Trump made a strange revaluation of a private jet LLC he owned, in a way that bolsters New York Attorney General Letitia James' business fraud case, reported Business Insider on Thursday.
"Two sets of Trump's 2023 financial disclosures show vastly different valuations for a number of Trump entities. The first disclosure, filed in April, was Trump's required filing as a presidential candidate. The second one, in July, revised the statements made by the first," reported Mattathias Schwartz. "The most extreme example is TAG Air, Inc. The company is one of a number of Trump entities associated with the former president's Boeing 757-200. In an April filing with the Office of Government Ethics, Trump claimed that the TAG Air had a value of $1,001 or less. Then, in a revised July filing, Trump valued TAG Air at between $5 million and $25 million."
The report says James' suit hasn't convinced Trump to stick with one set of numbers.
"In the mere three months that elapsed between the two disclosures, Trump's estimate of TAG Air's value jumped by a factor of 5,000 or more. It's unclear what prompted Trump's accountants to make such a drastic change," said the report. However, "During the 2016 campaign, taxpayers reportedly paid TAG Air $1.6 million to cover the cost of transporting the Secret Service agents charged with protecting him," and one source told Insider that Trump's revaluation might be "driven by worries that James's New York case could use the old forms, with the lower figures, as evidence in her case."
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According to the report, Trump also names a number of other unusual assets, including $100,000 in physical gold bars, $2.8 million in the cryptocurrency Ethereum, and trademarks in Iran, Ukraine, Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and South Korea.
James' lawsuit seeks to bar Trump from doing business in the state of New York, on the grounds that he has fraudulently misstated his assets.
However, the suit hit an unexpected bump in the road this week as a state appeals justice in New York put the case on hold, pending Trump's lawsuit against the judge overseeing his case.
