Seth Hettena at Rolling Stone:  “For most businesses, a freak thunderstorm flooding your golf course would constitute something between an inconvenience and a crisis — especially after you faced accusations of illegally modifying your course in a way that caused water damage to your neighbor’s buildings. But most businesses aren’t run by Donald Trump.

“When a deluge flooded the Trump Organization’s Westchester County golf course and a nearby town in 2011, the organization used a wildly inflated claim to score an insurance payout of nearly $1.3 million, pulling in far more than what it spent to repair the course, two people tell Rolling Stone. The previously unreported insurance claim at Trump National Golf Club in the Village of Briarcliff Manor far outstripped the cost to repair the damages, which were about $130,000 to $150,000, one of the sources says.

“One of the sources, a former Briarcliff employee, says superficial repairs were made to the damaged parts of the course. ‘The work was never completed,’ the former employee says. ‘They basically band-aided it.’ The Trump Organization had sought even more than the nearly $1.3 million that was paid out, but the insurer withheld a portion because the Trump Organization failed to produce the required receipts, the other source says.

“Both sources have direct knowledge of the Trump Organization’s operations and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to compromise ongoing investigations. Neither source who spoke to Rolling Stone knew the name of the underlying insurer of the Briarcliff course because all claims were handled through a brokerage service, Aon. Aon and the Trump Organization both declined to name the underlying insurer.

“Questions around the claim could spell more legal trouble for a Trump Organization already eyeball-deep in lawsuits and investigations. The Westchester County District Attorney’s office has opened a criminal investigation into financial dealings at Trump’s Briarcliff club. The New York Times, which first reported the investigation, said it appears focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of the property to reduce its taxes. The newspaper noted that the full scope of the inquiry could not be determined. (Jess Vecchiarelli, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, declined to comment.) In the course of legal wranglings over an attempt to obtain Trump’s tax returns, a federal judge in 2019 noted that the New York District Attorney’s office and other law enforcement authorities in the state are investigating “alleged insurance and bank fraud by the Trump Organization and its officers.”