appeared nine minutes in, promoting how Trump’s recent acquisition—what would become Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami—was going swimmingly. While Forbes valued Doral at $225 million (before debt), Trump and Ivanka pooh-poohed this estimate as low since “we’ll make $74 million this year,” according to Donald. It made $14 million that year.
Ivanka pushed what has now been shown to be a Trump real estate trick of overvaluing acreage (and the amount of acres), in inflating the value of the property on said land.
The three journalists inside Trump Tower that day, all specialists in investigating the fortunes of billionaires, were not about to fall for the same ruse. Trump had spent $150 million in 2012 buying Doral, which is less than 700 acres, according to property records—not the 800 that Ivanka and her father like to claim. Trump dumped more than $100 million into it, but his renovation did not seem to boost performance much. By 2015, Doral was earning only 13% more than it had in 2012, according to lending records, justifying the preliminary estimate of $225 million that Forbes’ number crunchers had calculated after consulting more than a half dozen golf and leisure experts.
Ivanka then claimed there was very little debt attached to the acquisition of Doral. There was $125 million in debt still owed to the bank. She subsequently promoted the lie (a lie affirmed by Donald and Weisselberg) that the interest being paid was well below 2%. The real number was 2.1%. Forbes points out that these seemingly small details are huge when it comes to evaluating real estate, not simply in order to buy or sell it but also in how one pays or does not pay taxes on it.
Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, were ever-present fixtures as top advisers throughout the Trump administration. She has tried hard to disappear from her father’s general orbit as the legal walls have closed around The Donald. There was some hope that Ivanka and Jared might face more legal scrutiny. They walked away from the administration having reportedly increased their wealth by more than half a billion dollars. They then added $2 billion in suspected Saudi blood money.
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