Forbes reporter testifies before grand jury about Trump's 'fixation' on his net worth

A business reporter was ordered to testify by New York prosecutors investigating possible fraud by former president Donald Trump.

Forbes editor Randall Lane and his publication had fought a subpoena by Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance, but a judge ordered him to testify before a grand jury about Trump's decades-long fixation on his net worth but limited the scope to simply confirm his previous reporting based on an interview six years ago at Trump Tower.

"To be clear, the original story transparently reported what Trump told us six years ago," Lane wrote. "We revealed no new information during the testimony. If we were sitting on anything newsworthy, we would have already shared that with our readers. In that same spirit of reader-first transparency, we feel it’s appropriate to share what we discussed with the grand jury yesterday."

Former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz questioned Lane for about 20 minutes, and almost every question required simply a yes-or-no response, and the reporter discussed the publication's methodology for its Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.

READ MORE: Trump ordered to testify in New York fraud investigation

"Of the 1,600 or so people who have been on The Forbes 400 since 1982," Lane said, "none of them, as we report in the article, have been more fixated on their net worth than Donald Trump."

Trump told the reporter at the time that he was worth“much more than” $4.5 billion,” our net worth estimate for him in 2015 – and, in fact, that he was worth “much more than $10 billion.”

"Trump told me that 'I look better if I’m worth $10 billion than if I’m worth $4 billion,' as reported in the article,” Lane wrote. "More specifically, that Trump told me that a higher net worth number 'was good for financing.'"

Investigators are looking into whether Trump inflated the valuations of his properties to banks and other lenders and gave lower valuations for tax purposes, and prosecutors must prove that he did this intentionally to gain a financial advantage.

READ MORE: Trump under investigation for golf club tax scheme that forced 'honest taxpayers' to pay him refunds

"Trump, as reported in the article, told me that our estimate of the value of his holdings in Trump Tower should be increased from $530 million by a factor of five or six," Lane wrote. "And that he said he could sell his stake in Trump Tower 'for $2 billion or $2.5 billion or $3 billion.'"

The celebrity businessman took Forbes reporter Chase Peterson-Withorn and Lane on a tour of his penthouse in Trump Tower and told them the apartment was worth at least twice as much as the $100 million they had valued the property, and Peterson-Withorn also testified about that.

"Those are the facts," Lane wrote. "We’ll leave it to others to dissect what this means, or doesn’t, for Vance’s case. We will, instead, put a spotlight on what seems to be a creeping use of subpoenas to undermine a free press. Yesterday, around the same time I testified, Forbes agreed to become a signatory for a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press letter urging the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack to withdraw its subpoena of a freelance photojournalist, seeking three months of her phone records. Reporters and prosecutors both serve the public, but in different ways. The latter shouldn’t trample on the efficacy of the former."