Left: New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks to the media, Nov. 6, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File); Center: Justice Engoron. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File); Right: Former President Donald Trump speaks during a break in closing arguments at New York Supreme Court, Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Nearly one month after the former president’s appeal attacked his Manhattan civil fraud case and $454 million dollar judgment as a politicized quest to punish him for violations that “do not exist at all,” the New York Attorney General’s Office has responded that there was “overwhelming evidence” the Trump Organization and its executives, including Donald Trump’s eldest sons, in the 2010s and into 2021 “acted with an intent to defraud” by engaging in an “illegal scheme to misleadingly inflate the net worth” of Trump “by as much $2.2 billion a year.”
In February, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, following a bench trial that Trump declined to testify during, that the “frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” writing, to provide an example, that Trump “insisted that he believed Mar-a-Lago is worth ‘between a billion and a billion five’ today, which would require not only valuing it as a private residence, which the deed prohibits, but as more than the most expensive private residence listed in the country by approximately 400%.”
