Donald Trump Takes The Stand In NYC Fraud Trial
What new crimes will The Human Random Lie Generator confess to? Will he be able to control himself? What happens when he cannot?
On the eve of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump testifying in the civil fraud case against their father and the Trump Organization, The New Republic posted a story headlined: “Trump Melts Down as Idiot Sons Are Set to Take the Stand”. What’s more severe than “melting down”?
Both sons were defensive and annoyed on the stand, unable to explain their obvious involvement in creating and signing off on financials statements that bore no relationship to reality. They both said it was the accountants’ fault.
The real (and obvious) question, of course, is where did these accountants get the intimate finanical details concerning the Trump family institution to prepare the damning financial statements. And the real (and obvious) answer is: the Trumps.
When a corporation signs an engagement letter with an accounting firm, the president and chief financial officer of the corporation sign that letter, which keeps the accountants safe from liability and requires the corporation executives to sign off on the information, stating they understand what is in the statements and they confirm that they are accurate. It’s the fuckin law. The signee for the corporation has a legal obligation to ensure the information was accurate.
Even if they don’t remember committing all of these crimes, they are no less guilty. Their signatures on documents committing bank, insurance and tax fraud make them responsible for the criminal activities. As an executive with signatory authority, stupidity is not a legal defense.
As Tristan Snell tweeted:
The Trumps’ defense in the NY AG fraud case is
1) It wasn’t fraud
2) If it was fraud, it was our accountants/lawyers’ faultBut, problems
1) The judge ALREADY RULED it was fraud!
2) Donald Trump and Don Jr and Eric all signed the fraudulent statements and thus vouched for them
CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen stated that Junior’s and Eric’s testimony was the absolute worst case scenario for Donald Trump. The Trumps clearly committed fraud for years and years and years. Junior showed a blatant disregard for the accuracy of the financial statements and treated his appearance like a joke at times (making a lecherous request that the court’s sketch artist to make him look sexy) and every time Eric denied being involved in some aspect of the financials, he was immediately shown an email that showed he was lying.
And now the Very Stable Genius — a man who incriminates himself with just about every statement he makes concerning his four criminal trials and is prone to incoherent wandering rants when he gets worked up — will take the stand on Monday. When Trump is confronted with undeniable evidence of rampant criminal activity and forced to answer questions (and follow-up questions about what he just said), he is bound to lose his shit, isn’t he?
Michiel McCarty, a banking expert, testified earlier that the Trump Organization avoided paying more than $168 million by manipulating the value of its assets when getting bank loans. (So much for Trump’s insistent claims that no one was harmed by these loans.)
Junior admitted, “I know nothing about GAAP” (generally accepted accounting principles) beyond what the letters stand for. The executive vice president displayed a “conveniently fuzzy memory” about every aspect of his family’s organization, somewhere he has worked for his entire life. He also claimed to not know how to pronounce common words in the finance field, such as “revocable”. Junior made it sound like he has a “no-show job”.
Eric Trump took the stand on Thursday, “parroting many of the same excuses as his brother did”. He was less able to control himself, getting “a little testy” and “combative” before “he was caught lying about the financial statements”. Every time he claimed ignorance about the financial statements, “the prosecution introduced evidence that seemed to undercut the younger Trump’s position”. He also said he doesn’t focus on appraisals. “I pour concrete.”
Eric the Concrete Pourer later told reporters “we’re going to win” this case. Except the Trumps already lost this case back in September, when New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron — whom Trump has been insulting online for weeks (“Trump and developer Hating Judge”, a “political hack”) — looked at the huge amount of evidence and ruled that the Trump Organization committed mass fraud for years, and no trial to determine that was necessary. As part of Engoron’s judgment, all of the Trump Organization’s business licenses in New York State will be terminated. This current trial will determine whether the Trumps committed specific illegal acts and what the monetary penalty will be. The State has asked for a fine of at least $250 million.
A commenter on a Jimmy Kimmel YouTube video (“Trump’s Dumb Sons Testify in Fraud Trial . . .”): “Eric and Don Jr. make Beavis and Butt-head look like astrophysicists”.
On Friday, the judge accused Trump’s lawyers of misogyny. One of the lawyers, Christopher Kise, has pissed off the judge several times. Kise’s main role seems to be to act as dumb and clueless as possible and try to provoke the judge into saying something that can be used in an appeal to overturn his verdict against Trump.
Eric’s testimony on Friday was even worse than the day before.
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman: “Eric done for the day, and leaves the stand having been beat up badly. He signed document after document, [including] for bank loans, that were inaccurate. He tries a combo of ‘I relied on the accountants’ and ‘I don’t recall,’ but often flounders.
More Litman: The “trial is a series of standout memorable moments — maybe 10 or so — surrounded by a lot of uneventful testimony. And so far the moments in the fraud trial have all broken for the NY AG & against the Trumps."
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said the sons’ testimony could complicate their father’s appearance:
When he was deposed over a year ago he took the Fifth, he wouldn’t answer anything other than his name and he took the Fifth as he is entitled to do. But the world has changed for Donald Trump. Back then, there were all these swirling criminal investigations; none of the four indictments we have now had landed. The world was a bit more uncertain for him. A year and change later he’s been indicted on four things . . . [It's possible that Trump] takes the stand and says something that piques prosecutors’ interest, they may think maybe we should open a criminal case on him for fraud. The risk of taking the Fifth is that the judge in this case, this civil case, can say I’m using that against you.
Ivanka Trump will testify later this week. She has been going to extreme lengths to avoid testifying — and has failed in each attempt. Her last bullshit attempt was to claim that testifying during a “school week” creates an “undue hardship”.
As Andrew Wortman stated: “She has 6 nannies, 4 babysitters, a live-in staff, a mother-in-law who lives 2 blocks away and a sister-in-law who watches her kids whenever she needs her to. But yeah, better pause the trial for Princess Ivanka because ‘it’s a school week’ and this creates ‘undue hardship.’ GTFO”.
I don’t recall Junior and Eric trying to get out of answering questions under oath. But Ivanka is a key player and witness, according to Salon’s Heather Digby Parton:
[I]f any family member knows the details of the Trump companies’ inflated valuations, it would be Ivanka. She was the main reason Deutsche Bank agreed to work with Trump in the first place, and bank officials apparently understood her to be the heir apparent. Forbes magazine dealt with Trump’s valuation problems for years, and Ivanka was right in the thick of it. As the magazine reported this week:
The attorney general will have plenty of questions for Donald Trump’s eldest daughter. Ivanka helped lead the acquisition of two assets at the center of the lawsuit, the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. and the Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami. She also lived in another property caught up in the proceedings, a condo building named Trump Park Avenue in New York City.
The article describe a meeting Forbes staffers had with Donald Trump in 2015 when he tried to convince them he was far richer than he actually was. After the meeting began, they were “spontaneously” joined by “little Ivanka,” who proceeded to give them a totally bogus valuation on the National Doral resort mentioned above. She and Trump worked the room like a tag team, massively inflating the club’s worth and insisting it had no debt when in fact there were liabilities of more than $100 million. Virtually every detail of the Doral deal they presented was fiction.
That, it would seem, was Ivanka’s job. She did it with condo sales in the Caribbean and Mexico, she did it with investment banks and she did it with the financial press. Nobody in the family, except perhaps Donald Trump himself, knows more about the Trump Organization’s systematic overvaluation of its businesses and properties than she does.
Around 2:00 am on Wednesday, Trump posted a long rant that concluded: “There is no Victim (except me!) Leave my children alone, Engoron. You are a disgrace to the legal profession!”
Interestingly, Trump does not consider Junior, Ivanka, or Eric, to be victims in this case. Alina Habba, a Trump attorney who has (unknowingly, I assume) confessed to Trump’s guilt in one of his other upcoming trials and infamously forgot to check the box on the form to request a jury trial, has also been whining to the media about how the Big Bad NY AG is forcing Trump’s “children” to testify. Fact Check: Junior turns 46 next month, Ivanka is 42, and Eric will be 40 in January. All three “children” are older than Habba, who is 39, but whose understanding of the law, admittedly, does appear to be on the level of a small child.
MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin overheard Habba giving false hope to Trump over the phone on Wednesday. “Overheard in the elevator: Alina Habba takes a call from Trump. ‘Hi, sir, I am in the elevator in the courtroom.’ Pause. ‘I will knock them dead.’”
Narrator: She did not knock them dead.
At the end of the day, she went on Newsmax and lied: “We had a very strong day today. There you go. That’s us.” She also stated the Trumps have done nothing wrong, but — again — they ALREADY have been found guilty of committing years of massive fraud.
In another late-night rant, Trump referred to Habba, who has also complained that the judge’s clerk has (allegedly) rolled her eyes at various moments, as “Petty Mason”. The one time in his life the Orange Idiot comes up with a nickname that is actually clever, it ends up being nothing but a typo that he never even saw before posting.
Washington Post, November 1, 2023:
The New York case is in some ways the most deeply personal to Trump, advisers say. Though he is not required to attend, Trump has shown up to court for seven days of the proceedings since they began in early October, even as some advisers have argued for him to stay away. He has told advisers he wants to attend because his children’s inheritance and his family’s brand are on the line. Several people close to him described him as livid about the trial. “Everything about it makes him angry — including that it’s hurting his children,” said one adviser, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to address the family dynamics.
“The trial strikes at his identity and the family. His kids, what he’s been able to build over years and years and years,” said David Urban, a longtime adviser. . . .
“In my opinion, Donald Trump was more upset when the PGA Tour took the event away from Bedminster than when he was impeached, because it struck at the brand and the name,” Urban said, referring to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “That’s what he cares about . . . ‘the empire that I’ve built.’” . . .
A person who worked with the company said the family has grown more conspiratorial [as of late] and now is leery of “enemies around every corner.” . . .
Everything I have seen, read, and heard about Trump since the late ‘80s leads me to believe Trump doesn’t give a shit about leaving anything to any of his children. Once he’s dead, his wealth could be destroyed or burned for all he cares. Now, when it comes to his name and how he will be remembered, I’m sure he cares a lot about that.
Eric Trump said Donald Trump is “fired up” to be in court on Monday.
Donald Trump last testified in court in 2013 — and his mental state has deteriorated over the last 10 years. He cannot help blabbling and ranting and pinballing from subject to unconnected subject, telling old lies, creating new contradictory lies, and constantly incriminating himself. It’s bound to be an utter disaster. When the judge orders him to stop tossing his word salads, will he? And what will happen if he doesn’t stop? What will he do when Letitia James smirks at him from her seat?
By the way, Trump claimed on Saturday that he won all 50 states in 2020. Where can he go from there? He may soon be insisting that every single vote was cast for him. He will say it’s a fact: he beat Biden 158,429,631 to 0.