The veracity of news and the source of news is under debate. Fiction masquerading as fact. Rumor and innuendo passed as news. Established facts questioned as conflicting with belief. Stephen Colbert coined a term that was humorous at the time: Truthiness.
Factba.se does not engage in news or interpretation. Instead, our goal is to make available, unedited, the entire corpus of an individual's public statements and recordings. We will locate, transcribe, index and make available this information to the public, linking directly to the originating source.
You will not find news stories on Factba.se. What you will find, almost instantly, is everything a person has ever said on a particular topic, with links to the primary source. Transcripts. Books. Videos. Appearances. Court filings. If we can locate it on the Internet, it will be tagged, indexed and searchable.
I haven't looked through that much of it (though, for better or for worse, I've watched or read most of what he's said in public over the last year or so), but this caught my eye:
Factba.se gives us the following caveat:
By law, Presidential candidates are required to file an Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report. This process includes the OGE Form 278e, where a candidate discloses assets, liabilities and sources of income.
Donald Trump has filed two such times to date: on July 15, 2015 and again on May 16, 2016. Full copies of these forms are linked below. These two forms are the most comprehensive view of his holdings to date.
The totals here are imprecise as a candidate is only required to provide a range, and the maximum value is $50,000,000 and above. Therefore in 62 instances across the two filings, the value of a holding is listed as $50,000,000 plus. As such, the ranges above are likely to be lower than the actual value. For example, the Trump Tower Triplex, which is the LLC that owns Trump Tower, is listed as a value of $50,000,000 plus, where the likely market value is much higher.
High and low values added from Filer's Employment Assets and Income (Part 2), Other Assets and Income (Part 6) and Liabilities (Part 8) of the 278e.
Please note these totals are a good faith estimate that simply adds the totals for each year. However, please use the line items below, and the linked PDFs, as the ultimate source of truth for the exact number filed.
I can't go through every single one of these data points, but if someone were to do so, how much in excess of the numbers above would the real ranges be? If the figures above are anywhere close to accurate, then 1. Trump's net worth, which he has said is in excess of $10 billion and Forbes has pegged at about $3.5 billion, is actually more like $1.5 billion. Obviously nothing to sneeze at, (EDIT: but if it's within, say, a billion of that) for someone whose entire identity appears to be based on his wealth, it'd be, uh, "Sad!"
So how accurate is this? Can someone smarter than I am figure this out?
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