Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at the New York attorney general’s filing on her investigation of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. We’ll also look at how $1,000 a month in guaranteed income is making a difference for mothers with young children.
In an apartment building, square footage is fixed long before the walls are painted and the floors are waxed — unless apartments are later combined and connected, often with messy construction work.
But without any combining or connecting or construction work, Donald Trump’s already vast penthouse in Trump Tower nearly tripled in size and its value jumped, according to annual representations he made to lenders beginning in 2012. (It was still smaller than the White House, minus the East and West Wings.)
Then, in the representation in 2017, the apartment shrank to its original size. His longtime chief financial officer acknowledged that the difference “amounted to an overstatement of ‘give or take’ $200 million,” according to a court filing from the New York attorney general that accused Trump’s family business of misrepresenting assets to strengthen the bottom line.
[Hyperbole or Fraud? The Question at the Heart of Trump Investigation.]
Four of my colleagues — Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Matthew Haag — write that exaggeration was a constant from Trump’s days as a real estate mogul to his years as a reality television personality to his term in the White House. Now…
