Here’s a great example of excellent reporting and use of public documents.

The tax returns of President Trump and his businesses have been the center of controversy since he first became a serious candidate but refused to make his tax returns public, unlike other presidential candidates in decades.

There’s a whole legal battle underway as Trump fights various attempts to obtain those records.

But this week ProPublica reported it had located two sets of documents, including tax returns filed in New York City, which show that Trump’s companies presented financial data to its main lender which appear to have overstated the profitablity of key real estate investments, while reporting different and far lower estimates of profitablity to New York City tax authorities.

“The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax,” ProPublica reported.

See: “Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies.”

This appears to validate an allegation made by Michael Cohen, who served as Trump’s personal attorney for years.

“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes,” Cohen later testified, “and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”

What I keyed on is how ProPublica’s reporter obtained the documents. It turns out they’ve been hiding in plain sight.

ProPublica obtained the property tax documents using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents were public because Trump appealed his property tax bill for the buildings every year for nine years in a row, the extent of the available records. We compared the tax records with loan records that became public when Trump’s lender, Ladder Capital, sold the debt on his properties as part of mortgage-backed securities.

As someone who has spent a good deal of time in the past searching for particular public records, I’m in awe of the way they uncovered the documents for this story. Really. This is really the big leagues of public document reporting.

Thank you, ProPublica, for this wonderful example of using a detailed knowledge of how the system works to track down documents in less than obvious places.