Forget the accountants. Watch Trump's appraisers squirm.

We noted yesterday how Orange Caligula's accounting firm is now disavowing the reliability of the very financial statements that they prepared on his behalf and showed to the world. You can only defend lies for so long, apparently.

But the people who must really be sweating bullets at this point are whoever's been issuing appraisals of  his supposed wealth all this time. The prosecutors are reportedly focusing on years of bogus appraisals of the Trump "fortune." Knowing what we do about him, I'd suspect that some of those valuations are inflated, and the rest are low-balled, depending on who he's been showing them to. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are inconsistencies, wherein they told one person that one of his assets was a real prize and somebody else that the very same asset was a real dog. In case you haven't noticed, Donnie makes stuff up as the situation requires.

Everybody who carries water for this guy goes down, but so far I haven't seen any appraisers identified as the next sitting ducks. No doubt there were real estate appraisers, since most of his alleged fortune is tied up in land and buildings. But there's a little less room for malarkey there than there is with his businesses. When it comes to appraising intangibles like stock in his family of shady companies, or the "goodwill" of his name – that's where the business appraisers come in – there is a wide-open playing field for hot air and fakery. You could slant those numbers by tens of millions in either direction, and who's to say you're wrong? It's all some "expert's" opinion about valuation.

It's sort of like his hair.

In my career, I have met many appraisers, even worked with some. They try to be respectable, but given all the leeway they enjoy in putting dollar values on things, they face enormous pressure to give the customer what the customer wants. If clients keep coming in wanting high appraisals and you keep giving them low ones, or vice versa, you won't have a career for very long.

Maybe the accountants Trump used, an outfit called Mazars, did his valuation work, too. But maybe not. Whoever it was that gave Trump the appraisals he wanted, they have probably been on the hot seat for a while now. There are lines that you can't cross, and no doubt they came close to them, if they didn't outright step across. 

Those guys get no sympathy from this blogger. You work for crooks, you get what's coming to you.