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Trump’s own mortgages match his description of mortgage fraud, records reveal
LA County sues oil companies over unplugged wells in Inglewood oil field
By Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Mar-a-Lago. | Photo by Gray Lensman QX via Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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or 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, marblefloored 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 Mara-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.” Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for 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. “Given Trump’s position on situations like this, See Mortgage fraud Page 03
he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.” Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by
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By City News Service
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os Angeles County filed an environmental lawsuit Wednesday against oil and gas well operators to compel them to address what lawyers called dangers to human health and the environment caused by unplugged idle and exhausted oil and gas wells in the Inglewood Oil Field. The Los Angeles Superior Court complaint alleges that Sentinel Peak Resources California LLC, Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas LLC, Plains Resources Inc. and Chevron U.S.A. Inc. failed to properly decommission and plug exhausted and idle oil and gas wells, thereby causing toxic pollutants to leak into the air, land and water, leading to significant environmental harms and health risks to communities surrounding the IOF. Sentinel Peak attorney Erin Gleaton issued a statement Wednesday stating that the lawsuit was filed without justification and that its allegations contradict years of scientific work conducted by the state and county. “We are aware of the lawsuit that has been filed by the county of Los Angeles against Sentinel Peak Resources and want to be clear: The claims are entirely without merit,” Gleaton said. “This suit appears to be an attempt to generate sensationalized publicity rather than adjudicate a legitimate legal matter. We have full confidence in our position, supported by the facts and our record of regulatory compliance.” The county Department of Public Health recently conducted a health assessment and environment justice study that found no See Oil wells Page 24
evidence that oil field operations have caused health impacts in the community, according to Gleaton. Supervisor Holly Mitchell defended the filing of the suit. “We are making it clear to these oil companies that Los Angeles County is done waiting and that we remain unwavering in our commitment to protect residents from the harmful impacts of oil drilling,” Mitchell said. “Plugging idle oil and gas wells so they no longer emit toxins into communities that have been on the front lines of environmental injustice for generations is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law. At the very least, oil companies that have long profited from this land must uphold their responsibilities to properly close these wells and ensure they cause no further harm.” Mitchell’s district includes the oil field, and she has led ongoing county efforts to ban new oil and gas extraction and mandate the phase-out of existing drilling in unincorporated Los Angeles County. More than a million people live within five miles of the IOF, which is surrounded by homes and apartments as well as recreational, institutional, commercial and industrial uses. The county’s complaint alleges that over 25% of unplugged wells in the IOF are idle and that more than 70 others are exhausted. Yet, the oil and gas wells allegedly continue to emit toxins into the environment and surrounding communities that endanger the general health and the environment, officials said. State regulations define an idle well as “any well that