For six weeks of trial, Deutsche Bank AG has been depicted as the biggest victim of Donald Trump’s alleged inflation of his net worth. New York Attorney General Letitia James claims Trump fooled the bank into giving him better terms than he deserved on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans.
Starting Monday, the former president will try to flip the script.
Deutsche Bank loved Trump, his lawyers plan to show. To back that up, they’re expected to present evidence of the bank’s gushing over him when it was financing his projects in Miami, Chicago and Washington, including a 2013 visit to New York’s Trump Tower by then-Chief Executive Officer Anshu Jain and an invitation for Ivanka Trump to appear in a Deutsche Bank internal promotional video.
The bank declined to comment for this story.
It’s not clear the defense case Trump lawyers Christopher Kise and Alina Habba plan to kick off Monday will make any difference from a legal standpoint. The judge in the non-jury trial has already found Trump liable for fraud. Moreover, James’s position is that Deutsche Bank’s apparently cozy relationship with Trump at the time is irrelevant and the bank can be a victim even if it didn’t lose money.
But evidence that his alleged victim was “extremely happy” and “thrilled” with him, as the former president testified earlier this month during a raucous day on the stand, will feed his public narrative that he’s being unfairly treated as part of politically motivated “witch hunt.”
Trump’s lawyers have put several current and former Deutsche Bank bankers on their witness list, including Rosemary Vrablic. An executive in Deutsche Bank’s wealth management unit, Vrablic was the banker who maintained the closest client relationship with Trump and his family.
The defense will likely seek to elicit testimony from Vrablic and other Deutsche Bank witnesses that shows how eager the lender was to do business with Trump, that they made money with him and that they knew to take his financial statements with a grain of salt.
Trump has repeated those claims like a mantra for years and did so again during his Nov. 6 testimony. He said he fully repaid Deutsche Bank loans for the Trump Chicago tower and the Doral golf course in Florida ahead of schedule. Kise said in his opening statement that Deutsche Bank and other Trump lenders made “well over $100 million in interest” on loans to him. “There were no late payments. There were no missed payments.”
Ivanka Trump testified last week about her role in the Deutsche Bank relationship. An executive vice president at the Trump Organization until 2017, she said her husband, Jared Kushner, introduced Vrablic to her around 2011, when Donald Trump was looking for financing for his planned acquisition of the Doral course.
Ivanka Trump testified that Vrablic “courted” her family’s business.
Deutsche Bank was one of the only major banks willing to lend to Trump after his 1990s bankruptcies in Atlantic City and New York. But even that relationship was starting to sour before Vrablic entered the picture. She shifted his business at the bank from the commercial real estate division to wealth management, offering him much lower interest rates. Deutsche Bank ultimately loaned Trump some $300 million through Vrablic.
Ivanka Trump testified that her understanding was that Deutsche Bank was “excited” about doing business with the Trumps.
In 2012, Vrablic asked Trump in an email if she would be willing to appear in a promotional video for the Deutsche Bank private wealth management group that would be shown to Jain, then-Co-Chairman Juergen Fitschen and the bank’s senior management committee.
Vrablic explained that Trump might be asked interview questions including whether she had skepticism about working with Deutsche Bank beforehand, why she would work with a European bank and what she thought differentiated Deutsche Bank from other lenders. Trump said she didn’t remember if the video was ever made.
Trump also testified that Vrablic arranged a “little bit of a sales call” in the form of Jain’s “very positive” March 2013 meeting with her father, in which the CEO encouraged the Trumps “to do more business with Deutsche Bank.”
‘Business as Usual’
Jain seemed to strike a similar tone in a follow-up email with Donald Trump.
“It was a pleasure to see your delight in the build out of your family holdings, and your justified pride in having your children in the business,” Jain wrote.
Though the defense will aim to focus on the halcyon days of the Trump-Deutsche Bank relationship, it’s undeniable that the love story eventually came to an end. After Trump launched his presidential campaign with incendiary remarks about immigrants, the bank decided he was a “highly politically exposed person (PEP)” with whom it needed to limit its business ties.
In an apologetic February 2016 email, Vrablic told Ivanka Trump that she’d pushed a loan request all the way to then-CEO John Cryan to no avail. But she promised that “once the candidacy is settled, we can proceed with business as usual with you” and that “you can be assured of our senior management’s commitment to your family and business.”
Vrablic left Deutsche Bank in December 2020. A month later, the bank and other lenders decided to cease future business with Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol siege.
Author: Erik Larson, Patricia Hurtado and Greg Farrell
