What we can expect from Donald Trump in court today
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out what to look for when Donald Trump testifies in his civil trial in Manhattan.
Today, the 24th witness in Donald Trump’s civil trial in Manhattan will take the stand: it is Trump himself.
He will try to maintain the business interests that are at the core of his public persona. The trial concerns the question of whether Trump must pay a fine for committing fraud. The judge, Arthur Engoron, has already ruled that Trump’s financial statements “clearly contain fraudulent valuations.” Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the case, says Trump overvalued his assets by as much as $2.2 billion. According to her, the fine should be $250 million.
I asked Susanne Craig, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on Trump’s finances and taxes and who covered the trial, what to expect if Trump were to testify.
What are you going to listen to?
When you think about the story of Donald Trump, it’s the story of his money. It is his essence, and that is why he is so excited about this process. He has been lying about his net worth for so long that I think he has come to believe the false story he has set forth.
His first defense will probably be that he was busy building buildings, flying around in helicopters and signing autographs, and that he didn’t have time for the minutiae of appraisals and filing forms with banks. He left that to his accountants and his lawyers.
He will also probably say that there were disclaimers in the financial statements that make them effectively meaningless.
And of course you’ll hear that his assets aren’t just worth a lot; many of them are invaluable.
Trump was testy when Judge Engoron called him to the stand before issuing a gag order during the first week of the trial. How snarky will Trump be today?
We have no reason to believe we won’t see that side of Donald Trump. We’ve seen it pretty much every time he’s been in court.
Almost since the trial began, Trump has attacked the judge’s clerk. He thinks she’s a biased Democratic Party operative. The judge imposed a gag order on him for this, and he was fined twice for violating it. Last week, Trump’s lawyers attacked the clerk again, prompting the judge to issue a gag order barring them from making public statements about his communications with his staff. Team Trump could very well continue their attacks, and I will keep an eye out for that.
Doesn’t that risk angering the judge and overshadowing the actual case?
That’s right, and that may also be the intention. On Friday, the debate over the clerk overshadowed Eric Trump’s testimony. It plays well with the former president’s primary audience, his supporters.
What about the banks to which the annual accounts have been submitted?
He’ll say the banks should have read the disclaimers, and anyway, they’re doing their own due diligence.
Another point he’s probably going to make – and this isn’t unconvincing to a wider audience, I think – is that there were no casualties here. There is no requirement that there be any victims in this case, but all the loans in question were performing loans, so the banks got paid.
Sure, there’s an argument that they would have gotten more money because the interest rates they charged would have been higher if he hadn’t submitted false documents. But he will claim that there is no evil, no wrongdoing.
In our reporting since 2016, we have looked at various types of asset manipulation he carried out for financial gain. He got away with it for decades, whether it was filing financial statements with banks to get loans, or inflating his assets for magazines, or making his assets seem less valuable when it came to certain transactions with the Internal Revenue Service.
How will the interrogation differ from the interrogation of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. last week?
One thing that will separate his testimony from the time his sons spent on the witness stand is that Donald Trump does not use email – we have not seen any emails from him in evidence. Anything referencing the former president comes in emails or notes from someone else referencing him. Or his signature on documents, but that is not as powerful as email.
What was compelling about the attorney general’s direct investigation of Eric Trump last week was that the attorney general’s lawyers put email after email after email on the screen questioning him about this valuation of this real estate and that valuation of that real estate. The repetitive nature of the questioning left a strong impression and undermined Eric Trump’s claims that he was not involved in the details of the company and valuations at the heart of the case.
Do you expect Trump to follow the path set by his lawyer, who said earlier in the trial that a statement of value is an estimate and not an absolute value?
Arriving at an appraisal is an art, not a science, but you can’t push it to the limit.
The attorney general doesn’t just say there was a huge reach. The evidence isn’t just, “Oh, he inflated his numbers a little.” There are indications that the input for the valuations was incorrect. Things like: Did the Trump Organization have comparisons that were actually comparable?
For example, when determining the value of an apartment with a view of Central Park, did they compare it to a smaller apartment complex further away without a view, or to a comparable apartment nearby?
What will Trump say when questioned about Michael Cohen’s testimony that Trump had a net worth in mind and wanted Cohen to “reverse engineer” the statements, inflating the numbers to arrive at that figure?
Michael Cohen said Trump did not specifically order him to inflate the numbers. He compared Trump’s actions to a mob boss who tells you what he wants without telling you directly. Trump will use this when asked and say that he did not explicitly order Cohen to do anything.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the upper 50s. In the evening there should be a slight chance of rain and a temperature drop into the low 50s.
ALTERNATE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Election Day).
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‘Green mansions’
Dear Diary:
It was a summer evening in 1974 and I was on my way to visit my friend, who lived on Ocean Avenue near Avenue J in Brooklyn.
I came from Queens and read a paperback novel, “Green Mansions” by William Henry Hudson, while waiting on an elevated platform for the M train.
At one point I took a step and the book fell from my hands onto the rails.
Suddenly a tall young man jumped down, picked it up, climbed back up and handed it to me with a smile on his face.