As Donald Trump testified Monday in his ongoing civil fraud trial, a colleague less steeped in the minutia of this case asked me whether New York Attorney General Letitia James’ team was scoring any points, given how often Trump digressed or ranted.
Indeed, they have.
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Attorneys for the state have shown, for example, that despite having no memory of telling a Wall Street Journal reporter that a particular building was valued at $600 million, a contemporaneous email from his son showed Trump, in fact, did exactly that.
They’ve shown that despite much lower, and sometimes even negative net revenue from leasing that same building, Trump told a Forbes reporter — on tape — that the same building “threw off” between $50-60 million per year, another conversation Trump did not recall.
They’ve shown that Trump’s financial statements dating back nearly a decade valued his Aberdeen property in Scotland as if he could sell thousands of homes immediately, when Trump admitted that he still has not used that property for anything but building a second golf course while holding onto 1,000 acres on which those residences were supposed to be built. And perhaps most damning of all, they exposed that despite signing promises to the Town of Palm Beach and the National Trust for Historic Preservation that he would never use or develop Mar-a-Lago as anything but a private membership club, Trump valued Mar-a-Lago on his financial statements as a private residence, as if those contractual agreements were as disposable as Kleenex. Will state attorneys’ cross-examination of Trump if and when he returns to the stand be similarly productive? Watch this space.
Lisa Rubin is an MS NOW legal correspondent and a former litigator. Previously, she was the off-air legal analyst for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Alex Wagner Tonight.”
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