An editor at Forbes reports Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance subpoenaed him “to appear before the grand jury investigating Donald Trump.”
Randall Lane Friday morning reveals he “was asked to testify about the 2015 cover story I wrote chronicling his decades-long fixation with our net worth estimate.”
In his article Lane focuses on fighting the subpoena over obvious First Amendment concerns but says after months of objections, “the judge overseeing this grand jury process ordered us to testify, but limited the scope to simply confirm the accuracy of what was in the cover story and the article about the apartment.”
Lane says he revealed nothing new, nothing that had not been previously published.
But the questions themselves reveal where the Manhattan District Attorney is going with his investigation.
Lane writes he told the grand jury, “of the 1,600 or so people who have been on The Forbes 400 since 1982, none of them, as we report in the article, have been more fixated on their net worth than Donald Trump.”
“Trump told me,” he also reveals he said, “that ‘I look better if I’m worth $10 billion than if I’m worth $4 billion,’ as reported in the article.’ More specifically, that Trump told me that a higher net worth number ‘was good for financing.'”
That right there echoes what former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told Congress, that Trump – according to Cohen – inflates the value of his assets when seeking financing and deflates them for tax purposes.