As break-ups go, this one was ugly. Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, decided this month that it no longer wanted anything to do with the former president or his business. What’s more, the auditing firm said its materials documenting Trump’s finances from 2011 to 2020 “should not be relied upon.”
It was a dramatic setback for the Republican. As we discussed the other day, Mazars lost confidence in the accuracy of its Trump-related documents in part after having reviewed court filings from the state attorney general’s office.
In other words, the firm effectively said it reviewed its own records after prosecutors sued the Trump Organization, at which point Mazars rejected its earlier work and ran as fast as it could from the former president.
The former president did not take the news well, and there’s no great mystery as to why. His accountants have an enormous amount of potentially incriminating evidence against Trump, and the more the firm cooperates with investigations, the more legal trouble the Republican is likely to face. It’s why George Conway said this week that Mazars breaking up with Trump is “worse for him than getting impeached twice.”
The day after the public learned of the firm’s decision, Trump issued an unusually long written statement — it was over 1,100 words — that appeared designed to calm any potential fears about the status of his supposedly vast wealth.
“We have a great company with fantastic assets that are unique, extremely valuable and, in many cases, far more valuable than what was listed in our Financial Statements,” the former president claimed. He added, “My company has among the best real estate and other assets anywhere in the world, has significant amounts of cash, and has relatively very little debt, which is totally current.”
To bolster his assertions, the rattled Republican referenced specific data from a June 2014 “statement of financial condition,” prepared by Mazars, that pointed to a pre-candidacy net worth of nearly $5.8 billion.
As The New York Times noted overnight, the problem with Trump’s claim is that it’s at odds with his own previous assertions.
When he declared his candidacy in 2015, he produced what he called his “Summary of Net Worth as of June 30, 2014” with a very different number: $8.7 billion. A month later, he upped the ante, releasing a statement pronouncing that his “net worth is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” The shape-shifting valuations, even in the face of mounting legal peril with Mazars’ decision to sever ties and disavow its past financial statements, get to the core of a problem for Mr. Trump. He has spent a lifetime bending reality to his will, often making it up as he went along, inventing facts and figures to support his needs in the moment.
The Times pointed to comments from 2007 in which Trump said his net worth fluctuates based on a variety of factors, including his “own feelings.”
The point is not to simply marvel and laugh at the former president’s strained relationship with data and the truth. Rather, there are plenty of real-world consequences to consider.
Remember, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is conducting a criminal investigation into the former president’s controversial financial practices, including the alleged inflating and deflating of his assets as part of a possible fraud scheme. There’s also the civil investigation being conducted by the New York attorney general’s office into the Trump Organization’s finances.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump made matters just a little worse for himself this week, issuing a written statement with financial numbers that appeared to contradict his own earlier assertions.
It’s as if he effectively said, “My finances shouldn’t be the subject of fraud investigations, and to prove it, here are some inherently sketchy numbers about my finances.”
But investigators in New York are not the former president’s only problem. Trump also needs a new accounting firm to take him on as a client, as well as possible lenders to help him refinance his debts or take on additional loans.
Good luck with that.
