Most observers looked at Thursday’s indictment of the Trump Organization and concluded that Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James have Donald Trump by the balls. But journalist and NYT bestselling-author Kurt Eichenwald peered into the guts of the indictment and discovered something else. Apparently even if Vance and James don’t bring Trump down, his lenders could.
As we all know, Trump’s real estate empire survives almost entirely on borrowed money—according to Forbes, he’s at least $1 billion in debt. Moreover, according to Politico, certain large loans include clauses that give a lender the right to call the loan if the borrower is indicted. While experts told Politico that it’s a near-certainty at least some of his loans include such a stipulation, David Einrich of The New York Times reported that the loans with Trump’s favorite bank include no such stipulation.
But when Eichenwald looked at the indictment, he discovered that even in the cases where Trump’s loan docs don’t trigger repayment, it may not be enough to save Trump.
In a long Twitter thread, Eichenwald explained what most of us already know—the Trump Organization’s very existence depends on loans, and Trump’s attempted self-coup made him so toxic that he can’t rely on Moscow or Riyadh to bail him out anymore.
That led him to take a close look at count 12 of today’s indictment, which charges the Trump Organization with falsifying business records.
In other words—the minute the indictment dropped, it’s a near certainty that the phones at Trump Tower were ringing off the hook with lenders demanding a full accounting. If Trump doesn’t turn over the records, or he does so and they don’t add up, THE LENDERS HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO CALL THE LOANS IN. And if enough of them do so, the Trump Organization goes bye-bye.
Earlier Thursday, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tax law expert David Cay Johnston told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that if Vance and James were so inclined, they could use New York’s version of RICO to force Trump into receivership. But if Eichenwald is right—and given his experience covering corporate malfeasance, he probably is—Trump’s real estate empire could be toast even before the prosecutors do their worst.