When we last heard from Mazars, the accounting firm that’s worked for Donald Trump for many years, the news for the former president was far from good. Exactly two months ago today, the public learned that an accountant who helped prepare Trump’s taxes and the financial records had testified before a grand jury investigating Trump’s financial practices.
Complicating matters, it appears that prosecutors had also obtained millions of pages of Trump-related documents from Mazars as part of the investigation, backing up the accountant’s testimony.
How could this get worse for the Republican? Well, Trump’s longtime accounting firm could announce that it no longer wants anything to do with the former president. NBC News reported:
The accounting firm Mazars USA said a decade’s worth of financial statements from the Trump Organization can no longer be viewed as reliable, according to a letter made public Monday by New York Attorney General Letitia James as part of her civil probe into the former president’s company. Mazars also said it will no longer work with the Trump Organization, meaning the company may have to get new financial statements that could complicate its ability to secure loans.
In a letter dated Feb. 9, the auditing firm said its materials documenting Trump’s finances from 2011 to 2020 “should not be relied upon.”
This is no small development. After all, those materials are at the heart of two ongoing investigations: 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 property values as part of a possible fraud scheme, as well as the civil investigation being conducted by the New York attorney general’s office.
Indeed, according to the accounting firm’s letter from last week, 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. Between these developments and Trump’s massive debts, I wish the Republican luck in finding a new firm willing to take him on as a client. For that matter, if Trump wants to try to refinance his debts or take on additional loans, the fact that Mazars is running away from him and abandoning confidence in a decade’s worth of financial records suggests the former president might struggle on this front, too. For its part, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization issued a written statement yesterday afternoon that read, “While we are disappointed that Mazars has chosen to part ways, their February 9, 2022 letter confirms that after conducting a subsequent review of all prior statements of financial condition, Mazars’ work was performed in accordance with all applicable accounting standards and principles and that such statements of financial condition do not contain any material discrepancies. This confirmation effectively renders the investigations by the DA and AG moot.” Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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