LEGAL/TRUMP FAMILY/DONALD JR/IVANKA: “According to the joint investigative story, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. narrowly dodged indictment on felony fraud charges in 2012 for allegedly lying to prospective buyers at the Trump SoHo ‘condo-hotel’—claiming units were selling like hotcakes when in fact the property was struggling to survive. (It went into foreclosure in 2014.)
In an unfortunate bit of foreshadowing, the Trumps peddled ‘alternative facts’ about the flailing Trump SoHo in an attempt to woo new buyers after the project was unveiled with great fanfare on The Apprentice in 2006. Branded as Ivanka and Donald Jr’s baby, the property was a tough sell on the eve of the financial crash—but you’d never know it from the way the siblings inflated sales figures. At a press conference in 2008, Ivanka said that 60 percent of the building’s units had been sold… But according to a sworn affidavit by a Trump partner filed with the New York attorney general’s office, Ivanka was outright lying: ‘By March of 2010, almost two years after the press conference, only 15.8 percent of units had been sold,’ ProPublica writes—barely cracking the 15 percent the project needed to stay afloat by law…
The Trump siblings’ attempt to mislead people into buying at the Trump SoHo sparked a civil lawsuit from buyers, who argued the Trumps had inflated the value of their condos (ahem, glorified hotel rooms, whose owners were legally prohibited from occupying them more than 120 nights per year) in a failing building; the Trumps later settled, returning 90 percent of buyers’ down payments. It also sparked a criminal fraud investigation, with prosecutors believing Ivanka and Donald Jr. may have violated the Martin Act, which makes it illegal in New York to make false statements in connection with real estate sales…
In a chain of events that at the very least appears seriously suspect, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. dropped the case in 2012—a few months after Trump Sr.’s longtime personal lawyer, Mark Kasowitz, donated $25,000 to Vance’s campaign. Kasowitz had gone over investigators’ heads by meeting with Vance to discuss the case, and some lawyers involved say they assumed Kasowitz intervened at Trump Sr.’s request. Both Kasowitz and Vance deny wrongdoing, and Vance notes that he returned the $25,000 donation—but a few months after the case was dropped, Kasowitz went on to host two fundraisers for Vance and personally donate almost $32,000 to his campaign. (Vance now says he’ll return that money, too.)”
-Michelle Ruiz, “Just In Case You Forgot, the Trumps Were Liars Long Before the White House,” Vogue, Oct. 4, 2017 08:40am