Attorney General Letitia James of New York filed a sweeping lawsuit on Wednesday that accused Donald J. Trump, his family business and three of his children of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.
Ms. James is seeking to bar the Trumps, including Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, from ever running a business in the state again.
She concluded that Mr. Trump and his business violated state criminal laws and “plausibly” broke federal laws as well. Her office, which lacks authority to file criminal charges in this case, referred the findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. They declined to comment on whether they would investigate.
The 220-page lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, lays out in new and startling detail how Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements were a compendium of lies, according to Ms. James. The statements — yearly records that include the company’s estimated value of its holdings and debts — wildly inflated the worth of nearly every one of its marquee properties, according to the lawsuit. They include Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street in Manhattan.
The company also routinely spurned the assessments of outside experts. After a bank ordered an appraisal that found 40 Wall Street was worth $200 million, the Trumps promptly valued it at well over twice that amount. Overall, the lawsuit said that 11 of Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements included more than 200 false and misleading asset valuations.
“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” according to the lawsuit. Ms. James, a Democrat who is running for re-election, filed the lawsuit just weeks after the former president refused to answer hundreds of questions under oath in an interview with her office.
In a lawsuit filed on Sept. 21, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, accused Donald J. Trump and three of his children of fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.
Mr. Trump has long used his net worth to construct a public persona as a self-made billionaire, an image that underpinned his initial run for the White House. But, according to Ms. James, he had a financial motivation for inflating his property values.
His company, the Trump Organization, provided the fraudulent financial statements to lenders and insurers, her suit said, “to obtain beneficial financial terms,” including lower interest rates and premiums. All told, Ms. James said, the Trumps were able to obtain a quarter of a billion dollars that she now wants the company to forfeit.
In a statement, the Trump Organization noted that its lenders “profited handsomely — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and fees” from their dealings with the company. The statement also attributed Ms. James’s action to “politics, pure and simple,” arguing that she “put her own political ambitions ahead of the safety of New Yorkers.”
