New report confirms Trump lied to banks about being a billionaire

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified under oath to Congress last month that Trump often inflated the value of his assets and net worth in order to secure massive loans — a practice that could amount to bank fraud.

And report from the New York Times published late Monday corroborates Cohen’s testimony, saying that Deutsche Bank — the only major Wall Street player willing to loan money to notoriously bad businessman Trump — knew Trump wasn’t the billionaire he claimed to be, and yet loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars anyway.

According to the New York Times, Deutsche Bank doubted Trump’s claims that he was worth $3 billion back in 2004, believing instead that his net worth was closer to $788 million. That’s a huge discrepancy.

Despite this, Deutsche Bank decided to loan Trump a whopping $2 billion over the years — much of which he defaulted on.

The bank has been secretive about why it kept approving hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Trump, despite the fact that Trump often defaulted on these loans and in the process caused financial harm to the bank’s clients.

In fact, the Times reports, the bank appeared so worried about its ties to Trump that after he won the 2016 election, Deutsche Bank employees were banned from using the word “Trump.”

Yet the bank will now finally have to start handing over documents and testifying publicly about its cozy relationship with Trump, after two Democratic-led committees in the House — the Intelligence Committee and the House Financial Services Committee — launched a probe into the bank’s ties to Trump.

Failing to do due diligence on picking its clients is already a problem for Deutsche Bank, which is also caught up in a Russian money laundering scandal involving oligarchs smuggling tens of billions in wealth out of Russia.

But the congressional investigations could bring even more trouble for the bank, as well as Trump himself, as Deutsche Bank will be forced to reveal what it knew about Trump’s troubled finances and why it decided to overlook those troubles to give him huge loans.

Some of the biggest revelations in the investigation could come from testimony from Rosemary T. Vrablic, a managing director of Deutsche Bank who was responsible for helping Trump secure a number of risky loans to Trump that no one else on Wall Street would entertain. Vrablic expects to be called to testify in the investigations, the New York Times reported.

Ultimately, Trump and Deutsche Bank’s relationship is bizarre. And Congress may soon finally get to the bottom of it.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.