RSN: FOCUS: Bess Levin | Trump's Longtime Accountants Just Threw Him Under the Bus

 

 

15 February 22

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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Trump's Longtime Accountants Just Threw Him Under the Bus
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Excerpt: "Mazars USA not only terminated its relationship with the Trump Organization, it also will no longer vouch for the previous financial statements it prepared for the company."

ALSO SEE: Charles Pierce | Donald Trump Is Running Out
of Scapegoats and Enablers

Mazars USA not only terminated its relationship with the Trump Organization, it also will no longer vouch for the previous financial statements it prepared for the company.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Donald Trump is currently in what the legal profession defines as “a world of pain.” In addition to a congressional investigation into his actions before, during, and after January 6, which could lead to a criminal referral to the Justice Department, the former president is the subject of no fewer than four criminal and civil investigations by prosecutors across the country. This includes Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, whose request to convene a grand jury to probe Trump’s attempts to overturn the election in Georgia was recently approved; Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who inherited an investigation from his predecessor into Trump’s business practices that resulted in the Trump Organization and its CFO being charged with multiple felonies last summer (they pleaded not guilty); and New York attorney general Letitia James, who has been on Trump’s tail for more than two years, and who recently said she had uncovered “significant evidence” of fraud at the Trump family business. None of this is particularly good news—in fact, some might say it is very bad news—and it’s now been compounded by the fact that the ex-president’s longtime accountants just threw him under the bus.

The New York Times reports that Mazars USA, which has done business with Trump for years, “cut ties” with the Trump Organization last week “amid ongoing criminal and civil investigations into whether Mr. Trump illegally inflated the value of his assets.” In a letter sent to the company dated February 9, Mazars informed the Trump Organization of its decision, and further noted that it could no longer in good conscience vouch for the years of financial statements it prepared for the business. While the memo said the firm had not “as a whole” discovered meaningful discrepancies between the information the Trump Organization had given it and the real, actual value of its assets, it said that given “the totality of circumstances,” anyone who had received the statements should assume they are bullshit. Said statements play a major role in both Bragg’s and James’s investigations, which are looking into the allegations that Trump inflated the value of his assets when applying for loans and deflated them when it came to paying taxes.

The Mazars letter was included in new documents filed in court by James’s office on Monday, which is presently attempting to get the ex-president and his two eldest children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, to answer questions under oath. Thus far the family has insisted they have no reason to sit for depositions, while the Attorney General’s office has said that, in fact, “No one in this country can pick and choose if and how the law applies to them.” Given that the trio was “closely involved in the transactions in question,” they have no leg to stand on. At a rally in January, Trump attacked James, Bragg, and Willis without referring to them by name. Trump said the three prosecutors are “vicious, horrible people, they’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick.” He also called for “the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere” if “these radical racist vicious prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal.”

In a statement, the Trump Organization told the Times it was disappointed with Mazars’s decision, but somehow saw the letter as confirmation that the firm’s “work was performed in accordance with all applicable accounting standards and principles and that such statements of financial condition do not contain any material discrepancies.”

While the Times notes that the financial statements compiled by Mazars already carried “a number of disclaimers, including acknowledgments that Mr. Trump’s accountants had neither audited nor authenticated his claims,” and that Mazars did “not express an opinion or provide any assurance about” the statements, there is no universe in which the change of heart by the accounting firm can be regarded as anything other than not good for Trump and company.

• Mr. Trump’s lawyers would likely argue that his lenders, sophisticated financial institutions like Deutsche Bank, would not have relied on the statements when providing him loans. Still, in her court filing last month, Ms. James highlighted potential misleading statements about the value of at least six Trump properties, including golf clubs in Westchester County, N.Y., and Scotland, as well as Mr. Trump’s own penthouse home in Trump Tower.


• Both the civil and criminal investigations have examined the underlying information the Trump Organization provided Mazars as the accountants compiled the annual financial statements. Often, Mr. Trump’s company would estimate the value of its properties based on recent selling prices of comparable buildings, a common real estate valuation method. The authorities have zeroed in on whether the company cherry-picked favorable information to essentially mislead Mazars into presenting an overly rosy picture of Mr. Trump’s finances.

Anyway, yeah, we’d like to see Trump spin the news that his accountants basically put “don’t trust anything this guy says” on their official company letterhead. He will, of course, but we can’t wait to see it.

Texas’s new voter-suppression laws are going as planned

In that they’re preventing people from voting, or, at the very least, making it much more difficult than it should be. Per CNN:

• For Houston-area retiree Pam Gaskin, voting is a ritual that starts every January when she completes her application for an absentee mail ballot. This year, the 74-year-old printed the application on January 3, filled it out and mailed it to her local election office. Days later, a rejection letter arrived: The forms she had pulled from the county's website no longer complied with Texas law. So, she tried again—using the new form, which required her to submit a Texas identification number or partial Social Security number.

But, surprise! Her second attempt was rejected as well. The alleged issue? She’d given her driver’s license number but that number, as of 2022, didn’t match the identification she’d submitted 46 years ago when she first registered to vote in the county.

“I am mad as hell,” Gaskin, whose own father paid poll taxes in order to vote as a Black person, told CNN. “These are the things we fought 60 years ago, 50 years ago, and we are still fighting them. And that is not right.”

Gaskin is one of many Texans having to deal with Republicans’ decision to try and disenfranchise countless voters with the new law passed last year, which includes “a raft of changes in a state that already had some of the strictest voting regulations in the country.”

On top of new, Kafkaesque ID requirements for absentee voting, SB1 makes it a literal crime for public officials to send absentee ballot applications to people who haven’t requested them. It also bans drive-through voting and limits early voting hours, the latter of which is critical for people who can’t just take off in the middle of the workday to vote. According to CNN, “the changes already have resulted in higher-than-usual rejection rates for absentee ballot applications,” which a cynical person might suggest was by design. In Harris County—a Democratic stronghold—a whopping 40% of mailed ballots received by election officials had been flagged for issues as of last week.

“We are seeing, in real time, voters’ votes being rejected,” Isabel Longoria, the top election official in the county, told CNN. “Basically, everything that can go wrong with this has been going wrong,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

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