For the first time in the history of the Trump Organization, many of the key financial decisions will not be made by a Trump.
Following a ruling by a New York state judge Friday barring Donald Trump and his two eldest sons from having any role in running the real-estate empire that was founded in 1927 by the former president’s father, the company has been placed in the hands of a court-appointed monitor.
Barbara Jones, a lawyer and former federal judge, will now have total oversight of the real-estate conglomerate that played a central role in shaping the public image that helped Trump win the White House in 2016.
Jones, 76, has been serving as a monitor at the Trump Organization since November 2022, when she was appointed by New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron to oversee certain financial matters at the company. The appointment came shortly after New York Attorney General Letitia James brought civil fraud charges against Trump and members of his family, accusing them of ripping off banks and insurers by routinely misstating the value of their properties.
Following Jones’s initial appointment, the company was required to inform her of any financial move it made after the fact. But now it will need her approval before taking any steps involving financial disclosures to third parties — primarily meaning loan applications to banks.
The judge’s ruling also ordered that an independent compliance officer, who will report to Jones, be hired within 30 days.
Jones, who became a partner at Bracewell LLP after serving 16 years on the federal bench in the Southern District of New York, now takes the helm of a corporation made up of 415 separate entities that include properties, licensing deals and management arrangements, according to court filings. The entities all are held as part of the Donald J. Trump revocable trust, which was formed in Florida in 2014 and amended as recently as 2021.
In a report issued to Engoron before his ruling in the Trump Organization fraud case, Jones said that she had determined the company had multiple “disclosure deficiencies,” in which financial reports were “either incomplete or demonstrated a lack of transparency.”
Trump’s lawyers challenged the findings and said Jones had engaged in a “Javert-like quest against the defendants” — a reference to the relentless prosecutor from the novel and musical “Les Miserables” — and was interested only in continuing her role as monitor, for which Bracewell had already collected $2.6 million in fees.
In her report, Jones said executives at the Trump Organization had been cooperative with her throughout her monitorship, but she noted that the company had failed to notify her of several significant transactions in a timely manner. She specifically cited the tax filings related to a conservation easement created for the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Florida and the transfer of over $40 million from the trust to Trump himself.
She also noted that under questioning, Trump Organization officials admitted that a $48 million debt that Trump had repeatedly claimed in official filings he owed to a building he owns in Chicago, never existed. His lawyers say Jones misconstrued what was said and that the loan does in fact exist.
The monitoring role is not the first time Jones has been brought into legal matters involving Trump. In 2018, she was appointed special master to oversee the privilege review of documents seized from Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
Cohen later pleaded guilty to tax evasion and campaign-finance violations for helping make hush-money payments to Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who both claimed to have had affairs with Trump and tried to sell their stories to the National Enquirer. Trump was later charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with falsifying business records for his alleged role in the cover-up. He has denied the charges.
Jones, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, had previously served as the chief assistant to former New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, following a stint as a federal prosecutor in charge of the organized-crime task force in the Southern District of New York, a role she was appointed to by then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Among her notable prosecutions was the mob case that provided the basis for the Johnny Depp film “Donnie Brasco.”
As a federal judge, she oversaw the $11 billion accounting-fraud case against WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, sentencing him to 25 years in prison. She also issued a key ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and that was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
In recent years, Jones has specialized in corporate monitorships, compliance issues, internal investigations and arbitrations and mediations for Bracewell.
In 2018, she was brought in by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York to conduct a study of the church’s policies and procedures in managing allegations and reports of sexual abuse by clergy.
