Trump's lawyers rest their defense case with another request to end NYC fraud trial – New York Daily News
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Donald Trump’s lawyers rested their defense case Tuesday at his civil fraud trial without calling him back to the witness stand — ending instead with a well-paid expert who came out swinging for the former president and a fifth request to end the trial.
After officially resting, Trump lawyer Chris Kise asked the judge for a directed verdict and said he’d put it in writing later this week. State lawyer Kevin Wallace criticized the latest bid as “silly” and a “colossal” waste of resources.
“There is no way I am going to grant that,” Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron said, advising Kise he’d be wasting his time. “But I’m not going to tell you not to send something.”
Trump’s lawyers capped their case with NYU accounting professor Eli Bartov, who acknowledged raking in shy of a million dollars from Trump last week.
Bartov, who previously described the case as “absurd,” continued to earn his fee during his third day of colorful testimony.
The professor boosted Trump’s primary arguments, claiming that his review of the records showed no evidence of accounting fraud, that banks didn’t make lending decisions based on Trump’s financial statements, and that valuing buildings is a subjective exercise.
After Bartov, Judge Engoron heard from the state’s first of two rebuttal witnesses, who revealed the backstory behind how Trump’s Fifth Ave triplex was falsely recorded as being three times its size in Trump’s annual statements, overvaluing it by more than $200 million.
Kevin Sneddon, a former senior vice president and managing director at Trump International Realty from 2011 to 2012, said the sizing came from Trump’s convicted former finance chief and co-defendant in the case, Allen Weisselberg, who gave him the info when he asked him to value it.
“I asked if I could see it. [Weisselberg] said that was not possible,” Sneddon testified, adding that the CFO said he didn’t have a floor plan or other details.
“He said, ‘It’s quite large … I think it’s around 30,000 square feet.’”
Weisselberg’s former deputy, Jeffrey McConney, also a defendant in the case, previously pinned the bad math on Sneddon. But the former exec said he was just passing on what he heard from the controller’s boss when he emailed the figures to McConney in 2012.
On Wednesday, Engoron is expected to hear from the state’s final rebuttal witness, Cornell University accounting professor Dr. Eric Lewis, over vehement objections from Trump’s lawyers.
The trial is then expected to see a month-long recess. Engoron is expected to receive closing briefs on Jan. 5 and hear summations on Jan. 11. He expects to issue a verdict by the end of January.
Trump took to Truth Social Tuesday to lament that he had not testified in his own defense, having bailed at the last minute on Sunday. He claimed a gag order prohibiting him from remarking on the civil servants who staff Engoron’s courtroom had taken “away my constitutional right to defend myself.”
Before the trial, Engoron found Trump, his sons, Eric and Don Jr., Weisselberg and McConney were liable for committing persistent and repeated fraud for years — the AG’s top claim — by inflating the value of Trump-owned assets in statements submitted to banks and lenders as a means to boost his bottom line illegally.
The verdict on the remaining claims will determine whether Trump and his crew committed insurance fraud and other offenses and how much they must pay back in illegal profits.
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