Donald Trump’s administration has a favorite tool to come after their political enemies with.
Trump has members of his administration digging through records to accuse or, in the case of New York Attorney General James, charge people whom they perceive as enemies of committing mortgage fraud by getting a mortgage for a primary residence that isn’t the primary residence of the applicant.
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It has become common that Trump is guilty of what he accuses others of doing. It was only a matter of time before somebody dug into Trump’s mortgage applications and found something.
What was found was that on multiple applications in Florida, Trump claimed that the properties were for his primary residence, but he had no intention of living in them. The properties were intended for commercial use.
ProPublica reported:
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
The Trump administration likes to talk about transparency in an Orwellian way, but Trump’s response to questions about his own mortgages was anything but transparent.
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