TEHRAN, April 20 - A former reporter for Forbes magazine has claimed that US President Donald Trump lied to him about his wealth to get into the Forbes 400 Richest list.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - “He figured out what he had to do in order to deceive me and get onto that list. And he did it very well. And he maintained that persona of just sort of talking about his assets without any sense of debt and lying about it," Jonathan Greenberg told CNN in an interview on Friday.
"The tactic landed him a place on the Forbes list he hadn’t earned — and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency," Greenberg also told The Washington post.
Greenberg said that in 1984 Trump called him pretending to be "John Barron," which according to Washington Post is a pseudonym that Trump has used for a long time with reporters and others. He said the president had been obsessed with the Forbes 400 list since its creation in 1981 and thus overstated his wealth to Greenberg during conversations.
Greenblatt added that Trump's net worth on the Forbes 400 list in 1984 was recorded at $400 million, with his father Fred Trump listed at $200 million. He indicated that the numbers they provided were inaccurate. According to Greenblatt, Trump later persuaded the magazine every year with "misinformation" that he was richer than they thought.
The White House declined to comment to CNN and the Washington Post, and The Trump Organization did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
According to a report published in November, America’s top 25 top billionaires have more than $1 trillion in wealth, equivalent to the wealth of 56 percent of the rest of the US population, or 178 million people, using data from the most recent Forbes 400 list. The 400 richest people in the US have a combined wealth of $2.68 trillion and collectively have more than the gross domestic product of Britain.
Source: Press TV
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