A federal watchdog group has sued former President Donald Trump, asking that the FBI and the Department of Justice investigate whether he knowingly and criminally made “material false statements” about a $50 million loan which “may have never existed at all.”
“The actions taken by Mr. Trump to misrepresent his loan obligations go well-beyond actions by other government employees who have fallen afoul of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a) in recent years. His reporting of a non-existent loan dwarfs portrayals by other government employees, who have been prosecuted for failing to disclose far lesser amounts of their debt obligations,” Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, wrote in the nascent complaint.
According to CREW, Trump may have made false statements by reporting over $50 million owed to Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC as a liability on at least nine public financial disclosure reports. Those reports were submitted to the Federal Election Commission as well as the Office of Government Ethics. This allegedly occurred from 2015 to 2023 and, as Bookbinder noted, “even though the loan appears to have never existed.”
“It is not clear why Mr. Trump would report a non-existent loan, but the law must be vigorously enforced against office holders and candidates who flout the disclosure process through repeated false statements. Failure to do so not only renders the system meaningless, but, more importantly, undermines the work of ethics officials who must ensure that financial disclosures are accurate so that potential conflicts of interest that present national security risks can be brought to light,” Bookbinder said.
These alleged discrepancies appear likely to be part of a tax avoidance scheme known as “debt parking” or, as the watchdog group claimed, Trump is attempting to hide “hidden debt” from someone — or something — else. Thursday’s lawsuit was first reported by the Daily Beast,
CREW is not alleging outright that Trump engaged in a tax scam but the formal complaint nonetheless asks both the head of the FBI Christopher Wray — who Trump appointed to run the FBI in 2017 after the ex-president fired James Comey — and the head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Unit Corey Amundson to probe the complex goings-on behind several of Trump’s public financial disclosures reports.
The now-defunct online news outlet The Messenger first reported in January that the existence of the mystery $50 million debt was detailed by Trump’s court-appointed monitor Barbara Jones — a former federal judge herself — inside of a footnote contained in a letter she sent to the judge presiding over Trump’s civil fraud case in New York, Justice Arthur Engoron.