New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud case against former President Donald Trump took a turn for the worse on Tuesday following testimony by an executive with Deutsche Bank.
Under questioning from Trump’s legal team, David Williams, “who worked on at least one of three loans Deutsche Bank made to Trump in the years before he was elected president, testified Tuesday that it’s ‘atypical, but not entirely unusual’ for the bank to cut a client’s stated asset value by 50% and approve a loan anyway, as it did with Trump,” Bloomberg News reported.
Trump attorney Jesus Suarez asked Williams, a managing director at the German-owned bank, “Is the bank capable of reaching its own judgment based on the evaluation it makes of the guarantor’s financial condition?”
“Certainly, yes,” Williams said.
Bloomberg noted further: “The suit brought last year by New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses Trump of inflating his assets by as much as $3.6 billion a year to get better terms from banks and insurers. Trump is scheduled to take the witness stand for the second time on Dec. 11, when he’s likely to double down on his earlier testimony that no banks were financially harmed by loaning to him.”
James is seeking $250 million in penalties and wants to ban Trump from doing any more business in the state of New York.
At the end of the day, Kevin Wallace, the attorney representing James, emphasized to Judge Arthur Engoron that Wallace’s testimony doesn’t diminish the strength of the state’s case, Bloomberg reported. He clarified that the trial’s pivotal point is not whether Deutsche Bank was a victim but revolves around whether Trump knowingly fabricated and utilized false financial documents.
“The idea that you can’t lie to a bank is pretty well established,” Wallace argued.
Bloomberg added: “Trump, who denies wrongdoing and claims the case is politically motivated, is calling to the stand this week four current and former Deutsche Bank employees — including the family’s former private banker Rosemary Vrablic — as part of his defense case, seeking to flip the script on the state’s version of events. The testimony could undermine the state’s portrayal of Deutsche Bank as Trump’s biggest victim.”
Despite prosecutors’ claims, however, another legal expert accused James of inventing a crime in order to “get Trump.”
In an op-ed, Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, argued in National Review: “The case against the former president lacks victims, so Tish James and Arthur Engoron are inventing some.”
He went on to note that if Trump had really defrauded banks out of more than $168 million, they would have no doubt sought legal remedy from him, but they never did that because they never lost money.
“That is not stopping elected progressive Democrats Letitia James and Arthur Engoron, the state attorney general and her cat’s paw in a judge’s robe, from concocting a mammoth fraud scheme masterminded by Trump in which we’re to believe the banks lost their shirts . . . but just forgot to complain about it,” he wrote.
He went on to note that Engoron ruled before the trial even started that Trump had indeed committed fraud, leaving him “no incentive to litigate as if he were in a normal legal proceeding.” As such, Trump has been left to spar with the judge and the prosecutors to demonstrate that it is little more than a partisan proceeding, McCarthy wrote.
After listing a litany of arguments that put the James-Engoron theory to shame, McCarthy concluded: “It’s an amazing thing to watch: Donald Trump, front-runner in the Republican presidential nomination race, is on trial for supposedly inventing wealth that he didn’t have; and in order to nail him, elected Democrats Tish James and Arthur Engoron are inventing losses that no one ever suffered.”
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