The nature of the $50 million loan to Donald Trump in Chicago remains a subject of ongoing scrutiny, according to the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Former federal prosecutor and head of the watchdog organization Noah Bookbinder discussed the loan with Jessica Denson, a host on the liberal news website MeidasTouch, in an interview published on April 30. Bookbinder described the loan as “a little complicated and pretty strange.”
According to a previous report by Barbara Jones, the independent monitor of the Trump Organization appointed by the court, Trump’s business managers claimed the loan never existed, despite the fact that it was listed on a multitude of federal election forms submitted by Trump.
Trump allegedly obtained the funds from a Chicago-based business associate, as evidenced by federal election documents. For comment, Newsweek has contacted the attorney for Donald Trump via email.
“It does raise the question of why because it’s a pretty weird thing to report a very large loan that isn’t real,” according to Bookbinder.
“Several hypotheses exist regarding that. Lying remains a criminal offense, which renders the distinction superficial. “However, it is quite peculiar,” he continued.
As stated by Bookbinder, the allegation that Trump utilized the loan as a means to evade tax obligations is “slightly intricate.” An alternative hypothesis that “seems to make a lot of sense” is the possibility that Trump “had a very large loan for real estate in Chicago, and he appears to have refinanced it in a way that resulted in some portion of that being forgiven.”
Instead of fulfilling his tax liability on the forgiven loan balance, which represents a profit, Trump potentially “fabricated a loan obligation to obscure the fact that the loans were forgiven in reality,” he further asserted. In doing so, he ought to be subject to a substantial tax liability.
Bookbinder further stated that an abundance of evidence “suggests that the loan he is reporting is fraudulent.” Additionally, he stated that Trump’s attorneys had concurred that Jones was qualified to oversee the finances of the Trump Organization; however, Trump’s attorneys are labeling her “unfair and biased” now that she has questioned the rationale for the Chicago loan.
Jones informed Judge Arthur Engoron that Trump had obtained a potentially nonexistent $50 million loan. In retaliation, Engoron imposed a $454 million sanction on Trump for manipulating the valuation of his assets.
A month later, in February, Engoron rendered a verdict of liability against Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization. The order of the order was to acquire more favorable business agreements by fraudulently inflating the value of Trump’s net worth and assets. Trump continues to assert his innocence.
In April, a letter was dispatched by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, requesting an inquiry into whether President Trump had erroneously categorized as a liability on all nine public financial disclosure reports he submitted to the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Government Ethics the $50 million owed to one of his own companies, Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. Although the loan “appears to have never existed,” Trump submitted the disclosure reports from 2015 to 2023, according to a letter from CREW.
“It is not clear why Mr. Trump would have reported a non-existent loan as a liability owed to one of his own companies,” the correspondence continued, “but some reporting suggests that the deal could be part of a tax-avoidance scheme, known as debt parking, that has been used by taxpayers to purchase debt and then leave it in a separately-owned entity rather than incur tax liability on debt which has been forgiven.”
The letter continued, “Others speculate that the loan may be owed to a secret third party.”
Jones was appointed by Engoron in November 2022 to oversee Trump’s financial statements and disclosures, according to the letter from CREW. Engoron had determined that the former president and his co-defendants had a “propensity to engage in persistent fraud by submitting false and misleading Statements of Financial Condition.”
