As the New York Attorney General Letitia James turns up the pressure in the massive fraud lawsuit against Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, Insider recently reported Trump’s updated Personal Finance Disclosure shows huge increases in the value of Trump assets.
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INSIDER: In April, Trump said his private-jet LLC was worth no more than $1,001. Then in July, he said it was worth up to $25 million. Why?
By Matthias Schwartz
Key Takeaways:
- Two sets of Trump’s 2023 financial disclosures show vastly different valuations for a number of Trump entities. The first disclosure, filed in April, was Trump’s required filing as a presidential candidate. The second one, in July, revised the statements made by the first.
- TAG Air, Inc. is one of a number of Trump entities associated with the former president’s Boeing 757-200. During the 2016 campaign, taxpayers reportedly paid TAG Air $1.6 million to cover the cost of transporting the Secret Service agents charged with protecting him.
- In an April filing with the Office of Government Ethics, Trump claimed that the TAG Air had a value of $1,001 or less. In a revised July filing, Trump valued TAG Air at between $5 million and $25 million.
- Trump’s estimate of TAG Air’s value increased by 5,000% or more in just three months.
- Trump’s TIGL Ireland Management Limited soared from an initial value of $1,001 or less to a range of $1 million to $5 million. The company manages Trump’s hotel and golf course in Ireland and sent the Secret Service a bill for then-Vice President Mike Pence’s 2019 visit to Ireland. Briarcliff Manor Development LLC, a company that has come under direct scrutiny by Attorney General James, saw the same movement between valuation ranges, showing an apparent gain of one thousand times or more.
- Trump’s report also shows trademarks registered in countries across the globe. These include the US adversary Iran and geopolitical hotspots like Ukraine, Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and South Korea. It’s difficult to assess how much foreign money Trump might be making from these deals as the disclosure said income from his trademark licenses “is reported at various lines throughout the report,” passing through other Trump entities, which means that it isn’t broken out by source country.
- Richard W. Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer and a professor at the University of Minnesota law school, emphasized the need to know more about the Republican presidential primary front-runner’s finances. “We shouldn’t have to guess. If you have someone who is running for president and they have an LLC, we should know what’s in it, what it owes, and where its revenue is coming from. If the LLC has debt, are they borrowing from Chase Manhattan Bank, or are they borrowing from the Russians? We don’t know, and we ought to know.”
- Trump’s campaign is refusing to explain the drastic changes in his personal finance disclosure.
Published: Sep 18, 2023