A New York judge on Tuesday granted a partial summary judgement to Attorney General Letitia James in her civil suit against Donald Trump, ruling that the ex-president and his company built his real estate empire on fraud and deceit by exaggerating his net worth and overvaluing assets to secure financing and make other deals.
Judge Arthur Engoron rescinded some of Trump’s business licenses and said that an independent monitor would continue to oversee operations at the Trump Organization, The Associated Press reported.
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Engoron’s decision came days before the start of a non-jury trial in the lawsuit.That trial is set to begin on October 2, and Engoron will decide on a few remaining issues in James’s lawsuit, including the $250 million in penalties the attorney general requested.
“In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies,” Engoron wrote in his 35-page ruling. “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”
Trump’s lawyers had asked the judge to throw out the case in their own motion for summary judgement. Instead, Engoron fined five of Trump’s attorneys $7,500 each for “engaging in repetitive, frivolous arguments,” saying he had already “emphatically rejected” those arguments and equated them with “the time-loop in the film ‘Groundhog Day.'”
He declined, however, to sanction Trump, his two eldest sons, and other defendants.
Engoron said that Trump had routinely lied about the size of his properties, including Trump Tower in New York and Mar-a-Lago in Florida, to bolster their value. The judge noted that Trump had inflated the value of his penthouse at Trump Tower by claiming it was three times the size it actually is and inflated the value of Mar-a-Lago by $2,300 percent.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron wrote.
Trump insisted he did nothing wrong and said that the exaggerated values on his financial statements were irrelevant because he included a disclaimer saying they couldn’t be trusted. And besides, he said, the banks “made a lot of money” on his deals and didn’t care.
The Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud last year in an unrelated criminal case, accused of helping executives dodge taxes on sizable perks. The organization was fined $1.6 million.
Trump is facing four criminal indictments — one on New York for financial misdeeds related to hush money paid to a porn actress, one in Georgia accusing him and 18 co-defendants of a conspiracy to change the votes in the state’s 2020 presidential election, and two federal case in Miami and Washington.
The Miami case relates to documents, many of them classified, Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago after he lost the 2020 election and left the White House, while the Washington case has to do with the attempt to stop Congress’s certification of the results of the 2020 election.
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[Featured image: FILE – Former President Donald Trump a rally in Summerville, S.C., September 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Artie Walker Jr., File)]
