Years before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, his children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were under investigation for real estate fraud, and “an indictment seemed like a real possibility.”
Report: Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. were investigated for real estate fraud in 2012
But the case was dropped.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
But after a personal appeal from Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., the case was dropped. Kasowitz then donated to and helped raise thousands of dollars for Vance’s reelection campaign.
All that is according to a new report from Andrea Bernstein, Jesse Eisinger, Justin Elliott, and Ilya Marritz, who are writing jointly for the New Yorker, ProPublica, and WNYC.
The alleged misdeeds at issue here seem to have nothing to do with politics or the Russia scandal — this is about misleading wealthy luxury condo investors. And in the end, those investors settled with the Trumps and didn’t pursue further legal action.
Still, it’s a revealing look at how Trump’s children got out of a legal jam, and yet another reminder that Trump’s business empire presents all sorts of thorny legal issues.
Ivanka and Don Jr. were being investigated for publicly giving false condo sales numbers
The conduct at issue here is simple: Trump’s children appear to have lied about how many condo units in a certain development project they’d sold, in an effort to attract more buyers.
The development in question is the Trump Organization’s luxury “Trump SoHo” condo project, which Ivanka and Don Jr. had leading roles in promoting in the mid-2000s. In part due to a poor choice of location and in part due to the unfolding financial crisis, the Trumps were having a lot of trouble selling these units.
- By March 2010, the authors write, the Trumps had sold 15.8 percent of units in the development.
- But two years earlier, Ivanka had claimed in a press conference that 60 percent had sold, and Donald Jr. had told a magazine that 55 percent had sold. Both false claims seem to have been made as an effort to attract more buyers.
- Several of the buyers eventually found out the truth, felt misled (a building with fewer units filled is often less valuable), and filed a lawsuit.
- After that, investigators in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office began looking into whether the Trump team committed fraud or other crimes in the matter.
What the investigators found sounds ugly. Bernstein, Eisinger, Elliott, and Marritz write:
In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail. There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the e-mails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”
But the case was dropped
Whether this particular instance should rise to a serious enough offense to merit criminal prosecution is unclear. But the circumstances around the case’s eventual dismissal that the reporters describe are unusual, to say the least.
First off, as the investigation went forward, the condo buyers who had sued the Trumps agreed to a settlement with them in which they got much of their money back. That settlement entailed an agreement not to cooperate with prosecutors. In fact, the buyers’ attorney even wrote a letter to the district attorney claiming the Trumps hadn’t violated any laws. Vance points to this as a major factor in motiving him to drop the case, and it indeed seems significant.
But another thing that happened is that Donald Trump Sr.’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz got involved in the case — and in giving money to Vance’s reelection campaign. To keep the timeline straight:
- In January 2012, Kasowitz, Trump Sr.’s personal lawyer, donated $25,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign.
- Then in May 2012, Kasowitz met Vance to ask him to drop the investigation. (Vance returned his donation before the meeting.)
- In August 2012, Vance told his subordinates to drop the case. (“I did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed,” he told the New Yorker team.)
- In September 2012, Kasowitz planned a fundraiser for Vance, which was held a few months later and raised tens of thousands of dollars for him.
Overall, whether or not this should have ended up being prosecuted, Trump’s children do appear to be implicated in the same shady and often legally dubious business practices Trump himself has long employed. Head over to the New Yorker to read the whole report.
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