Amaya Pawar is the alderman for the 47th district of Chicago. He would like to become the city treasurer. For that reason, he is interested in the largely vacant Trump Tower building that we talked about in the shebeen on Wednesday. A year ago or so, Pawar profferred an explanation on the electric Twitter machine.

This is vacancy fraud. The empty retail spaces in Chicago’s Trump Tower were designed to sit empty—to create a case to reduce property taxes and then offset building income. Just check the property tax appeals.

(Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times was on this case three years ago, back when the notion of President* Donald J. Trump was something people joked about on situation comedies.)

Fraud, you say? Unpossible! Not the Most Innocent Human Being! Wait, there's a Mr. Fahrenthold at the door again. From the Washington Post:

These documents sometimes ran up to 20 pages. They were full of numbers, laying out Trump’s properties, debts and multibillion-dollar net worth. But, for someone trying to get a true picture of Trump’s net worth, the documents were deeply flawed. Some simply omitted properties that carried big debts. Some assets were overvalued. And some key numbers were wrong. For instance, Trump’s financial statement for 2011 said he had 55 home lots to sell at his golf course in Southern California. Those lots would sell for $3 million or more, the statement said. But Trump had only 31 lots zoned and ready for sale at the course, according to city records. He claimed credit for 24 lots — and at least $72 million in future revenue — he didn’t have.

Since the 1980s, Trump has defined himself by his wealth, but he has often avoided providing proof to back up his boasts or provided documents that inflated the real values. As president, Trump has declined to release his tax returns, unlike every president since Jimmy Carter. Trump is far from the first real estate developer to inflate his projects or wealth. But there are laws against defrauding insurers and lenders with false information. Financial and legal experts said it’s unclear at this point whether Trump will face any legal consequences. They said it depends on whether Trump intended to mislead or whether the misstatements caused anyone to give him a financial benefit.

What are the odds?

Welch said Trump could be protected by disclaimers that his own accountants added to the statements, warning readers that they weren’t seeing the full picture. And in an odd way, Welch said, Trump could be helped by the sheer scale of the exaggerations. They were so far off from reality, Welch wondered whether any real bank or insurer could have been fooled. Welch said he’d never seen a document stretch so far past the normal conventions of accounting. “It’s humorous,” Welch said. “It’s a humorous financial statement.”

Hilarious. This is a president* whose entire previous career in business was as crooked as fractured ice, even by the standards of the American corporate financial universe, which was the Klingon Empire in Zegna and Armani. There are going to be dozens of these stories over the next few years. The odds are better than 50-50 that he'll be writing his memoirs from inside some government housing.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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