Ivanka Trump made a stunning admission about a behind-the-scenes deal that her father, Donald Trump made with the Trump Organization’s single largest lender, revealing that the former president had borrowed money from his children in order to help satisfy a guarantee.
Ivanka took the stand Wednesday in the $250 million civil fraud suit accusing her father, two of her brothers, and her family’s company of inflating their assets to deceive lenders and insurers for favorable loans and tax breaks.
During the testimony, prosecutors asked Ivanka, who was initially named as a defendant in the case, about emails she had sent to Deutsche Bank in 2011.
In those correspondences, she acknowledged that as part of the lending agreement that her father made with Deutsche Bank, he had to sign a personal guarantee that he could cover all the principal and interest on the loan and that he could attain a net worth of at least $3 billion in exchange for very low interest rates.
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“What we learned today is that behind the scenes, Donald Trump entered into an agreement with each of his three adult children, whereby they pledged assets of their own to help him satisfy the guarantee, which, according to his contract with Deutsche Bank, was supposed to be his and his alone,” legal analyst Lisa Rubin told MSNBC on Wednesday.
Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek that personal guarantees are common with bank loans and that Trump is allowed to ask his children to also guarantee the debt in case of a default. The issue Rahamni sees is what exactly Trump told the lender.
“Did he tell them that his children’s assets were his? Then that’s fraud and strong evidence for the State,” Rahmani said. “But if there was no misrepresentation, and Trump just wanted his children to have ‘skin in the game,’ then that’s a breach of contract issue at worst.”
Rubin said that because Trump allowed his children to co-sign the agreement, there was evidence that he “was robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak.”
“I’m not sure the impact of that struck everyone in the courtroom, but like I said, my jaw almost dropped,” she said.
When asked about the emails and her apparent role in helping the Trump Organization obtain the agreement with Deutsche Bank on Wednesday, Ivanka repeatedly told the court, “I don’t recall.”
Ivanka denied that her family misled the bank, despite the emails shown in court that revealed Ivanka had admitted that the company knew “from day one” that the deal requirements would be a problem.
Ivanka, who was an executive vice president of her father’s company, left the Trump Organization to join her father at the White House in 2017. She was removed as a defendant from the case removed earlier this year because her involvement in the alleged financial fraud fell outside the statute of limitations.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
