Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at the New York attorney general’s filing on her investigation of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. We’ll also look at how $1,000 a month in guaranteed income is making a difference for mothers with young children.
In an apartment building, square footage is fixed long before the walls are painted and the floors are waxed — unless apartments are later combined and connected, often with messy construction work.
But without any combining or connecting or construction work, Donald Trump’s already vast penthouse in Trump Tower nearly tripled in size and its value jumped, according to annual representations he made to lenders beginning in 2012. (It was still smaller than the White House, minus the East and West Wings.)
Then, in the representation in 2017, the apartment shrank to its original size. His longtime chief financial officer acknowledged that the difference “amounted to an overstatement of ‘give or take’ $200 million,” according to a court filing from the New York attorney general that accused Trump’s family business of misrepresenting assets to strengthen the bottom line.
[Hyperbole or Fraud? The Question at the Heart of Trump Investigation.]
Four of my colleagues — Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Matthew Haag — write that exaggeration was a constant from Trump’s days as a real estate mogul to his years as a reality television personality to his term in the White House. Now the question of whether overstatement was part of a pattern of “fraudulent or misleading practices” has emerged as a central element in the attorney general’s civil inquiry into the former president and his family business, the Trump Organization.
The filing listed more than a dozen instances in which Trump had “misstated” the value of assets to arrange loans, insurance coverage and “other economic and tax benefits.” The numbers involved, to most people, would be eye-popping.
Trump claimed $150,000 initiation fees at golf clubs that were never collected. He also listed seven mansions that were never built but were valued at $161 million. And there was the 20,000 square feet that were added to the Trump Tower apartment and later taken away. The filing said the apartment was always a triplex with 10,996 square feet. (That much space could hold more than 12 apartments of the average size built in the New York metropolitan region between 2010 and 2016.)
The inquiry by the attorney general, Letitia James, is continuing. It unclear whether she and her team will file a lawsuit against Trump or his company. The filing merely said her office “intends to make a final determination about who is responsible” for the “misstatements and omissions.”
With a lawsuit, legal experts say, James could press for financial penalties and move to shut down elements of Trump’s business in New York.
A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization called the allegations baseless and repeated accusations that the inquiry was politically motivated, because James ran for office in 2018 promising to target Trump.
“Three years later, she is now faced with the stark reality that she has no case,” the spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
Weather
Expect spotty snow with temperatures falling through the day to around 15 tonight. A brisk wind will make it feel even colder.
alternate-side parking
In effect until Jan. 31. (Lunar New Year’s Eve).
The latest New York news
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace last year, still has a $16 million war chest.
The Westchester district attorney, Miriam Rocah, released a 12-page report on the death of Robert Durst’s first wife. Rocah called it a “challenging circumstantial case.”
The difference that $1,000 a month in guaranteed income can make
“Scam” was what some women thought when they saw fliers at bus stops and in clinics and nail salons in Upper Manhattan that read: “New mothers can receive $500 or $1,000 a month, with no strings attached!”
It was no scam. It was an experiment in anti-poverty policy. A $16 million program called the Bridge Project, started by a venture capitalist and his wife, is providing the money — and tracking how regular, unconditional stipends affect low-income families. I asked my colleague Andy Newman, who writes about social services and poverty in New York City, to explain.
That description — especially words like “regular, unconditional stipends” — sounds antiseptic. What’s this really about?
What this is about is free money for people who need it most, provided in the belief that cash is not only the simplest cure for poverty, it’s the most effective one.
In the last 25 or 30 years, conventional welfare was phased out or scaled back in favor of programs that were harder to qualify for and were meant to be only temporary. More recently, a movement has sprung up based on the idea that poor people fare better if you give them money and let them spend it on what they feel is most important, rather than on what the government thinks is important. This is called guaranteed income.
Dozens of pilot projects with guaranteed income have been started around the country.
The city of Stockton, Calif., gave 125 families in lower-income neighborhoods $500 a month for two years starting in 2018. Skeptics assumed the recipients would spend it on cigarettes and junk food, but they spent almost all of it on necessities like groceries, medical appointments and dental care — as well as things that make life better that lots of middle-class people take for granted, like tutoring for their children. Less than 1 percent of the money went for tobacco and alcohol.
It turned out that the money led to other positive outcomes. The people receiving it were twice as likely to find full-time employment as the people who weren’t.
Where did the Bridge Project come in?
The Bridge Project is run by a family foundation started by a venture capitalist, Jeff Lieberman, and his wife, Holly Fogle. She had read about the crucial importance of the first 1,000 days of a child’s life and how interventions to make that time well-supported have a much greater impact on eventual educational achievement, income and health than investments made later on.
New York City has added a lot of help for kids who are 3 and 4 years old, through former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pre-K and 3-K programs, but there is a big gap when it comes to children 3 and under.
Early in the pandemic, a nonprofit Fogle was running in Upper Manhattan called Nido de Esperanza was flooded with calls from the 100 families in the program.
Nido started giving them money — $500 a shot, on four different occasions. Fogle saw how efficient that was, and how effective. So decided to try it on a larger scale.
Is $500 or $1,000 a month really enough to make a difference?
In a city as expensive New York City, probably not. But it can keep you from spiraling downward. One of the Bridge Project moms I talked to, Daniela Gutierrez, lost two of her three jobs early in the pandemic. She said the money kept her out of a family homeless shelter.
What have the mothers in the program bought that the Bridge Project people hadn’t expected the money to go for?
One mom, Maureen Gardner, bought a washing machine for $430. She gets $500 every two weeks, so this was a major financial commitment.
She was desperate to avoid her building’s laundry room, where she said a lot of people don’t wear masks. She is caring for her infant son alone. Infants are not getting vaccinated against the coronavirus. She would have had to take him down to the laundry room with her.
What we’re reading
The Theodore Roosevelt Statue at the American Museum of Natural History, which stirred protests as a symbol of colonialism and racism, is being removed.
Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to expand and extend a pandemic tax credit intended to help the commercial theater industry rebound.
METROPOLITAN diary
Happy Anniversary
Dear Diary:
In 1985, the man who is now my husband and I were living in D.C. when I was offered a job in New York. He decided to stay behind.
On the day of our anniversary, I left my office early to catch a 5 o’clock flight. Before going to the airport, I wanted to do some shopping, so I took a cab to Tiffany with two items in mind, including a set of cuff links and studs for a formal shirt.
Arriving at the store, I went to the second floor and found the perfect cuff links. I told the saleswoman that I had another item to buy and would be right back.
I went to where the stationery was sold and found what I wanted. As the clerk was wrapping my item, the woman who had sold me the cuff links appeared with my purchase beautifully wrapped inside a Tiffany shopping bag.
I thanked her and said that I would have come back to get the package.
She looked at me and smiled.
“Sir,” she said, “this is Tiffany.”
— Paul Pasquarella
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Olivia Parker and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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