NEW YORK (AP) – It’s sleepy by Donald Trump’s standards, but the former president’s age-old estate in Westchester County in New York could eventually become one of his bigger legal nightmares.
Seven Springs, an area of 213 acres of nature surrounding a Georgian-style mansion, is the subject of two state investigations: a criminal investigation by Cyrus Vance Jr., District Attorney, and a Civil Investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Both investigations focus on whether Trump manipulated the value of the property to derive greater tax benefits from an environmental conservation arrangement he made at the end of 2015 while electing him president.
Seven Springs, which was bought in 1995 for $ 7.5 million, re-investigated when he was ready to step down and was about to lose the legal protection he had as president. Vance issued new subpoenas in mid-December, and a judge ordered that evidence be transferred to James’ office nine days after Trump left Washington.
Other Trump Legal Miseries, such as investigations into his efforts to influence election officials and payments on his behalf to women doing business dominate the news. Former Manhattan prosecutor Duncan Levin said white-collar investigators are going wherever the paper route leads.
“While a tax issue related to a custody arrangement may not be as sexy as a hush-money payment, prosecutors are likely to focus on any violation of the law they find,” Levin said. “Remember, the authorities got Al Capone on tax evasion.”
Seven Springs is an outlier in a Trump real estate portfolio filled with glamorous heights and gilded amenities. It is mentioned on its website as a family refuge, although Trump has not been there for more than four years.
At the heart of the estate is the mansion built in 1919 as a summer vacation by Eugene Meyer, who became chairman of the Federal Reserve and owner of The Washington Post. While pushing for a plan to build luxury homes on the property in 2006, Trump pushed the idea that he and his family would move into the mansion, but that never happened.
The new 28,322-square-foot home features more than a dozen bedrooms, an indoor pool, a bowling alley and a tennis court. Meyer’s daughter, the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, was married in 1940 in Seven Springs.
In her memoir ‘Personal History’, Graham describes ambivalent emotions about going there and writing: ‘The older I got, the more I did not like the loneliness of the farm, but in my childhood it was like me. Dad wrote when I was 10, “A wonderful old place.” ‘
At one point, Meyer owned about 700 acres. A philanthropic foundation founded by him and his wife, Agnes, allocated 247 acres to the Nature Conservancy and the remaining land and buildings after which Seven Springs existed at Yale University in 1973, after Agnes Meyer’s death.
The estate changed hands again when the foundation took it back from Yale and operated a conference center there before transferring the real estate to Rockefeller University, which eventually sold it to Trump.
Trump paid about $ 2.25 million below the list price for Seven Springs, acquiring the land as part of an effort to start his fortune after a series of failures in the early 1990s, including casino bankruptcies and the sale of its money losses Trump Shuttle airline.
Trump envisioned converting it into its first golf course with exclusive customers and high membership fees.
He hired an architecture firm to plan cleanfields and greens, but abandoned the effort when residents expressed concern that chemicals on the lawn would contaminate neighboring Byram Lake, a local source of drinking water.
Trump then tried to build houses. He proposed building 46 single-family homes, after which he also met with the opposition of the community, 15 mansion-sized homes he described in 2004 as a ‘super-high-residential apartment’, as never seen on the East Coast not. . The project has been upheld through years of litigation and no houses have ever been built.
In 2009, Trump made a splash by allowing Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to pitch his Bedouin-style tent on the Seven Springs lot north of New York City because he had nowhere else to stay for a UN visit.
Trump initially suggested he did not know Gaddafi was involved, but later admitted that he “earned a lot of money to lease the land to the Libyan leader. Local officials stopped work on the tent and Gaddafi never stayed there.
His development plans lapsed, and Trump opted for a strategy by which he could retain the property but reduce his taxes. He has promoted a conservation land trust to conserve 60 acres of pasture and mature forests.
Trump received a $ 21 million income tax deduction, equivalent to the value of the protected land, according to property and court records. The amount is based on a professional appraisal that valued the entire Seven Springs property as of December 1, 2015 at $ 56.5 million.
That was a much higher amount than the judges of local judges, who said the entire estate was worth $ 20 million.
Michael Colangelo, a lawyer in the Attorney General’s office in New York, set out the central question regarding the Seven Springs delivery during a trial last year regarding a dispute over evidence.
“If the value of the clean-up was inflated improperly, who benefited from the improper inflation and in how much?” Colangelo said. ‘It goes without saying that the Attorney General must see the records that will reflect the value of the deduction, as it is personally to intermediate entities and ultimately to Mr. “Trump has come in.”
A message for comment was left with Trump’s spokesman. In the past, the former Republican president has rejected the investigation as part of a ‘witch hunt’.
Seven Springs caught investigators’ attention after Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen told a congressional committee in 2019 that Trump had a habit of manipulating property values - inflating them in some cases and minimizing them in others to create favorable loan terms and obtain tax benefits.
Cohen testified that Trump had financial statements and said Seven Springs was worth $ 291 million as of 2012. During his testimony, he provided copies of three of Trump’s financial statements to the House Committee on Supervision and Reform.
Cohen said the 2011, 2012 and 2013 statements were what Trump gave to his principal lender, Deutsche Bank, to inquire about a loan to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and to Forbes magazine to claim his to substantiate a place on his list. the world’s richest people.
Trump, on his annual financial disclosure forms while he was president, said the property is worth between $ 25 million and $ 50 million.
The Attorney General of New York acts first. James issued subpoenas to commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield for records regarding his appraisal work on behalf of Trump; to law firms that worked on the Seven Springs project; and to Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, for records regarding its annual financial statements and preservation.
James also sued zoning and planning records in 2019 from the three towns of Seven Springs stretches. Vance follows in December with his own subpoenas. One city clerk said investigators found ‘boxes and boxes of documents’. This included tax returns, survey maps, environmental studies and minutes of the planning board.
James’ investigators conducted an interview with Trump’s son, Eric Trump, an executive vice president at the Trump organization and the president of the limited liability company through which he owns Seven Springs; Trump’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg; and attorneys hired by Trump for the Seven Springs project, which specializes in land use and federal tax controversy.
The investigators have yet to determine if any law has been violated.
Vance, who like James is a Democrat, did not reveal much about his criminal investigation, in part because of the rules of secrecy of the grand jury. The district attorney’s office said in court documents that it focuses on public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal activity at the Trump organization.”
Documents submitted in connection with the criminal investigation – driven by a US Supreme Court ruling last month, Vance granted access to Trump’s tax records – listed Seven Springs among possible targets.
Along with the mansion, Seven Springs owns a Tudor-style home that was once owned by ketchup magnate HJ Heinz, and smaller coach houses that, according to Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, served as ‘home base’ when they visited the estate walking and riding ATVs.
During his presidency, Trump himself opted for higher-profile properties such as his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he has lived since leaving the White House.
The New York Times reported last year that Trump’s tax records show that he did not classify the estate as a personal home, but as an investment property, enabling him to pay off more than $ 2 million in property taxes since 2014. to write.
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