Lawyers for Donald Trump and the state of New York are launching a last-ditch effort to make their case in the former president’s civil business fraud trial.
Both sides filed court documents Friday outlining the findings of more than 10 weeks of testimony this fall.
The documents preview closing arguments, scheduled for Thursday. Judge Arthur Engoron has said he hopes to decide the verdict later this month.
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the lawsuit. She accuses the former president and current Republican front-runner of misleading banks and insurers by vastly inflating his net worth.
Trump denies any wrongdoing and calls the case a political attack by Democrats.
The case could prevent him from doing business in the state where he built his real estate empire.
In a final effort to make their case, lawyers for New York state and Donald Trump’s defense filed court papers Friday highlighting the conclusions of more than 10 weeks of testimony in his civil trial for commercial fraud.
The documents preview closing arguments, scheduled for Thursday, in a lawsuit that has implications for the Republican presidential front-runner even as he fights four criminal cases in multiple courts.
The New York civil case could end up preventing him from doing business in the state where he built his real estate empire.
The former president faces four criminal cases in different courts. fake images
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the lawsuit, which accuses Trump, his company and key executives of deceiving banks and insurers by vastly inflating his net worth. James maintains that Trump obtained attractive rates on loans and insurance because of the wealth he claimed in his personal “statements of financial position,” or “SFCs,” for short.
The lawsuit alleges the documents gave exorbitant values for golf courses, hotels and more, including Trump’s former home in his namesake tower in New York and his current home at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. , Florida.
“The conclusion that the defendants intended to defraud in preparing and certifying Trump’s SFCs is inescapable,” Kevin Wallace, an attorney with James’ office, wrote in a filing Friday. “The countless deceptive schemes they employed to inflate asset values and conceal facts were so outrageous as to belie an innocent explanation.”
Eric Trump was one of many who testified that there was no crime. Andrea Renault/ZUMA/SplashNews.com
The defendants, including his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, deny any wrongdoing.
The former president claims that his financial statements were actually billions of dollars short, and that any overestimates, such as valuing his Trump Tower penthouse at nearly three times its actual size, were mere errors and made no difference to the bigger picture. of his fortune. .
He also says the documents are essentially legally bulletproof because they said the figures were not audited, among other caveats. The recipients understood them simply as starting points for their own analyses, the defense says.
Documents filed Friday by Trump’s defense previewed closing arguments in the case. AP
“Errors or inaccuracies occur all the time in accounting,” attorneys Michael Madaio and Christopher Kise wrote in a filing Friday for Trump, his Trump Organization and some executives.
Such errors do not constitute fraud unless there are indications of concealment, forgery, deception or the like, and there were none, the lawyers argued.
Separately, defense attorneys argued that the lawsuits against executive vice presidents Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. should be dismissed because they never had “anything more than peripheral knowledge of or participation in the creation, preparation or use” of their financial statements. father.
The children relied on the work of other Trump Organization executives and an outside accounting firm that prepared those documents, attorneys Clifford Robert and Michael Farina said, echoing the children’s own testimony.
His father also took the stand and made a series of comments in the courtroom hallway.
He described the case as a political maneuver by James, Judge Arthur Engoron and other Democrats, saying they are abusing the legal system to try to cut off his chances of taking back the White House this year.
The verdict is up to the judge because James brought the case under a state law that does not allow a jury.
Engoron has said it expects to make a decision by the end of this month.
He will weigh charges of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. But it ruled before trial on the lawsuit’s main claim, finding that Trump and other defendants engaged in fraud for years.
With that ruling, the judge ordered a receiver to take control of some of the former president’s properties, but an appeals court froze that order for now.
Now, James is seeking additional sanctions of more than $300 million and wants Trump to be banned from doing business in New York.
During the trial, Engoron fined Trump a total of $15,000 after finding that he violated a gag order prohibiting all trial participants from publicly commenting on the judge’s staff. t
The order was imposed after Trump defamed the judge’s top law clerk.
Trump’s lawyers are appealing the gag order.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn