President Donald Trump allegedly committed the same kind of mortgage fraud his administration has prosecuted New York Attorney General Letitia James for according to a new ProPublica report.

Trump has accused several of his political enemies, including James and Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, of committing “deceitful and potentially criminal” fraud by declaring more than one primary residence on loan applications.  Both James and Cook have denied wrongdoing. The charges against James were dismissed over a procedural error.

But according to the nonprofit investigative outlet, records show that “Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of.”

“In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a ‘Bermuda style’ home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence,” the ProPublica report said. “Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.”

The report continued:

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.

Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.

Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, brought the mortgage fraud issue to Trump’s attention as the president sought to prosecute his enemies. Pulte declared, “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”

Under those standards, mortgage finance expert Kathleen Engel told ProPublica that Trump is “going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice. Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”

ProPublica reported that Trump hung up on its reporter “after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.”

Read the ProPublica story here.

The post Trump Allegedly Committed Same ‘Mortgage Fraud’ His Admin Prosecuted Letitia James For: Report first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/XCdHyvP