It’s not a good day to be Donald Trump.
via: NBC News
The judge who presided over a civil business fraud trial against Donald Trump and his company has issued his decision in the case.
Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the former president and the Trump Organization to pay over $364 million in damages, and bars Trump “from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years.”
The judgment is the second this year against Trump after he was hit last month with an $83.3 million verdict in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him. The former president could also face four criminal trials this year as his presidential campaign barrels toward the November election, with the first set to begin in New York state court on March 25th.
New York Attorney General Letitia James had been seeking $370 million from Trump, his company and its top executives, including his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, alleging “repeated and persistent fraud” that included falsifying business records and financial statements. James had argued those financial statements were at times exaggerated by as much as $2.2 billion.
James contended the defendants used the inflated financial statements to obtain bank loans and insurance policies at rates he otherwise wouldn’t have been entitled to and “reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.”
Trump had maintained his financial statements were conservative, and has called the AG’s allegations politically motivated and a “fraud on me.”
“This is a case that should have never been brought, and I think we should be entitled to damages,” Trump told reporters when he attended closing arguments in the case on Jan. 11.
The months-long civil trial included testimony from Trump and his oldest children. The former president was combative in his day on the stand, blasting James as a “hack” and calling the judge “extremely hostile.”
Trump repeatedly complained about Engoron before and throughout the trial, and the judge slapped him with a partial gag order after he started blasting the judge’s law clerk as well. Trump’s complaints led to a flood of death threats against the clerk, as well as Engoron, court officials said, and Trump was fined $15,000 for twice violating the order.
Among the examples cited as fraud by the attorney general’s office during the trial was Trump valuing his triplex home in Trump Tower in New York City at three times its actual size and value, as well as including a brand value to increase the valuation of his golf courses on the financial statements, which explicitly said brand values were not included.
Another example pointed to by the attorney general clearly got under his skin — a dispute over the value of Mar-a-Lago, his social club and residence in Florida. Trump’s financial statements between 2011 and 2021 valued Mar-a-Lago at between $426 million and $612 million, while the Palm Beach County assessor appraised the property’s market value to be between $18 million and $27 million during the same timeframe. Trump had also fraudulently puffed up the value of the property by saying it was a private residence, despite having signed an agreement that it could only be used as a social club to lower his tax burden.
Trump maintained during the trial the property was worth much, much more.
“The judge had it at $18 million, and it is worth, say, I say from 50 to 100 times more than that. So I don’t know how you got those numbers,” Trump testified, adding later that he thinks it’s actually worth “between a billion and a billion five.”
James’ investigation into the former president’s business began in 2019 as a result of congressional testimony from his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who told the House Oversight Committee that Trump would improperly expand and shrink values to fit whatever his business needs were.
James filed a suit seeking $250 million in damages from Trump in 2022, and the judge appointed a monitor to oversee the company’s finances that November.
In a summary judgment ruling the week before the trial started, Engoron found Trump and his executives had repeatedly engaged in fraud. The “documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, satisfying [the attorney general’s] burden to establish liability as a matter of law against defendants,” the judge wrote, while denying Trump’s bid to dismiss the case.
Engoron summarized the Trump defense as “the documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as ‘objective’ value; and that, essentially, the Court should not believe its own eyes.”
The order, which Trump is appealing, held that Trump’s business certificates in New York should be canceled.
Trump complained about that ruling on the witness stand. “He said I was a fraud before he knew anything about me, nothing about me,” Trump said. “It’s a terrible thing you did.”
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