OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT-ELECT
There’s really never a dull day in Washington, D.C., as confirmation hearings for Donald J. Trump’s cabinet appointees zip along on Capitol Hill. Today brings word that Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, did not list almost $100 million in assets in his initial disclosure documents and “forgot to mention his role as a director of an investment fund located in a tax haven,” according to the The New York Times.
Mnuchin, who resigned as a board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last month, has amended his filings to note those holdings, which include some $95 million in real estate. The Times also shares that “he belatedly disclosed that his children own nearly $1 million in artwork.”
The papers note that Mnuchin’s three children, Emma, John, and Dylan (who were included because they are dependents), have “artwork held for investment” worth, respectively, between $500,001 and $1 million, $100,001 and $250,000, and $100,001 and $250,000. (The paperwork requires only ranges, rather than precise valuations.) All told, then, those holdings appear to be worth between about $700,000 and $1.5 million.
Those assets are listed as an “interest in Fourcade LLC,” whose address is 45 East 78th Street in Manhattan, the home of Mnuchin Gallery, which is run by Steven’s father, Robert. A press rep for the gallery said that Fourcade LLC (presumably named after the late art dealer Xavier Fourcade) is a private family trust set for the grandchildren of Robert and Adriana Mnuchin and said, “I want to reiterate on behalf of Mnuchin Gallery that while Steven Mnuchin is Robert’s son, he is not nor has he ever been affiliated with the Mnuchin Gallery.”
Earlier disclosures by Steven showed that he holds a stake in a (frankly stunning) 1978 Willem de Kooning painting, Untitled III, valued at between $5 million and $25 million.
Steven—who has been criticized for his tenure as CEO and chairman of OneWest Bank, which some allege had a zest for making foreclosures after the economy faltered late last decade—said during a hearing today that the omissions on the more than 5,000 pages of documents he filed were inadvertent. The Times reports that he said, “I think as you all can appreciate, filling out these government forms is quite complicated…Let me first say, any oversight, it was unintentional.”