Page:Simpson-transcript-redacted.pdf/71

Glenn SimpsonPage 71 his business career, his finances. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether he's really as rich as he says he is because that was the subject of a libel case that he filed against a journalist named Tim O'Brien for which there was quite a lot of discovery and litigation filings detailing O'Brien's allegation that he was worth, you know, maybe a fifth to a third of what he claims and Trump's angry retort that he was worth far more than that.

So we did things like we looked at the golf courses and whether they actually ever made any money and how much debt they had. We looked at the bankruptcies, how could somebody go through so many bankruptcies, you know, and still have a billion dollars in personal assets. So those are the kinds of things. We looked at a lot of things like his tax bills. Tax bills are useful because you can figure out how much money someone is making or how much they're worth or how much their properties are worth based on how much they have to pay in taxes.

One of the things we found out was that, you know, when it comes to paying taxes, Donald Trump claims to not have much stuff. At least the Trump organization. So they would make filings with 1-800-FOR-DEPO