Donald Trump’s sworn testimony from the witness stand in the State of New York’s $250 million civil business fraud case against him is helping Attorney General Letitia James’ attorneys “score points,” according to a legal expert.
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, who is at the courthouse, says Trump has helped James’ case at least several times since taking the stand at 10 AM Monday.
Trump has repeatedly dragged out his answers and tested the patience of Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron, who at least twice has urged Trump’s attorneys to control” him.
Calling it “a rollercoaster of a day so far,” Rubin reports Trump’s testimony has shown “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 he, in fact, did exactly that.”
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In another example, Rubin reports Letitia James’ team “has shown that despite much lower, and sometimes even negative net revenue from leasing that same building, Trump told a Forbes reporter — on tape — that that building ‘threw off’ between $50-60 million per year, another conversation Trump did not recall.”
Trump’s testimony has also “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 tomorrow, 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,” Rubin concludes, “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.”