This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio. It's four weeks until the start of the trial in the New York Attorney General's two hundred and fifty million dollar lawsuit against Donald Trump and two of his sons for an alleged scheme to manipulate the value of a range of assets, from his skyscrapers to his golf resorts. Trump denies the charges and has criticized New York Attorney General Letitia James many times, saying it's a political prosecution that she campaigned on.
But she proclaimed I look forward to going into the office of Attorney General every single day, suing him and then going home being very happy. I said, oh gee, I hope she gets in. I hope she will. But she announced what is fueling my soul right now is Trump getting Trump And she knows nothing about me.
But the Ag says the evidence against Trump is so extensive that the judge should find Trump libel on the fraud claims before the trial. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter Patricia Hurtado. Leticia James says the evidence is so extensive that the judge should find Trump libel for fraud without a trial. What kind of evidence is she talking about.
Well, they have Trump's own words, and they're confronting him with statements he's made about how he values his property. And it's quite extraordinary because basically it's almost as if Trump is saying he believes his brand is limitless and that his brand, the Trump brand, and his properties are worth more money since he was elected president, and he
calls them the mona Lisas of properties. He says, for example, that you can have an old Master painting on your wall and it is worth a lot of money even though it doesn't do anything. So carrying his properties to old Master paintings, she says he.
Had a net worth of no more than two point six billion dollars rather than his stated net worth of up to six point one billion dollars.
Well, he's accused of inflating his assets by at least eight hundred and twelve million to two point two billion, is what she alleges. The transcript is basically the first time we have a glimpse into Trump's mindset of how he came to value his companies. He also shockingly says he has no role in the valuation that he says it was up to his son, Eric Trump to handle the main day to day operations of the companies and
to do these assessments of value. So he basically takes all this out of his hands and says that it's up to his kids.
Are we talking about just properties in New York?
No, We're talking about properties all over the place. He's talking about Mara a Lago, he talks about his golf courses all over the country. But basically the argument is that he's misstated or inflated the assets the Trump Organization, and which is an umbrella organization or corporation under which all these other entities come. That Trump has overvalued their worth based on what he thinks it's worth.
So one thing I sort of found odd is and he said this in an interview with Sean Hannity, that the Trump Organization had a very powerful disclaimer on all of its loan applications, telling banks not to rely on the company's appraisals.
That's the argument he's going to make. You know, hey, buyer, beware the caveat answer right, that it's the problem of anyone who read these material that they should have never been hoodwinked. Some may argue that, and I'm sure Leticia James is going to argue at the trial, Hey, you put this stuff in. You can't say, oh, I'm excused because I have a footnote that says it's really not.
It's up to you to believe me or not. That's the kind of thing that a jury in New York State will have to determine whether or not this is fraudulent.
Attorneys always make some rejudgment motions. It's sort of a shot in the dark. Really, I mean, what are the chances that a judge would grant a some rejudgment motion in a case like this, with the result being that it could ban Trump from serving as a director of any New York based company.
Yeah, I mean the judge has been very critical of motions and efforts by Trump and his lawyers. In fact, today there's some discussions about repleting and making new arguments that they've already lost. But I mean, now you know, the rubber has hit the road. We're finally seeing what Trump said as well as what his kids say. There's different depositions. There was one from Ellen Weiselberg that makes
references to his time in prison. You know, his travails with getting convicted as the CFO of the Trump organization and fleeting guilty. So I mean, now it's sort of all the cards that Letitia James has are on the table, all the evidence that she's collected. It's massive. It's hundreds of pages of statements, and I guess it just depends whether or not a New York State Supreme Court jury how they'll find they believe these arguments. He at one
point said, you know a property. There's a property called Seven Springs in Westchester, and even though it's swampy and there's nothing developed, he said, it's worth a ton of money in his view because it could get developed. So in his mind, that aspirational amount of money is worth it because he has the Trump brand. He's even better now because he was former President Trump, and now aspirationally it's worth a ton of money because it could be developed even though it hasn't been developed.
Why are these depositions being revealed now, Well.
Because the New York Attorney General has basically put down own showing all the documents now of all the questioning of all the parties, and it seems to be quite compelling case that she's making that these valuations were speculative or based on slimsy premises, so to call his properties, you know, it could be worth two million, forty million,
thirty million, six hundred million, you know. Basically he kind of even in his own testimony when talking about you know, what's the intrinsic value of mar Lago or Turnberry golf course in Scotland. Quote, you know, these things have tremendous value to rich people that you know, if it makes two millions three million, and therefore would be worth thirty or forty million, I think you could sell it for four or five or six hundred million, because it's the painting,
you know. I mean, that's kind of that's the kind of rationale that may give a jury pause and have them scratching their heads. So, I mean, I don't know where this is an effort to possibly push discussions forward to sdeed liability. I assume that Trump will not let them, you know, agree to accept liability. But this is certainly quite something that Letitia James is showing her cards. They're all on the table, and it kind of is gobsmackingly shocking in some way.
At his first deposition in August of twenty twenty two, he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than four hundred times and refuse to answer questions. Then at the second one in April of twenty twenty three, he answered questions at length. The Deputy ag said to his lawyer at one point, we're going to be here until midnight if your client answers every question with an eight minute speech, right right.
I look at transcripts all the time on cases, but the long answering answers are quite something. So I guess the floodgates were open at this point, and he felt he could justify his explanation for all these valuations on the property. So it's kind of like, I guess, once he opened the door, I couldn't stop talking about how he came up with all these, you know, the values on these properties, and he's very proud of them. You know,
he's proud of developing things like forty Wall Street. He said it was basically a dumpy building until his family took it over. And you know, also the reason it may not be worth anything more is because the city needs to get its act together. So if the city ever comes back and you convert the entire tower of forty Wall into condos, and may you could make an absolute fortune far greater than the five or six hundred million. Probably the building is worth now.
So I guess I see why the Attorney General thinks that she can have the judge ruled just on the paper is because there's his deposition, there is the financial papers. Also in his testimony. You read it all, Patty, So tell me where did it come out that he considered the presidency the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives. I think you would have nuclear holocaust if I didn't deal with North Korea. I think you
would have a nuclear war if I weren't elected. Where did that fit into his deposition?
Well, he was basically boasting that this is what he's been busy doing. He says, I was virtually not involved in this business with the real estate.
Quote.
I really wasn't interested, believe it or not. I was interested in saving the problem with North Korea, which was ready to blow up, and solving the problems we had in China, who was just ripping us off left and right, and making sure that Russia never went into the Ukraine, which they didn't under our auspices. So you can see that he's basically saying I wasn't really involved in the Trump Org and all the business operations. That wasn't my job. I was saving the WARLD.
And Michael Cohen, his former lawyer who has testified against him, says he's throwing his kids under the bus because they were the ones in charge, right, Yeah.
And I was kind of surprided by that because when he was asked point blank, well were you involved in what were you doing? He said no, as Eric Trump was doing it, I wasn't. So it is kind of surprising, but you know, I guess in his mind that's what he wanted to say, that Eric Trump was doing the business. Quote, my son Eric is much more involved with it than
I am. I've been doing other things, and I guess you could say on something major final decisions, whatever, but I've been much less involved in it over the last five years, five or six years ever before that.
So Patty remind us what's at stake here if he loses this case completely.
Well, I mean basically, Letitia James seeks to sanction him and also remove him from ever running any of his companies, which would be quite a blow.
You know.
The sons have also been sued Eric and Don Junior Ivanka was removed as a descendant. So you know, I guess it will hobble the family from running its own businesses and possibly close them down.
And Pat, before I let you go, you covered. And we've talked about a case where a former twenty first Century Fox executive and an Urguayan sports marketing group, full Play, were convicted of engaging in a wire fraud and money laundering scheme to get inside information to secure US broadcasting rights to the twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two World Cup tournaments. Why did the federal judge in that case overturn those convictions.
We had a decisions, a pair of decisions having to do with seft of honest services wire fraud, and it has to do with a component of bribery, you know, federal bribery wire fraud. And basically, this former twenty first century Fox executive, Ernan Lopez, and this company then Uruguay and sports marketing company called full Play, went on trial and it went on for weeks in federal court and they were convicted by a jury of multiple counts of
wire fraud. And that was in March when they were convicted, and then we had two decisions to come out in May from the Supreme Court stemming from federal corruption cases that Manhattan US Attorney Bararra brought against elected officials for
public corruption, for bribe pain and bribe receiving anyway. The Court rules in those two decisions involving per Cocoa and Seminelli basically narrowing or limiting the prosecutor's ability to use the statute when it came to bribery, and it gets very complicated that basically it hampers the government from bringing these certain kind of wire fraud cases under certain theories. So in this case, the judge who had had this trial it was hotly contested, repet rejected any requests to
overturn the conviction or dismiss the charges. Here we have two months later the Supreme Court ruling comes in about you can't use the statute anymore, and she actually said there was no international bribery component that could be met now under the new standard that the Supreme Court has assigned. So you know, she said, she noted that she had previously rejected the defendant's arguments for acquittal, and now she had to do it in light of the Supreme Court ruling.
Yeah, they always have trouble with these public corruption cases. Yeah, I mean they're always going up to the Supreme Court.
Yeah. I mean we wrote a feature story about this for the Business Week, and I talked to one of these good government guys and he said, the Supreme Court and have basically said it's up to the states to prosecute these cases. But his point was New York State, which is where this corruption allegedly happened, where people were doing did Regaine and alleged bright pain Now, I mean they were convicted of it. That public officials. Now, it would be up to state prosecutors to bring these kinds
of cases. But he said that unfortunately, he said, state law is like Swiss cheese. It's not very good. It's so porous. It doesn't have as much heft that the US did. And if we remember all the way back pre Ferrara's crackdown, which is what these cases stemmed from, was supposedly, you know, rife corruption with elected officials were taking bribes and paying developers are getting paid kickbacks. So who is going to enforce this now It's been left up to the states to do it.
Thanks so much, Pat, That's Bloomberg Legal reporter Patricia Hurtado.
This is a dark day in Jacksonville's history. Any loss of life is tragic, but the hate that motivated the shooter's killing spree adds an additional layer of hardbreak.
A masked white man shot and killed three black people inside a Jacksonville, Florida, Dollar General store on Saturday. He used a gun painted with a swastika and then turned the gun on himself. After reviewing the man's writings, Sheriff T. K. Waters said the attack was definitely racially motivated.
It was clear that his crimes were motivated by wanting to want of to shoe black people, which is quite unfortunate because it's not a representative of our community at all.
The shooting took place within hours of the conclusion of a commemorative march on Washington in the nation's capital, where organizers drew attention to the growing threat of hate motivated
violence against people of color. The attack on a shopping center in a predominantly black neighborhood will undoubtedly evoke fears of past shootings targeting Black Americans, like the one at a Buffalo, New York supermarket in twenty twenty two and the one at a History or African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in twenty fifteen, his President Joe Biden.
White supremacy is a poison. It's a poison. It's been allowed to grow faster and faster in our communities to the point where the intelligence communities determined. The US intelligence community is determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat we face in the home line.
And a new study provided to USA Today shows that in the country's largest ten cities, the number of reported hate crimes rose twenty two percent from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two, making last year the second consecutive year hate crimes reached a record high. The Justice Department is investigating the shooting as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism. Joining me is Professor
Gabriel Chin of the UC Davis School of Law. The NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring warning black people to use extreme care if traveling to Florida, and argued that the state's loose gun laws and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis' anti woke campaign to deny the existence of systemic racism created a culture of open hostility toward African Americans and people of color.
What's your reaction, Well, I'm afraid that what Governor DeSantis and his allies are doing might contribute to an atmosphere of hostility, resentment, potential violence. It's not as though Governor Desanta's unlike maybe President Trump has not specifically advocated resistance
and protests and taking action in those ways. But you know, the effort to cut down discussion of critical race theory, the attack on the African American studies ap these standards, it seems to me to be an effort to essentially rewrite history and then cut off all discussion about that history.
It seems like the governor of Florida, which was a slave state and was a significant Jim Crow state and a highly segregated state, and in many ways a deeply, deeply discriminatory state, they want to pretend that that history doesn't exist, or maybe not that it doesn't exist, but that it has nothing to do with our lives today.
And if that's your view, if your view is, you know, some bad things happened many, many years ago, and there's been fair and equal treatment in the lives of everybody who's around today and their parents and their grandparents, and discrimination is really, you know, it's the equivalent of something that happened to the ancient Egyptians. If that's your view, then when African Americans are Asian Americans or Arab Americans or anybody else objects to discriminatory treatment or raises questions
about discriminatory treatment, it seems like grasping. It seems like, you know, if it really were ancient history, it would seem like, you know, an illegitimate effort to take things that don't belong to them, to be a race hustler and get ahead based on false arguments and therefore take advantage of good people who did nothing wrong. And I'm afraid that's the dynamic that may be going on in
the minds of some extremists in Florida. And the problem is that there are some extremists in Florida, just like in every other place, there are people who are not well versed in history, who are not very good at reasoning. Maybe people like this individual who did the shooting in Jacksonville,
who have ment health problems. I'm not an expert on his situation, but apparently he had some mental health problems at various points in his life, and somebody like that might be susceptible to really picking up conspiracy theories and taking action based on it. I mean, it's just so outlandish and so crazy that somebody would say it's worth it to me to kill some people, even though I'm going to die myself, you know, because they are doing
so much wrong to the community. It's outlandish. It's outlandish. But unfortunately, I think the rhetoric of resentment, the rhetoric that people who say that Florida and other places have had too much racism for too long and that has to be addressed. I fear there may be a connection.
You know, since twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, there does seem to have been a general increase in these sorts of violent attacks against American races, against Unamerican religions, and you know, given the tenor of the times, I'm afraid that we haven't seen the last of it.
So the Jacksonville Sheriff T. K. Waters said, plainly put, this shooting was racially motivated and he hated black people. I mean, this seemed to be pretty clear cut to the sheriff. But what does it take for the Justice Department to say this is a hate crime and this is going to be a hate crime investigation.
Well, so it's a really interesting situation because there's no potential defendant here, the defendant is dead, and it doesn't look like the guns were illegally transferred. And the ideology that this is a white country or maybe a white Christian country for white Christian people and people who don't fit into that category are harmful to the society and
undermine it. That is a hateful ideology and ideology that I think is wrong and dangerous, but it's one that people are allowed to have because we do have a First Amendment and we do have freedom of thought, and if people want to have those ideas, they can. So it's not one hundred percent clear to me, is interesting what the Department of Justice may hope to find out. But to back up a bit, they do have jurisdiction
over hate crimes. There are certain acts of violence based on certain prohibited grounds such as race, religion, gender disability, gender identity, sexual orientation. If there are certain violent acts that take place on those grounds and it can be proved, then the Department of Justice can prosecute people who do
those things in federal court. And beyond that, the Department of Justice has the ability to investigate situations even if it doesn't appear there's a there's a hate crime per se, But they have the ability to investigate situations where, for example, civil rights might be violated.
It would sort of be a broad investigation then, because as you said, there's no defendant. It's not like they're saying the police did something wrong or something like that. It's just to investigate the community.
It seems to me like that's what's going on here, that they are investigating what is going on in the community that led to this. But the thing is, this is not the first act of racial violence. It's not the first act of racial violence in Florida. It's not the first time somebody has looked into it. There have been civil rights investigations by the state and federal government and by private entities that are concerned about these things. And so it's predictable what the Department of Justice is
going to find out that motivated this particular offender. And you know, for an American in the twenty first century to decorate their property with swastikas, And there was a report that the offender here had a vest with a Rhodesian army patch on it, and that evidently is a meme,
a common white supremacist symbol. And one would bet that what the Department of Justice is going to find out is that this individual was radicalized by white supremacist ideology that is readily available on a million and one place, is on the internet, and people who make the argument that the people who are the rightful heirs of this country the descendants of white Europeans. At one time the United States was organized for their benefit, which is true
in many ways, and now it isn't. And you see what these white supremacists consider interlopers who have positions of power and responsibility and influence and opportunities for education, and what about the white people? So I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the sort of playbook that unfolded in
lots of other cases is going to unfold here. That this is somebody who was not doing that well in their life, somebody who was disappointed by how things were working out for them, and somebody who was not emotionally stable, and somebody who had a fascination with weapons, and they found an explanation that it's not because they weren't working hard enough, it's not because they weren't talented enough. It's because bad people were standing in the way of what
they were justly entitled to. And if only black people or Asian people, or Muslim people, or gay people or whoever could be put in their place, then everything would be restored to its proper place in the world.
As you mentioned, there have been so many hate crime investigations, and hate crimes are up. There's a new study that was in USA today shows that in the ten largest cities, the number of reported hate crimes rose twenty two percent from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two, making last year the second consecutive year they hit a record high. So it seems to be getting worse instead of getting better, no matter how many investigations they have.
Yeah, and the problem is we're a divided country. And I'm not saying and I would deny that your average Republican or your average Republican politician likes hate crimes, wants hate crimes. That's not it. But the rhetoric and the argumentation about our fellow Americans can sometimes be very negative, and the extremists, the people who are not emotionally stable, make too much of this. They take it seriously, the
idea that, for example, the media is the enemy. And when some people say that it's a metaphor, and when other people hear that, some of them think that the problem in the United States really is some group. You know. It's a combination of this unrestrained rhetoric plus very wide availability of firearms, even to people who have profound mental illness,
you know. And it's one thing to say that a law abiding, responsible American should be able to get a firearm and carry it for self defense or other reasons. It's another thing to say we should have laws that are so lenient that even somebody who is not well should be allowed to have a semi automatic rifle that is a very very powerful weapon.
You know.
The combination of these things, I think is why we're seeing an increase in hate crimes. There's an increase in heated rhetoric, and there's an increase, thanks to the Supreme Court, in the availability of firearms. So some of the restrictions on firearms ownership that would have been possible in years past are no longer because of the rulings of the Supreme Court, and so we have more and more people who feel themselves provoked, and they have more and more
ability to do damage. It is a remarkable situation that we find ourselves in a reversal of fortune after Obama, when it seemed like mabe racial tensions in this country were diminishing, and that proved to be an illusion.
Thanks for being on the show, Jack, That's Professor Gabriel Chin of the UC Davis Law School, and that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot Bloomberg dot com, slash podcast, Slash Law, and remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg.
M mhm.