Trump's Flagship Property Exposed As A Massive Fraud - Ring of Fire [View all]

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New York Attorney General Letitia James has exposed a lot about the Trump Organization's properties, but no property has suffered as much reputational damage as Trump's beloved Trump Tower in New York City. And now reporters at Forbes have dug even deeper into the evidence and revealed that the entire property - including the stated value and even the square footage - might be a complete fabrication. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

One of New York Attorney General Leticia James Big jobs right now with the investigation IMP pending lawsuit against Trump and his kids is proving that they've basically just been living a life of fraud by devaluing, undervaluing, overvaluing, all of their properties. And thanks to a report from Forbes, she doesn't have to work that hard to do it because Forbes has gotten ahold of some of the information that Leticia James has, has compared it with public records. And they've also determined, as they put it, that uh, Trump and his kids have basically been living a life of fraud. Specifically with regards to Trump Tower in New York City, Donald Trump's flagship property, according to the Forbes investigation, going all the way back to 19 83, 40 years ago when Trump bought the building. Ever since that day, Forbes has determined that he has been lying about the value of the building, which most recently he said was worth, uh, 881 million.

Forbes looked at the real numbers and found out that he's probably overvalued that by about $400 million. So the question of course, is how did he do it? Well, according to the Forbes investigation, he did it by simply lying about how much space is in the actual building. He would tell banks and lenders and, uh, you know, property appraisers, oh, this is actually this many square feet instead of this many. So he would lie to them saying that there was more space than there actually was. So really all you had to do was do the math. You could have looked at the dimensions of the outside of the building, which is publicly available information. Then done the math of the square footage that he says is on each floor and realized that, wait a minute, that would mean these rooms, these retail spaces, are actually somehow jutting outside of the building and for 40 years, not one bank, not one appraiser, not one tax official thought. Wait a minute, let me do this math real quick. It's not even like we're talking about that complicated of math, right? We're we're talking about area and perimeter kids, literally learn those kinds of things in like fifth and sixth grade. I know that my daughter's in sixth grade, I've been helping her with area and perimeter earlier this year, so that's not very difficult math to do. But for 40 years, nobody thought to do the math to

Realize that the ins inside was somehow bigger than the outside. That's what absolutely blows my mind. Now, I'm sure Leticia James and her office have done the math and the folks at Forbes, I don't know if they actually did the math, but they did find out the actual square footage of the building compared to the size reported by Trump and realized, wait a minute, these two numbers are not equal. You know, they did the little greater than less than equal to which we learned in elementary school. So basically we're talking about like sixth grade math, and below is all you needed to determine that Donald Trump and his kids were living life as complete and total frauds. But that's what happened. You lie about how much space is in the building. That way you get more money from the banks. Simple as that bank fraud. A hundred percent. If you ask me, but I'm not a prosecutor, I'm not gonna be sitting on that jury. So it's not for me to decide, but get somebody in there who can explain math, maybe even a sixth grade math teacher, and I think you're gonna be able to convince that jury that, yeah, Trump's been lying about this for 40 years.