NEW YORK (AP) — After 10 weeks, 40 witnesses and bursts of courtroom fireworks, testimony wrapped up Wednesday in former President Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial. But a verdict is at least a month away.
Closing arguments are set for Jan. 11, and Judge Arthur Engoron has said he hopes to decide the case by the end of that month. The case threatens to disrupt the 2024 Republican front-runner’s real estate empire and even stop him from doing business in his native state.
The verdict is up to the judge because New York Attorney General Letitia James brought the lawsuit under a state law that doesn’t allow for a jury.
“In a strange way, I’m gonna miss this trial,” Engoron mused aloud Wednesday before the last hours of testimony, which were about accounting standards.
James’ lawsuit accuses Trump, his company and key executives — including sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — of deceiving banks and insurers by giving them financial statements that padded the ex-president’s wealth by billions of dollars.
The suit claims the documents larded the value of such prominent and and personally significant holdings as his Trump Tower penthouse in New York and his Mar-a-Lago club and home in Florida, as well as golf courses, hotels, a Wall Street office building and more. State lawyers contend that Trump got lower interest rates and other benefits because of the riches shown on his statements.
The defendants deny any wrongdoing, and Trump has made that vehemently clear on the witness stand, in the courthouse hallway, and and in frequent comments on his Truth Social platform.
“A total hit job,” he railed Wednesday in an all-caps post that reiterated his complaints that there was “no jury, no victim.” Both James and the judge are Democrats, and Trump casts the case as a partisan attack.
Trump not only testified but voluntarily sat in on several other days of the trial. He wasn’t there Wednesday to see testimony conclude. James, who has attended with some regularity, watched from the courtroom audience.
Trump took a significant legal hit even before the trial, when Engoron ruled that he engaged in fraud. The judge ordered that a receiver take control of some of the ex-president’s properties, but an appeals court has frozen that order for now.
The trial concerns remaining claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. James is seeking penalties of more than $300 million and wants Trump to be banned from doing business in New York.
The attorney general said in a statement: “While the judge already ruled in our favor and found that Donald Trump engaged in years of significant fraud and unjustly enriched himself and his family, this trial revealed the full extent of that fraud — and the defendants’ inability to disprove it.”
Testimony and documents showed the Trump Tower penthouse was claimed as nearly three times its actual size, and that Trump company executives once boosted its estimated value by $20 million partly because of the value of his celebrity. Mar-a-Lago was valued as high as $612 million, based on its potential sale as a private home, though Trump signed a 2002 agreement not “to develop the property for any usage other than club usage.” Trump says he believes it could revert to only a home.
The trial gave the court and onlookers a view into Trump’s properties — sometimes quite literally, as when a real estate broker played a drone video of Mar-a-Lago while testifying for the defense.
Much of the testimony consisted of deep dives into loan underwriting, property appraisal methods and financial practices. For every magazine-like photo of a Trump property, there were pages of accounting rules or lines of charts and spreadsheets.
The proceedings also featured testimony from three of Trump’s adult children: Donald Jr., Eric and their sister Ivanka, who was their fellow executive vice president at the Trump Organization before she left the company for the White House. Former Trump fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen took the stand for the attorney general’s office.
The former president himself was a voluble and sharp-tongued witness, airing his grievances about the case as “a political witch hunt.”
He insisted he was worth billions more, not less, than his financial statements said. Trump insisted that any misstatements were immaterial mistakes and that disclaimers effectively told recipients not to count on the numbers. The disclaimers said, among other things, that the statements weren’t audited.
Trump downplayed his involvement with the statements, despite language saying he — or trustees who oversaw his company’s assets during his presidency — were responsible for the documents.
His discursive answers prompted the judge to bristle that “this is not a political rally.” Complaining that Trump was giving speeches instead of answering questions, Engoron urged defense lawyers to “control” the former president.
Trump’s out-of-court comments also became an issue in the trial, leading to a gag order that barred all the participants from commenting publicly on the judge’s staff. The order, which Trump has decried and his attorneys are appealing, came after he maligned the judge’s principal law clerk.
Engoron has fined Trump a total of $15,000 for what the judge said were violations of the order.
Yet the testimony phase ended on a cordial note Wednesday, with Trump attorney Christopher Kise thanking the court for investing time in the case and the judge expressing appreciation for all the work lawyers had done. Some of the defense attorneys shook James’ hand as they headed out of court.
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Associated Press writer Michael R. Sisak contributed.
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