NEW YORK (AP) – It’s sleepy by Donald Trump’s standards, but the former president’s ancient estate in Westchester County, New York, could well become one of his bigger legal nightmares.
Seven Springs, a 213-acre scenic area surrounding a Georgian-style mansion, is the subject of two state investigations: a criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and a civil investigation by Attorney General Letitia James of New York.
Both investigations focus on whether Trump manipulated the property’s value to gain more tax benefits from an environmental conservation scheme he struck in late 2015 when he ran for president.
Purchased by Trump for $ 7.5 million in 1995, Seven Springs received renewed attention as he prepared to leave office and was on the verge of losing the legal protections he had as president. Vance issued new subpoenas in mid-December and a judge ordered evidence to be turned over to James’s office nine days after Trump left Washington.
Trump’s Other Legal ProblemsInvestigations into his attempts to influence election officials and payments made on his behalf to women reporting cases have dominated headlines. But former Manhattan district attorney Duncan Levin said white-collar investigators go wherever the paper trail leads.
“While a tax issue related to a conservation scheme may not be as sexy as a hush money, prosecutors are likely to focus on any violation of the law they find,” Levin said. “Remember, the authorities have sued Al Capone on tax evasion.”
Seven Springs is an outlier in a Trump real estate portfolio filled with gleaming high-rises and gilded amenities. It’s listed on his website as a family outing, although Trump hasn’t been there in over four years.
At the heart of the estate is the mansion built in 1919 as a summer vacation by Eugene Meyer, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve and owner of The Washington Post. In 2006, while pushing out a plan to build luxury homes on the property, Trump floated the idea that he and his family would move into the mansion, but that never happened.
The brand new 28,322 square foot home contained over a dozen bedrooms, an indoor pool, bowling alley and tennis court. Meyer’s daughter, the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, married in Seven Springs in 1940.
In her memoir ‘Personal History’, Graham described ambivalent emotions about going there and wrote, ‘The older I got, the more I hated the loneliness of the farm, but in my childhood it was, as I wrote to my father when I was 10, “a great old place.” ”
At one point, Meyer owned about 700 acres. A philanthropic foundation founded by him and his wife, Agnes, donated 247 acres to the Nature Conservancy and the remaining land and buildings that made up Seven Springs at Yale University in 1973, after the death of Agnes Meyer.
The estate changed hands again when the foundation took it back from Yale and operated a conference center there, before turning the property over to Rockefeller University, who eventually sold it to Trump.
Trump paid about $ 2.25 million below list price for Seven Springs and acquired the land as part of an effort to jump-start his fortunes after a string of failures in the early 1990s, including casino bankruptcies and the sale from his money-losing Trump Shuttle airline.
Trump envisioned turning it into his first championship-level golf course, with an exclusive clientele and a high membership fee.
He hired an architectural firm to map out fairways and greens, but dropped the effort when residents voiced concerns that lawn chemicals would contaminate neighboring Byram Lake, a local source of drinking water.
Trump then tried to build houses. He proposed building 46 single-family homes, and after that plan also met community opposition, 15 homes the size of a mansion that he described in 2004 as “ super high-end homes, like never before on the East Coast. “The project was held up by years of litigation and no houses were ever built.
In 2009, Trump caused a furore by allowing Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to pitch his Bedouin-style tent on the Seven Springs estate north of New York City because he had no other place to stay for a UN visit.
Trump initially suggested he was unaware that Gaddafi was involved, but later admitted that he was making “a lot of money” by renting the land to the Libyan leader. Local officials stopped work on the tent and Gaddafi never stayed there.
His development plans had failed, Trump chose a strategy that would allow him to keep the property but lower his taxes. He granted easement to a conservation land trust to preserve 158 acres (60 hectares) of pastures and mature forest.
Trump received an income tax deduction of $ 21 million, equal to the value of the preserved land, according to property and court records. The amount was based on a professional appraisal that valued the entire Seven Springs property at $ 56.5 million on December 1, 2015.
That was a much higher amount than the evaluation by local government appraisers, who said the entire estate was worth $ 20 million.
Michael Colangelo, an attorney at the Attorney General’s Office in New York, outlined the pivotal question regarding Seven Springs easement during a hearing last year over a dispute over evidence.
“If the value of the easement was incorrectly inflated, who benefited from that improper inflation and for what amounts?” Colangelo said. “Needless to say, the attorney general should see the documents that would reflect the value of that deduction as it flowed to intermediate entities and ultimately to Mr. Trump personally.”
A message was left with Trump’s spokesman asking for comment. In the past, the Republican ex-president has denounced the investigations as part of a “witch hunt.”
Seven Springs caught the attention of investigators after Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen told a congressional committee in 2019 that Trump was in the habit of manipulating property values - blowing them up in some cases and minimizing them in others to obtain favorable loan terms and tax breaks .
Cohen testified that Trump had financial statements that said Seven Springs was worth $ 291 million as of 2012. During his testimony, he gave copies of three of Trump’s financial statements to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Cohen said the statements, from 2011, 2012 and 2013, were statements Trump gave to his principal lender, Deutsche Bank, to inquire about a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills from the NFL and to Forbes magazine to defend his claim. in a place on the list of the world’s richest people.
Trump said on his annual financial disclosure forms while he was president that the property was worth between $ 25 million and $ 50 million.
The Attorney General of New York was the first to act. James issued subpoenas to Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate services company, for data related to his review work on behalf of Trump; to law firms that have worked on the Seven Springs project; and to Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, for data related to the annual financial statements and easement.
James also subpoenaed zoning and planning records for the three cities of Seven Springs spans in 2019. Vance followed suit in December with his own subpoenas. A town clerk said the investigators were given “boxes and boxes of documents” in response. They include tax returns, survey maps, environmental studies, and schedule board meeting minutes.
James’ investigators interviewed Trump’s son, Eric Trump, an executive vice president at the Trump Organization and the president of the limited company through which it owns Seven Springs; Trump’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg; and attorneys Trump hired for the Seven Springs project who specialize in land use and federal tax disputes.
Investigators have yet to determine whether a law has been broken.
Vance, who is a Democrat like James, has not revealed much about his criminal investigation, in part due to grand jury nondisclosure rules. The district attorney’s office has said in court documents that it focuses on public reports of “extensive and long-term criminal behavior at the Trump Organization.”
Documents filed in connection with the criminal investigation – supported by a US Supreme Court decision last month to grant Vance access to Trump’s tax records – have listed Seven Springs as possible targets.
Along with the mansion, Seven Springs has a Tudor-style home that was once owned by ketchup magnate HJ Heinz, and smaller carriage houses of which Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have said they served as their ‘home base’ when they visited the estate hiking and riding ATVs.
During his presidency, Trump himself chose prestigious properties such as his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he has lived since leaving the White House.
The New York Times reported last year that Trump’s tax records showed that he classified the estate, not as a personal home, but as an investment property, allowing him to write off more than $ 2 million in real estate taxes since 2014.
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