Trump has 'some explaining to do' about missing millions of dollars: legal analyst

An alarming footnote from a court-appointed financial monitor watching over Donald Trump's finances that a $48 million loan has suddenly vanished should result in the former president being called in to explain away the possibility that he may have committed another act of financial fraud.

During an appearance on "Morning Joe," MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin claimed that, short of a legitimate accounting of the loan that had been listed in the former president's financials, there may be cause for more criminal charges.

Speaking with the co-hosts she explained that "retired Judge Barbara Jones is the monitor in the case, and we're not sure if it is impacting Judge [Arthur] Engoron's decision and timing. It's a letter that 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 elaborated. "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."

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"The Trump organization lawyers, they refute that," she added. "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?" she proposed. ''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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"As a candidate, you'll remember that, as president, for example, Donald Trump filed these presidential disclosures where we could see all of his finances," the legal analyst added. "He is required to do that as a candidate as well, and the loan showed up in his most recent disclosure as of April 2023. As, you know, they'd say on 'I Love Lucy,' someone has some explaining to do."

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