As Manhattan prosecutors assess whether to charge Donald J. Trump with fraud, they have focused on the financial documents he used to get loans and brag about his wealth, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The documents, compiled by Mr. Trump’s longtime accountants and known as annual financial statements, could help answer a question at the heart of the long-standing criminal investigation of the former president: inflated the value of its assets to defraud its lenders?

In recent weeks, prosecutors at Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Cyrus R. Vance Jr. have questioned one of Mr. Trump’s accountants before a grand jury as part of their review of the financial statements, the officials said. people who know the subject. Prosecutors also questioned her longtime banker, another person said.

If prosecutors seek an indictment, the outcome of the case may hinge on their ability to use the documents to prove that a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s public personality – his penchant for hyperbole – was so extreme and intentional when dealing with his lenders that he crossed the line in fraud.

Whenever Mr. Trump needed a loan, he provided potential lenders with the statements, which contained optimistic projections about the value of his real estate business as well as sweeping warnings noting the limits of the numbers.

Prosecutors for Mr. Vance found that the accountants who drafted the statements were relying on underlying information provided by the Trump Organization, Mr. Trump’s family business, according to people with knowledge of the case, who knew questions posed by prosecutors and spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential testimony.

Prosecutors, working with New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ office explored the possibility of Mr. Trump and his company assistants picking up favorable information – and ignoring data that goes against it. these – essentially to mislead the accountants. presenting a too rosy picture of his finances.

While the numbers may implicate Mr Trump, warnings in statements that the data had not been audited or authenticated could help his defense, underscoring the challenge prosecutors face when considering whether to indict the former president.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA declined to comment beyond saying she could not discuss her clients or her work for them without their consent, and that Mazars remained “engaged. to fulfill all our professional and legal obligations ”.

Jerry D. Bernstein, an attorney for Mazars who has collected Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate income tax returns for years, declined to give further details.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment, as did Mr. Trump’s attorney, Ronald P. Fischetti. A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization said New York was grappling with crime and homelessness “but the only objective of the New York DA is to investigate Trump for political purposes.”

Mr. Trump did not personally collect the data for the accountants, but the documents left no doubt as to who was responsible for their contents: “Donald J. Trump is responsible for the preparation and fair presentation of the financial statements in accordance with to accounting principles. generally accepted in the United States of America, ”wrote its accountants in a cover letter attached to statements in 2011 and 2012.

Yet the accountants also admitted that they “neither verified nor reviewed” the information and “did not express an opinion or give any assurance about it,” a common caveat in the statements of the financial situation. The accountants revealed that in compiling the information for Mr. Trump, they had “become aware of deviations from generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America.”

Armed with these caveats, Mr. Trump’s lawyers would most likely argue that no one, let alone sophisticated lenders, should have taken his valuations at face value. And even if his valuations were wrong, lawyers might argue, the lenders conducted their own analyzes of Mr. Trump’s assets and concluded that he was a worthy borrower.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump could also turn to people with property appraisals to say that the value of a hotel or office building can be subject to a variety of interpretations.

Mr. Trump, who has called Mr. Vance’s investigation a political witch-hunt, has made a similar defense in the past, attributing any financial inconsistencies to “an innocent form of exaggeration,” as he called it in his 1987 book “The Art of Business.

Financial statements are not unique to Mr. Trump. Many businesses, including real estate developers, use them as a balance sheet to record their assets and liabilities.

The public got a glimpse of Mr. Trump’s statements when his former lawyer and fixer Michael D. Cohen released them when he testified before Congress in 2019.

Mr. Cohen, who separated from Mr. Trump during the presidency and ultimately pleaded guilty to several federal crimes, told Congress that “Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, like trying to be among the richest people in Forbes and deflated its assets to lower its property taxes. “

Mr. Cohen provided Congress with Mr. Trump’s statements from 2011 to 2013. Mr. Trump, he said, provided the documents to Deutsche Bank when he inquired about a potential loan to buy the Buffalo Bills.

The deal never came to fruition, but Mr Vance’s prosecutors questioned witnesses about Mr Trump’s statements to Deutsche Bank during the process, people said. They interviewed Mr. Cohen and an employee of Deutsche Bank, Mr. Trump’s main lender.

For years, Mr. Trump has shared the statements with Deutsche Bank and other potential lenders to offer a glowing assessment of his financial health when he needed a loan for a hotel, golf course, or apartment building. of offices.

But before he impressed his lenders, Mr. Trump had to have his employees put together spreadsheets detailing the underlying value of his assets, according to people familiar with the process. The employees would then send the spreadsheets to his accounting firm, Mazars, which would compile the information into annual statements.

The statements, released on June 30 of each year, often began with a one-page listing of Mr. Trump’s assets. Each property – Trump Tower, its golf clubs, its hotels – was listed next to a dollar amount that represented its assumed value. Her money and investments were also given value, as were the Miss Universe pageants and other assets.

The second and final page of the 2011 and 2012 statements described Mr. Trump’s debts – essentially a list of all outstanding loans – and then reported his net worth. In 2011, Mr. Trump claimed a net worth of $ 4.2 billion. In 2012, it was over $ 4.5 billion.

To determine the value of a property owned by Mr. Trump, his employees often looked at recent selling prices of comparable buildings, a common property valuation method.

But prosecutors questioned whether the Trump Organization consistently picked the most valuable properties, even if they weren’t quite comparable, and ignored real estate sales that would have lowered Mr. Trump’s valuations, have said people familiar with the subject.

Prosecutors also looked at how the company anticipated future income that was not guaranteed, the people said.

Some of the irregularities in the statements were relatively insignificant – Mr. Trump claimed, as he often did, that the Trump Tower was 68 stories tall when it really was 58 – while others raised questions more important on the legitimacy of the figures. The 2011 statement omitted his Chicago hotel – and the tens of millions of dollars in debt Mr. Trump had personally guaranteed on the property.

The cover letter to the 2012 statement detailed a long list of warnings, including that the statement contained predictions about the future and did not include data for the Chicago hotel. The omission, the accountants suggested, went against an important rule of thumb: “Generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America require that personal financial statements include all assets and liabilities. “

The accountants concluded the letter with a broad caveat: “Users of this financial statement should recognize that they may draw different conclusions about Donald J. Trump’s financial situation. “

In addition to Mazars’ cover letter, Mr. Trump added his own addendum to statements of financial position, a series of explanations and caveats that refer to statement values ​​as estimates.

His lawyers are likely to argue that these warnings absolve Mr. Trump of criminal responsibility. They could also argue that lenders are not really victims, pointing to the fact that its main lender, Deutsche Bank, has made money in its dealings with Mr Trump. (The Trump Organization is expected to soon sell the lease on its Washington hotel for at least $ 375 million and repay the Deutsche Bank loan to that property.)

But even the former president’s own notes indicate his involvement in determining which values ​​would be represented.

The value of Trump Tower, according to the notes, was based in part on “an assessment of Mr. Trump.”

David Enrich contributed reports.