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Trump’s own mortgages match his description of mortgage fraud, records reveal
Adoption fees waived at county shelters teeming with homeless pets
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.
NO. 254
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By City News Service
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etween Thursday and Monday, fee waivers are in effect at all Riverside County animal shelters, where visitors can find a wide variety of homeless pets to take home for the Holidays. “When you adopt a pet, you are also helping us make space in our kennels for the next animals that continue to come in and need our help, because we always have to have space for them,” Department of Animal Services Deputy Director Jaclyn Schart said. “We want as many pets as possible to leave our shelters with a new family, and our staff looks forward to making these connections
happen across our shelters.” The nonprofit BISSELL Pet Foundation is sponsoring the county’s “Empty the Shelters — Holiday Hope” campaign through Monday, Dec. 15, during which all spay/neuter, vaccination and microchipping fees will be waived. Adopters will only need to pay state-mandated licensing fees for dogs, which for fixed canines generally run around $25 or less. The largest strain on the county’s four shelters is the number of impounded dogs, numbering close to 1,000 currently, officials said. “This year has placed enormous pressure on
See Homeless pets Page 23
Over a third of San Bernardino streets in poor, ‘failed’ condition
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
By Staff
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ore than one-third of the streets in San Bernardino are in need of repair, prompting officials to seek funding sources to pay for it, the city announced Wednesday. A recent assessment found the city’s streets overall are in “fair” condition but below the state’s overall “good” average for pavement quality. The cost to bring roads up to the statewide average over the next decade is expected to cost between $440 and $550 million, or $44 million$55 million annually, officials See SB streets Page 23
said. Current spending for street repair is about $13 million a year. Last week Mayor Helen Tran and the City Council heard a presentation at their regular public meeting that reported the findings of a recent assessment of streets citywide and the cost of repair and maintenance over the next 10 years. City manager Eric Levitt said in a statement, “This is the first step in putting together a program to continue the City Council’s efforts in improving the City’s pavement condi-