"Holy f**k": Ex-Deutsche Bank exec says bank may have "destroyed" copies of Trump’s tax returns
Banking giant that lent Trump hundreds of millions "apparently got rid of" its copies of his tax
Banking giant that lent Trump hundreds of millions "apparently got rid of" its copies of his tax returns
www.salon.com
A former Deutsche Bank executive suggested that the financial firm may have “destroyed” physical copies of President Trump’s tax returns after the bank told a court that it no longer had them.
Trump relied on Deutsche Bank for loans for years after other financial institutions balked at doing business with his company after a series of defaults and bankruptcies. Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told Congress that Trump had provided the bank with false documents inflating his net worth in an attempt to get a loan in 2014. Two House committees subpoenaed Deutsche Bank after Cohen’s testimony for financial documents related to the president, his three eldest children and his company. Deutsche Bank indicated in April that it had the tax returns of at least some of those individuals, prompting media outlets to file a motion to unseal the names of those individuals.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday rejected the outlets’ motion, revealing that the bank had informed the court that "the only tax returns it has for individuals and entities named in the subpoenas are not those of the president."
But current and former bank officials told The New York Times that Deutsche Bank had portions of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns. Some of those records were obtained from Trump in 2011 when its private banking arm took on Trump as a client. A number of former bank executives reviewed the tax returns, bank officials told the outlet.
Deutsche Bank relied on information contained in the tax returns when it approved a series of loans to Trump in 2012, according to the Times. The bank loaned Trump hundreds of millions of dollars for projects in Florida, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Trump still owed the bank $300 million when he took office in 2017.
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