MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin warned of potential new criminal charges for Donald Trump after a court-appointed monitor overseeing his New York fraud case found that the former president's financial disclosures contained "certain deficiencies."
Former federal judge Barbara Jones wrote in a 12-page letter that she had identified "certain deficiencies in the financial information that I have reviewed, including disclosures that are either incomplete, present results inconsistently, and/or contain errors," adding in a footnote that a $48 million loan Trump claimed to owe to one of his companies did not exist. Rubin described how the letter "points to improprieties in Trump's financial statements."
"One of the things that it points to, and maybe the thing that's most troubling about it, is for years it's been understood that one of the business entities in the Trump Organization loaned former president Trump personally $48 million," she said. "According to Judge Jones in a footnote in this letter, she could never find, no matter how many times she asked, documentation of that loan and was later told, essentially, that the loan didn't exist."
Rubin added that the "Trump organization lawyers, they refute that. They say the loan did exist and what we did was give Judge Jones an intra-company memo telling her that debt had been extinguished. But I've looked at that memo from December 2023: it is a memo to the file, so nobody even had the guts to sign it essentially. It just says that the debt has been extinguished. There is still, to this day, no documentation that the loan existed."
"And you might be thinking to yourself, what's the big deal about that?" Rubin asked. ''The big deal is if that loan did not exist and it was, instead a gift, there would be massive tax consequences to that as well as some improprieties in the financial reporting that went to Trump's financial institutions and insurance companies. In essence, a continuation of that same fraud that's been going on for years and has been showing up in his financial disclosure."
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