The expression on his face was already a statement of his state, of the anger that ran inside him. When Donald Trump entered the New York courtroom and took his seat on the bench, passing New York Attorney General Letitia James in the front row, he avoided looking at her. Not a glance.
In a departure from the usual bows, prosecutor Kevin Wallace of James’ office laid out the civil case for defrauding banks by inflating valuations of his assets to get better loans from banks. At no time did he allude to the position of president of the United States that he held. He only repeated his name and always to link it to the cheating that he allegedly made in the balance sheets of his organization to profit from it.
In presenting the case, Wallace urged Judge Arthur Engoron to ban Trump from doing business in New York state. He argued that his fraudulent reporting of the group’s financial status had convinced banks to take risks to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“While it may be one thing to exaggerate for Forbes magazine, you cannot do so while doing business in the state of New York,” the prosecutor said. He claimed that the entire business procedure was full of “lies after lies.” His company used a scheme of “persistent illegal acts” that were decided by Trump himself. The civil case that follows also includes his children Donald Jr. and Eric and a couple of employees.
Wallace stressed that they inflated their financial reports by a figure ranging between $812 million and $2.2 billion, knowing that they were false statements that only sought to obtain benefits.
In his argument, the prosecutor showed several videos of the judicial statements in the summary in which all of them, Trump and his children, deny any responsibility for the operation of their business. In any case, they say, the fault lay with the chief financier, Allen Weisselberg, whom he accused of lying.
Since it was a civil case, Trump was not required to be present, but he wanted to attend so he could attack everyone who tries to hold him accountable. Before entering the room, before journalists, Trump said that everything boiled down to an attempt to damage his electoral campaign for the 2024 presidential elections.
“This has to do with electoral interference, clearly and simply,” he said. “They want to hurt me so that the campaign doesn’t go so well,” she insisted. During one of the breaks, she attacked the attorney general for going after him. He also had to receive Judge Arthur Engoron, whom he described as an “operative” of the Democrats. “We are going to be here for months when the judge has already made a decision. This is ridiculous,” he reiterated. “The banks were happy because I returned all the money, there is no fraud,” he proclaimed.
The defense lawyers expressed themselves along these lines. “President Trump made millions of dollars building one of the most successful real estate empires in the world. “He has literally made a fortune by being right in his business,” said lawyer Chris Kise. The key to his theory is that valuations are not a certain science, they are always subjective, even if they deviate by several hundred million. “There was no victim,” he stressed.
