Ivanka Trump spent all day Wednesday in a New York courtroom going over all the ways she doesn’t remember a single detail about any of her father’s financial shenanigans, despite playing a key role in three family real estate deals mired in accusations of bank fraud.
The former president’s daughter proved to be the most resilient—perhaps even boring—witness yet at Donald Trump’s gargantuan civil trial, where the New York Attorney General is trying to obliterate the billionaire’s corporate empire and pummel it with fines.
“I don’t recall,” became a sort of mantra, with Ivanka answering dozens of questions by claiming she simply didn’t remember. Lawyers for the AG’s office were trying to get into her involvement in acquiring massive bank loans that were based on her dad’s personal financial statements—which were bloated with fanciful totals that double-counted revenue and, at times, imagined non-existent physical space.
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But Ivanka’s apparently abysmal memory prevented them from getting anywhere.
Trump’s eldest daughter acknowledged “shepherding” deals to acquire the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., as well as score bank loans for Trump properties in Chicago and Miami’s suburbs. But time and again, she quickly distanced herself from the nuts and bolts of the transactions, claiming ignorance about anything related to the Trump Organization’s internal concerns that the numbers they were turning over weren’t above board.
Her penchant for forgetting potentially problematic particulars was most apparent when the Attorney General’s legal team questioned her over Deutsche Bank’s insistence that Trump maintain a net worth of $3 billion excluding any notion of brand value before lending him money to develop a golf course in Doral, Florida.
Ivanka remained polite but aloof for hours on end—even when confronted with several emails she responded to that put her at the very center of the ordeal.
In one, when presented with the sweet terms of the deal that she was coordinating, she wrote, “It doesn’t get better than this,” signs that placed her in a position of authority and showed her directly responsible for how it came together. In another, she quickly dismissed concerns from a Trump Organization lawyer that her father’s numbers could be problematic, given that the boss wouldn’t want to be personally on the hook for borrowed money—especially when he’d have to disclose his true net worth and debt.
“Is DJT willing to do that? Also, the net worth covenant and DJT indebtedness limitations would seem to me to be a problem?” Jason Greenblatt, then a company lawyer, wrote in 2011.
Another email thread described how the Trumps in 2016 were trying to get a $50 million injection of Deutsche Bank money by expanding their already-existing German bank loan. Ivanka testified that she didn’t remember what she did on the deal, while emails showed that she was the central player—and noticeably concerned that the bank might peer too deeply into the family finances.
Emails showed Ivanka stressing that she wanted to borrow the money in the form of an “unsecured note,” and nudging their longtime family banker, Rosemary Vrablic, to keep things easy. After all, a secured loan—one backed by collateral, like the family property—would require someone to show up and assess the property for what it was actually worth.
“Thank you Rosemary. Just to be clear, based on the note from Dave Williams below an unsecured facility would not require an appraisal. Could you try for us to make this happen as an unsecured note?” Ivanka asked.
That deal appeared to fall through two months later, when Deutsche Bank wouldn’t play ball that way.
Questions by Louis Solomon, the chief of enforcement at the AG's real estate finance bureau, failed to connect Ivanka directly to any of her father’s personal financial statements or imaginative accounting. At one point in the afternoon, however, she seemed cornered when discussing the Trump family’s ultimately successful bid to convert the massive Old Post Office building in the nation’s capital into a Trump hotel.
That hotel became a hotspot for shady influence peddling during the Trump administration, and is conveniently located less than a mile away from the White House, where Ivanka herself became a senior adviser.
On the witness stand discussing her dealings with the federal government to acquire the property, Ivanka claimed to know nothing about the General Service Administration’s concerns about “multiple GAAP departures” that seemed to run afoul of what are called “generally accepted accounting principles.” And she remained forgetful, even when shown documents from GSA and subsequent internal chatter that showed the Trump team scrambling to deal with the problem.
Presented with emails going back and forth between her and her team, Ivanka responded in a way that encapsulated her entire testimony: not remembering a thing.
But she also adopted her father’s defensive tactic—which claims that this case is too old anyway—by taking a gentle jab at the AG’s Office for bringing up documents from 2011.
"I don’t recall this email, so I'd be guessing as to what I meant... a decade ago,” she said, smiling.
The AG’s team ended its examination by asking one question she finally answered lucidly—one regarding her ultimate payout in 2022 for selling the historic District of Columbia property.
“Did you receive approximately $4 million from the OPO sale?” Solomon asked.
“That's consistent with my recollection, yes,” she responded.
In the late afternoon, her memory suddenly came flooding back when she was questioned by defense lawyer Jesus Suarez. She vividly recalled lunch with the family banker and described the way she overcame challenges to secure the deals she had barely remembered hours earlier.
Her all-day testimony on Wednesday was nothing like the fireworks that flew across the third-floor courtroom earlier in the week, when an intensely combative Donald Trump sparred with the judge and was nearly ordered to step outside to calm down. Things got so heated that Justice Arthur F. Engoron commented that “this is not a political rally,” and turned to Trump lawyer Christopher Kise at one point and asked, “Mr. Kise, can you control your client?”
