Trump has claimed his Florida resort is worth as much as $1.5 billion, but the Palm Beach County property appraiser valued it far lower.
A Democratic House member is asking Palm Beach County, Florida, to tax Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property at the rate the former president claims it is worth amid his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York.
In a letter first provided to NBC News, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., issued the request to Dorothy Jacks, Palm Beach County’s property appraiser.
Moskowitz noted New York Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling last week saying that Trump repeatedly committed acts of fraud for years. Engoron ruled that Trump lied to banks and insurers by overvaluing and undervaluing his assets while exaggerating his net worth to billions of dollars.
So what happened?
Details are limited, but what I’ve been able to piece together is that someone got a bogus sale report into some kind of feed that Zillow monitors. The report was full of factual red flags, but apparently Zillow didn’t bother doing any kind of verification and just blindly listed the sale on their website. Various media outlets then saw the Zillow listing did some minimal digging and ran stories reporting the sale. At that point places like lemmy then had posts referencing the various media sources, who of course cited Zillow, who doesn’t make their sources public.
After the story blew up Trump and his relatives responded saying the story was false at which point it seems Zillow finally took a look at things and realized whatever source they used was bogus. Zillow then removed the sale report from their site and issued a notice that “a mistake” had led to an incorrect listing being published.
What happened is that someone reported a false sale to Zillow. Who did it and why are up for speculation but it was almost certainly meant as an outrage generator and it apparently worked perfectly.