Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Appraiser Throws Trump UNDER THE BUS in CRUSHING Testimony

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for Donald Trump at his fraud case in New York, his outside, long-term appraiser testifies that the Trump organization fraudulently claimed to banks and investors that he actually appraised properties when he never did, meaning again they “just made it up”. Michael Popok of Legal AF discusses the serious ramifications of the new testimony, proving that Trump committed a fraud in order to perpetrate another fraud. Get 10% off plus free shipping of your estate plan documents by visiting https://trustandwill.com/LEGALAF Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 The Influence Continuum: https://pod.link/1603773245 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 The Weekend Show: https://pod.link/1612691018 American Psyop: https://pod.link/1652143101 Burn the Boats: https://pod.link/1485464343 Majority 54: https://pod.link/1309354521 Political Beatdown: https://pod.link/1669634407 Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://pod.link/1676844320 Uncovered: https://pod.link/1690214260 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

is obviously running for president again. He has sort of made this a key part of his 2024 presidential campaign. Um, he seized on the civil fraud trial. There's James. This is Latisha James. And this is sort of an extension of the campaign trail for him. Like a popok legal AF, the day you're outside of prazers come and testify against you in a fraud case that their information was fraudulently misused by Donald Trump and Donald Trump's financial control people. That's a terrible day for you in a civil fraud case. And that's what happened to Donald Trump today. Despite all of the circus came to town and Donald Trump standing out in front of the

courthouse and piss it off the court clerk because he kept coming back late to court. He was only there for half a day, but you know, maximum attention, maximum oxygen sucking by Donald Trump. But what was really going on once again, the methodical presentation of evidence and witnesses by the office of the attorney general, it's just chop in wood and stack in it every minute, every hour, every day in the case for the next 100 days.

And none of this foolishness and acting out in antics by Donald Trump in the hallway will show a little clip of that in a minute, especially on the day he got gagged by a federal judge because he's constantly using violent rhetoric to attack everybody related to the criminal justice system. Whatever was going on outside was not what was going on inside, and that's what matters. None of it bothers judge and Goran. Judge and Goran is Hold's Donald Trump, his business empire, whatever size it is in the palm of his hand. And if he decides that there is persistent fraud on top of persistent fraud and fines for

the New York Attorney General in all six counts, he will take away these trophy properties that Donald Trump loves so much. He will destroy the company that Donald Trump built. What he said today was the greatest real estate company in the world, owning the greatest real estate assets in the world with lots of cash. All that cash is going to be taken over and brought over and given to the people of the state of New York for fraud. All of those assets will be liquidated and Donald Trump will be left, I don't know, wearing a barrel and suspenders at the rate he's

going. Today was what I like to refer to as a Praise Your Day. We've had insider current employees of Donald Trump, um, testifying against him and saying that he was involved and led the fraud, the financial fraud. We've had outsider accountants and auditors do the same thing. We've had outside bankers say that the same thing from Deutsche Bank today, up on the stand, Kuschmann Wakefield, a renowned international global real estate conglomerate that does a lot of things from brokerage to capital markets, raising money for the transaction of real estate, and appraisals. The problem is the appraiser who took the stand today, who worked closely with the Trump organization,

Mr. Larson, Doug Larson. I don't know if he was feigning that he was shocked and surprised, or he was shocked and surprised by a document, a piece of evidence that was put in front of him by the office of attorney general, which I'm going to show right here, which was thefield was the author, was the expert who provided certain data within financial statements that were shown to banks when that was a lie. Let me repeat that. Today on the stand, the outside auditor admitted under oath that the Trump organization led by Donald Trump lied to its lenders and its bankers on its financial statements

by claiming that made up and cooked numbers about the value of assets were the work and the result of Doug Larson, Cushman Wakefield when it was not. It was just cooked. So now the worm has turned another layer of fraud. It's not just about making up your own numbers in order to really sell the fraud, right? Really sell the conceit to the banks. You have to make them think that there is a real independent third party company that is

validating those numbers, right? You have to fake the stamp of approval. And you say things like, oh, sure, Cushman Wakefield supports these numbers. These appraise numbers, these appraisal numbers and value. That's Cushman Wakefield's number. And that would give relief and comfort to a banker who was making a big loan. And in underwriting, they would say, in the underwriting for the bank that needs to evaluate and do due diligence about the loan. They would say, well, what's the appraisal in there? Well, they have an appraisal from Kushman Wakefield. Oh, Kushman Wakefield. We know Kushman Wakefield. Where do I sign to approve the loan?

That was a fraud on top of a fraud. It's the fraud that's necessary to perpetrate the fraud. Because you can't do it yourself. You got to also fake the doctor's note. You got to fake the note from the accountant, from the appraiser, from the bank. And then this is the tangled web that's been woven by Donald Trump and his financial people. It was blown, sky high in a mile wide today by Doug Bender and his testimony. You know, Kushman Wakefield has its own problems. They were found in contempt by judge Angoron about six or eight months ago for their failure to timely turnover documents about their client after the judge already determined that there was no privilege that they could assert and they were still late in turning over all

their documents, all their files without any hold back to the office of attorney general. And they got fined $10,000 a day by judge Engoron for doing so. And then they quit the representation because they got their own reputation to worry about. So they fired the client, just like Mazeers, the outside accounting firm for a dozen years, fire Donald Trump in the Trump organization. And at the same time went a step further

when they quit, they quit noisily, more noisily than Kushner Wakefield, and said, and everything we just did and all those financial statements we audited were based on information that we received from the Trump organization. We cannot rely on them. So you can't rely on our financial audited, our audited financials for the last 12 years. Pushman Wakefield, a little more political, a little more diplomatic, worried that Donald

Trump could still be a real estate developer in the future, and they may want to have a relationship with him, you know, foot dragged about turning over documents. But today was the day, year later, dog, Doug Larson, come on up, and let me show you a document. Mr. Your own client used externally,

not just internally, to show bankers, with your name on it. Was that right? And he said, point blank under oath, that was inappropriate and inaccurate and appraisal by me or Kushman Wakefield should have been ordered. And it wasn't. And we're not just talking about as Alina Habba, the other lawyers said in the courtroom or outside the courtroom, minimal, diminimous amounts of money here. We're talking about big swings between the actual value of something and the value claimed

by Donald Trump. For example, and I know this property because I work in live in New York, Nike town, which went belly up, which is a block or so from Trump tower on Fifth Avenue. It's a big retail, you know, it's a nice retail. I think it's on 57th Street and you're off on Fifth Avenue. It's a big retail, you know, it's a nice retail. I think it's on 57th Street and you're off of Fifth Avenue. And they valued it on the Trump internal books based on a series of assumptions that are incorrect that even their own outside of Praser said was wrong, valued at $287 million. $287 million. $287 million. Doug Larson was shown all of the variables and assumptions that

were made and he immediately said, this is wrong. This is not how you do an appraisal, appraisal value for Nike town because they're using comparable comparative properties that aren't comparable, right? You got to use retail space in and around, let's say the Midtown New York block with a certain vacancy rate and a square footage and a certain what we call capitalization rate or cap rate. And of course, they manipulated all those numbers to spit out a number they wanted.

They reverse engineered it. We want this to be about a $300 million property. What do we need to do? Okay, On the Excel spreadsheet, change this number, change that multiple, change that factor. Look, three hundred million for a property that's probably worth half that. And that was Doug Larson's point, which is very powerful when it's coming out of the mouth of the long time appraiser for the Trump organization who's already upset and chagrinned that his name got used fraudulently on financial statements and on valuation

when he didn't do the valuation. They take that kind of stuff very seriously appraiser. When you put their name on appraisals, they didn't do, they get really, really upset. And that's what we saw today in the courthouse at 60 Center Street in New York. Another example is 40 Wall Street. You've heard a lot about 40 Wall Street.

I used to have an office right near it. It's right near the Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange for those that know that area. It's a big hulking building. It's got a lot of vacancies. It's always had a lot of vacancies, especially during COVID. It had huge retail vacancies at the bottom. You know, these commercial condominiums in the building was about half empty. I got friends that have a law practice inside

there. And so when you calculate the value, you have to take into account things like vacancy rate, right? And you know, you're missing revenue from the bottom because there's no, you know, the pharmacy one out five years ago and the whole foods that was supposed to come in three years ago never came in until recently. And those are factors that go into the appraise value. Many of you may not know this, but I'm about to embark on an amazing life-altering event. See, we build up our lives with bright moments of joy, pride and success, and however you define those moments, securing your future should be part of the journey. Traditional estate planning can cost thousands of dollars, and one size fits all templates

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$540 million that's a big difference Right, I didn't made I didn't major in math. I don't have an MBA But I can tell you that 220 million and 540 million are two completely different universes of numbers. But when you have to think about the motive here, and that's where the New York Attorney General comes into her case, because she has to prove intent, not motive, but intent to commit a fraud. And the intent is there was a giant hole on the balance sheet for Donald Trump that he

didn't like. It was like sclaring at him, right? This big red hole created by the fact that Forbes magazine had discovered that he was lying for years about the size of his Manhattan pen house and that it was only worth a one-third of the value that was always listed on his balance sheet. He hated that, so he had a find a way to fill the gap. Since he couldn't acquire other assets, you got to make your existing assets worth more. And how do you do that? You manipulate the numbers and you cook the books. It's been going on for years. It's been going on for so long that there's a phrase for it I just used, cooking the books.

That's all Donald Trump did. It wasn't a sophisticated. I don't want anybody think that this was, as Donald Trump likes to say, a beautiful fraud, a great fraud. The best and most is fraud ever. This was a garden variety, penny, any fraud of cooking the books that's done by the local deli on the corner and the dry cleaner that only takes cash every day. Change the numbers, two sets of books. It's all this is. And then when they needed to really have some sort of gold star attached to a validation lie about it and say that people like Kushman Weekfield validated the numbers when they didn't and the appraisals. So what so with that kind of testimony, the testimony also of another insider, Donna Kitter, who's

an assistant controller reporting to Jeff McConney, the controller. The one who already said that Alan Weissselberg and Donald Trump ordered him to change the numbers to improve Donald Trump's financial picture without any basis. Donna Kitter, who Donald Trump in his deposition said he didn't even know she was, because smartly, the attorney general during her deposition ran by all the names they were going to use a trial a year later, or six months later, and said, do you know this guy? Do you know this person? Do you know this person? Donald Trump said, I really don't know them. So yesterday, Peter Bernie, the assistant vice president, who's soon to be out of a job, testified against

the Trump organization about Alan Weiselberg ordering him at Trump's direction to increase balance sheet numbers without any basis. Cook in the books. He said he didn't know who that person was in his deposition, even though he's worked for the company for nine years. Donna Kitter's worked for the company for like 18 years. And he said he didn't know who she was, but she knew who he was. And that's the more important aspect of her testimony.

He said that Alan Weissselberg told her to make favorable assumptions about various properties in order to geek up the price, right? Ginn up the price. He told her to assume vacancy rates like the building wasn't vacant, that there weren't any vacancies in a rental building, or there were more sales and a sellout of a property like a condominium that needed to be sold. Let's say they had 30 units left to be sold. He said, assume they're all sold.

Let's say they had a vacancy rate of 14%. He said, lower that to 2%. And they use different capitalization rates, right? The cost of money invested in the building to operate the building. If you change the cap rate and you totally disregard the true vacancies in the building and you increase the amount of sales over what really exists, you're going to get a higher number, shocking. And that's what Donna Kitter testified that she was ordered to do by Alan Weiselberg for Donald Trump. Did I say at the beginning of this hot day, this was a terrible day for Donald Trump on the stand in the Attorney General's Civil Broadcast because it was on top of yesterday's terrible day,

on top of the day before it's terrible day and so on for the last two weeks. Don't misinterpret the arrival of Donald Trump. It was a terrible day for him. I think he thought Michael Cohen was gonna be on the stand and that's gonna have to wait Michael's medical condition clearing up. He was also in town because he had a give

to our deposition in the FBI employees who were fired during their role in the Mueller investigation because they were also Democrats and they sent some stupid things and text messages. He had to give it, he had to give a deposition for that as well. So he had to leave. But not long ago, not before he pissed off the entire court staff and the court clerk who, who got into the hallway and said, two minutes, it looked right at Donald Trump to get him back into the courtroom. Very little cross examination going on of any of these witnesses by the Trump defendant, a defense lawyers, which is shocking.

I'm a 32 year trial lawyer in courtrooms, just like this one in cases, sort of like this, these. I've never seen it. Yes, you've got a judge instead of a jury, but this judge knows this case inside and out. And if you're thinking that, well, I'm not gonna cross examine this witness that's really, really bad for me, that who works for us or used to work for us

that was called in the Attorney General's Case in Chief instead I'm gonna wait until our case in defense and then I'll call them again, you know, four months from now, two months from now. Good luck. That bell has already been wrong with this judge who every day is forming his opinion literally to write against you. You have to do it in real time at the time in order to counteract any bad effect. You know, if he, if he, um, bloody Jew in this testimony or she did, you got to do something

about it. Get up, cross examine, do the best you can to cauterize the wound. Don't just say no questions, which is what they've been doing. So Patrick Bernie, the vice president, assistant vice president in the accounting department who who just completely was almost a technical knockout for Donald Trump. No questions. Really? Alan Weissselberg, chief financial officer felon, convicted felon, 50 year fraudster, testifies

against you in his own way. No questions. Okay. They asked a couple of questions of Kushman Wakefield, but we're really, you know, we're sort of like tap dancing on a minefield, really worried, because they didn't know what his testimony was gonna be,

because they probably haven't reached out to him and tried to prepare the witness for his testimony. And so that's all we're watching. It's not some grand strategy, you know, pass every time it comes around to your turn to do something with the witness. You know, I know that Kice has been on television talking about it. Now, there's no strategy here. This is just not prepared. Just like they're not prepared when they're in Judge Chutkin's courtroom in the District of Columbia.

They're not prepared in front of Scott McAfee. They're just not prepared. And these lawyers are stretched incredibly thin for Donald Trump in unpurpose by the prosecutors of the attorney generals. You know, you got a kice with Habba sitting in the civil fraud case, right? I don't even know where Todd Blanche is, by the way. Todd Blanche sits in the courtroom, it does very little. In DC, you've got like, Loro, basically by himself for Donald Trump doing terribly. And then you've got, I guess Todd Blanche, maybe Loro down in Mar-a-Lago, and I don't

know who in Georgia, I think it's, I think it's a new lawyer they just hired against the United States of America and all of its millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in resources and hundreds of personnel There's always an asymmetry between the government and the defense team, but here it is writ large That's all I'm gonna say and then Donald Trump who already got gagged of course suddenly Suddenly where he used to call judge Angkoran a Marxist leftist radical crazy insane, uh, judge. Now he says out loud today and his social media and two reporters, I like to judge, I respect to judge.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he got gagged by judge check in earlier today, probably. I'm just guessing here. I was going to play a clip. I guess I'll play one clip. Well, by one clip at Donald Trump, and this is just a, just remember, everything I just told you about, how terrible the case is going on,

you will see none of that on Donald Trump with his circus, right? He's like an Oregon grinder with a monkey out in front of the courthouse, or in the hallway of the courthouse. And of course the reporters eat it up because they're trying to, they need content. They're trying to make a deadline for their reporting. Let's show a clip.

Based on that he ruled against me. He ruled for all. I mean, he said, front, they are the fraudulent people because they ruled the house that was worth 80. They put down his worth, 18 million, it's worth maybe close to 100 times that amount. And based on that, they were all against me having to do with fraud, which is a big statement, but they are the frauds. Because the house is worth a billion, a billion and a half,

750 million, or with this worth of fortune, it's most expensive house probably in the the world and they said it was worth they came in the dollars and they don't do anything about it. Okay, having heard my entire hot take, here's the query. Here's the question, was this a good day for Donald Trump or a bad day for Donald Trump? I'll let you decide comparing his clip

to the reality of what was going on. Again, the New York Attorney General, methodically chopping wood, like a metronome, I know metronomes don't chop wood, but chopping wood, just piling up the cords, moving on, slow methodical presentation of evidence and witnesses. Like I've said before, she, the New York attorney general is a boa constrictor and she has Donald Trump and she has wrapped around him and every day in the trial, it just gets tighter and tighter. And by the time this trial is over and the case and chief is over, Donald Trump's head is going to pop off. And that's going to be, that's going to be the end of it. I get a lot of delight at a doing hot takes like

this one. I hope you notice that. I do a lot of delight at a doing hot takes like this one. I hope you notice that. I do it only in one place. The Midas Touch Network on their YouTube channel help them get the two million already. I keep saying that. Once you do, I'll keep pushing for them to get the two and a half million, but help them get the two

millions, a grassroots thing. There's no outside investors, right? And so the bigger they get, the voice of them gets that big, your voice will get larger. And then on Wednesdays and Saturdays come join me and my co-incors, Karen, Friedman, Ignifalo, and Ben, my Salis for legal AF. We curate the best stories just like the one I just did, but we do it back and forth. We debate each other with our collective 100 years of legal experience and legal AF. Yes, it is what you think. Give me a thumbs up here. Helps with the ratings. Helps keep the content coming to you until my next hot take until my next legal AF. This is Michael Popak reporting.

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