Oops: Court Documents Show Trump Knew His Manhattan Triplex Isn’t Actually 30,000 Feet

Of all the lies New York attorney general Letitia James has accused Donald Trump of telling as part of an alleged scheme to overvalue his assets for monetary gain, the most ridiculous one arguably concerns his penthouse at Trump Tower. Specifically, Trump has claimed in official bank statements the triplex is 30,000 square feet, when in reality it is approximately one-third that size. Which, clearly, is a very big difference. And according to a document revealed by prosecutors on Tuesday, Trump is fully aware of that fact!

While questioning former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, lawyers for the government showed the court a 1994 document signed by the ex-president putting the size of his Trump Tower abode at 10,996 square feet, according to the Associated Press. While Trump, who has denied all wrongdoing, was not in court to respond to the evidence, Weisselberg told prosecutors that he remembered seeing the email the document in question was attached to, but not the actual document. Nevertheless, he insisted it wouldn’t matter much either way because the penthouse—whose overinflated size Trump used to received more favorable loan terms—was not important relative to his boss’s overall net worth. “I never even thought about the apartment. It was de minimis, in my mind,” Weisselberg said. “It was not something that was that important to me when looking at a $6 billion, $5 billion net worth.”

Weisselberg also testified Tuesday that he first learned there were questions about the size Trump was telling people his home was—and the size it actually was—when a reporter for Forbes magazine told him in 2016. The former CFO said he initially disputed the outlet’s reporting, but could not recall if he tasked anyone with looking into the matter. “You don’t recall if you did anything to confirm who was right?” prosecutor Louis Solomon asked. Weisselberg responded that he did not. Yet emails reportedly show that, as Forbes continued to hone in on the size of the triplex in 2017, a spokesman for the Trump Organization told another executive that Weisselberg had decreed that no one was to engage on the issue. Then, a week later, Trump’s 2016 financial statement came out and, surprise: The apartment was listed with the very wrong square footage.

In 2022, Weisselberg pleaded guilty to conspiring with the Trump Organization to commit numerous crimes, which the company was found guilty of months later. On Tuesday, Weisselberg testified that he is still receiving installments of his $2 million severance package from the company.

In related news, Rolling Stone reports that leading up to the civil trial against the New York attorney general, Trump and his attorneys believed they had little chance of winning and thus decided to craft “an approach to the case that centers around chaos and cacophony” and involves “below the belt” attacks on the judge, witnesses, and prosecutors. While the ex-president’s attorneys have already been fined by Judge Arthur Engoron for bringing up legal arguments he had barred numerous times, a person familiar with the matter told Rolling Stone that Trump has, per the outlet, “privately suggested that his lawyers should not ‘worry’ for now about getting further sanctions by the court for their planned procedural antics.”

RFK Jr. is apparently not ready for prime time