President Donald J. Trump is guilty of mortgage fraud, as much so as those he has accused of the crime, according to a report from ProPublica, the investigative news site.
In 1993, the President signed for a mortgage on a house adjacent to his now Mar-a-Lago home, saying that it would be his principal residence, the non-profit newsroom found. Seven weeks later, he took out a loan on a second nearby property, again pledging it, too, as his main residence.
“In reality,” ProPublica reports, “Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two homes … were used as investment properties and rented out.”
Shirley Wyner, Trump’s late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning … President Trump never lived there.”
Lying on a mortgage application, the news site says, is “exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.”
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records on behalf of 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.”
Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance, told the newsroom: “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. Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
Mortgage rates on main residences are more favorable than those for rental properties or holiday houses. It can be perfectly legal to have more than one primary residence and lenders have “significant discretion” as to which loans to offer borrowers. In Trump’s case, ProPublica found he used the same lender to buy both houses.
In recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence enough of criminality. Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”
The two mortgages in question have been paid in full, according to the newsroom. The lender on the mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch, now a part of Bank of America. Each of the mortgage documents signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.
Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud, according to the site. But in response to questions, a White House spokesperson said: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”
The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
Pulte, meanwhile, has denied his investigations are politically motivated, though so far they have been directed at Trump’s political rivals.
“If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”
So far, ProPublica said, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages, the site said.
