The Trump administration has argued that Fed board member Lisa Cook may have committed mortgage fraud by declaring more than one primary residence on her loans. We found Trump once did the very thing he called “deceitful and potentially criminal.”

For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.

President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.

But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, 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 houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.

At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the 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.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”

    • TheFogan@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      I would say the second amendment got kinda screwed in how it was… Like the primary point was to not have a standing army. Almost all the founding fathers specifically feared the idea of a standing army, as one of the greatest threats to liberty.

      “Always remember that an armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics—that without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe.” - James Madison

      “Standing armies are dangerous to liberty.” - Alexander Hamilton

      “I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury, in all matters of fact triable by the law of the land, and not by the laws of nations.” - Thomas Jefferson

      So yeah second amendment is great and all… though I would say, it’s primary value was meant to be that we could rise up against authoritarians… because the people are in the same equipment league as the army… instead now somehow we’re watching the nation argue over if the millitary code saying not to follow illegal orders is actually a real rule, while ice thugs are literally grabbing people off the street. At this point I’m honestly not seeing the second ammendment working without actually having a second civil war.