Left: New York Attorney General Letitia James AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File). Center: Justice Arthur Engoron (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File). Right: Former President Donald Trump (AP Photo/Seth Wenig).
Donald Trump slammed New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and his civil fraud trial judge as his family’s persecutors in a long-awaited appellate brief that seeks to reverse his $454 million dollar judgment on seven different grounds, claiming that the jurist who wrote that the “frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience” didn’t even understand “basic banking concepts like a money market account.”
In the Monday filing submitted to the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, First Department, the former president argued that New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron “unaccountably rewarded NYAG’s lawless efforts at every turn” to punish one of the “most visionary and iconic real estate developers in American history” for the Trump Organization’s “complex, highly successful transactions” with “sophisticated Wall Street banks that left all parties deeply satisfied and had no impact on the public interest.”
The brief went so far as to claim that James sought to punish him for violations that “do not exist at all.”
Claiming that Engoron was “overruled with alarming frequency, including multiple times in this case,” the Trump team said the judge’s “erroneous” decisions amounted to a rubber stamping of James’ “limitless power to target anyone she desires, including her self-described political opponents,” with economic implications that are “a disaster for New York.”
On that front, a footnote included three hyperlinks to videos of James’ 2018 remarks when on the campaign trail for attorney general, when she vowed to “use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.”
“In fact, NYAG campaigned on the promise that she would ‘get Trump’ and made this promise the single greatest point of her campaign. No statute authorizes this power grab, so NYAG had to invent that power by applying Executive Law § 63(12) in a way never seen before,” the brief said. “Yet, Supreme Court unaccountably rewarded NYAG’s lawless efforts at every turn.”
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And while Engoron wrote in February, by way of example about inflated valuations, that Trump’s billion-dollar valuation of Mar-a-Lago would make it worth “more than the most expensive private residence listed in the country by approximately 400%,” the Trump brief insisted that the former president’s “estimates of his net worth were very low and conservative, not high—the exact opposite of what NYAG alleges” — and that the judge didn’t have an in-depth understanding of financial matters, citing “trial testimony”:
Among others, Supreme Court—which struggled to understand basic banking concepts like a money market account—valued the iconic Mar-a-Lago Club (“Mar-a-Lago”) as worth $18 to $27.6 million—50 to 100 times below its actual value. According to trial testimony, that value is between $1.1 and $1.5 billion and is now significantly higher based on current market conditions.
From here, the brief made the case that there are seven reasons Engoron’s “erroneous decisions” should be overturned, including that the massive penalty is “baseless and must be reversed in toto” for violating the Eighth Amendment as an excessive fine and that the judge undervalued Mar-a-Lago to such a degree that it “infected” the trial.
In statements to Molly Crane-Newman of the New York Daily News, the AG’s office said the defendant’s attorneys are “raising arguments that they were already sanctioned and fined for” and are doomed to fail on appeal, to which Trump lawyer Christopher Kise responded: “President Trump is a visionary and iconic real estate titan who has been baselessly pursued and persecuted by the New York Attorney General’s unprecedented abuse of power.”
Kise claimed that, if anything, the civil fraud trial evidence established that Trump’s “net worth far exceeded what was reported in his financial statements and the sophisticated bankers involved pursued and enjoyed a long and satisfactory business relationship with him as a prized client.” He slammed Engoron as well for handing down “draconian, unlawful, and unconstitutional penalties[.]”
Read the brief here.
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