Donald Trump arrived at the court building in Manhattan (New York) this Thursday and unleashed at the door his usual tirade about “witch hunts”, “political interference” and other commonplaces in his speech. Inside it was the turn of the final arguments of the prosecution and his lawyers in the civil fraud trial in which the prosecutor is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from him to compensate for the deceptions with his accounts from which he benefited for decades. . The judge allowed the former president to intervene for a few minutes, who presented himself as a victim and attacked the judge and the prosecutor in the case.
“Right now, the judge won't let me make the plea because I'll bring up things he doesn't want to hear,” Trump had said upon entering the building, calling the decision “political interference.” “This is a case that should never have been brought,” said Trump, who maintains his innocence. New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, wants the judge to impose $370 million in sanctions on Trump.
The prosecutor accuses Trump, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and other top executives of the Trump Organization of participating in a scheme lasting at least a decade in which they used “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentation” to inflate the Trump's net worth in order to obtain loans from banks on more favorable terms. The judge in the case already ruled in a partial summary that Trump had submitted “fraudulent valuations” of his assets, leaving the trial to determine additional actions and what penalty, if his case, the defendants should receive.
Trump has been playing cat and mouse with the possibility of intervening to make the final argument himself. Initially, his defense requested it, and the judge admitted it, but then his lawyers missed the deadline to accept a time limit on his intervention. This Friday, upon arriving at the court, he said that he still planned to intervene in the final argument, but at the moment of truth he did not request it. However, at the end of the lawyer, Trump did speak.
“Your Honor, this case goes against the facts. The financial statements were perfect. The banks recovered all their money and were as happy as they could be,” Trump defended in a closed-door session, according to statements collected by US news agencies and media. “This is a political witch hunt that should be put aside. “We should receive compensation for what we have been through,” said the former president, ignoring the judge's prohibition on entering into political issues. “I am an innocent man. “I am being persecuted by someone who is running for election and I think we have to go beyond the limits,” he continued. “This is a fraud against me. What has happened here, your honor, is a fraud against me,” he insisted.
He later accused the judge of not listening to him. “I know this bores you,” said the former president. “Control your client,” the judge warned Trump's lawyer, who also attacked prosecutor Letitia James.
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The former president maintained that tripling the square footage of his Trump Tower penthouse in his financial statement was a mistake, “an honest mistake,” that was corrected.
In the afternoon, a New York state attorney said in his closing argument that Trump and his “cash-poor” company could not have completed several development projects without loans and the cash flow from interest savings allowed by the spurious financial statements, AP reports. “The fraud was fundamental to the operation of the Trump Organization's business,” said the lawyer, Kevin Wallace. He said Trump and the other defendants intentionally put false information in the company's financial statements.
Trump skipped the afternoon session in favor of a press conference that served as counterprogramming to the State's closing argument. In a lower Manhattan office building he owns, which he could lose control of as a result of the trial, Trump cursed President Joe Biden and a writer who accused him of rape, E. Jean Carroll.
The New York trial is not one of the four criminal proceedings facing the former president, but it shows that the pattern of falsehoods he has used in his political life has its origins in his business history. In both cases, yes, successfully.
Judge Arthur Engoron explained that he will decide the case because neither party asked for a jury and state law does not allow juries for these types of lawsuits. He said he hopes to have a decision by the end of the month. Last month, in a ruling in which he denied a defense request to advance the verdict, the judge implied that he was leaning toward finding Trump and his co-defendants liable for at least some of the lawsuits. . “Valuations, as has been endlessly elucidated in this trial, can be based on different criteria analyzed in different ways,” Engoron wrote in the Dec. 18 ruling. “But a lie is still a lie.”
This Thursday's hearing had an unpleasant prologue. At 5:30 a.m., hours before the final day of the trial began, Nassau County police said they responded to an “incident” at Judge Engoron's home in Great Neck, Long Island, following a bomb threat. Nothing strange was found at the scene, according to authorities.
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