Where the Story of Trump's $400 Million Cash Spending Could Go Next - where did the cash come from?
Where the Story of Trump’s $400 Million Cash Spending Could Go Next
A big story in Sunday’s Washington Post lays out in detail how Donald Trump’s business, in the years before Trump became president, went on what the newspaper describes as a “buying binge,” purchasing property and extending the reach of the brand. What’s most surprising, however, is that much of this—at least $400 million worth—was done in cash. Not only was it a surprising strategy for someone who famously—and infamously—used to go into debt to make purchases; it also raises the question of exactly where the cash came from. And, indeed, this question may be of interest to federal investigators.
The Post article was written by three reporters: Jonathan O’Connell, Jack Gillum, and David A. Fahrenthold. After its publication, I spoke by phone with Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his coverage of Trump’s charitable work. (He also broke the story of the Access Hollywood tape.) During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed how the Post came upon this story, what makes the Trump business so unusual, and where reporting on Trump’s finances goes from here.
Isaac Chotiner: What was it that led you to look into the Trump Organization’s use of cash, and why hadn’t it been extensively reported on more?
David A. Fahrenthold: The Trump Organization is a really unusual business that has its arms in a lot of different things, and it is opaque from the outside. So, we have been trying to understand pieces of it as we went along. Our resolution for this year was to understand the debt of the Trump Organization. There are some really mysterious things I don’t understand about his debt. The Great White Whale of this reporting is something called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC, which is this odd LLC that Trump has listed on his personal financial disclosures. It’s like a shell company that he himself owns and yet he claims it has no assets. And yet he says that he owes that shell company more than $50 million. I don’t know anything about that.
So, I got started looking at: Who are his debts? Who does he owe money to? And I thought the way to do that comprehensively would be to pull the land records for everything I knew he owned, and try to see what mortgages were on the deeds. Who owned the mortgages? How old were they? What rates were they for? And I thought I might find mortgages he hadn’t accounted for in his personal financial disclosures. Instead I found a bunch of places with no debt at all. And when we figured that out, especially in places like Scotland and Ireland, where there is tons of money going in with no loan, that’s what made us say: OK, maybe that’s the story—this odd buying pattern that doesn’t comport with how other people do it.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/trumps-usd400-million-cash-spending-david-fahrenthold-on-where-the-story-goes-next.html
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