Trump hides  behind previously  rejected document

The fraud trial against the Trump Organization reached a momentous moment on Monday with the testimony of former President Donald Trump, who expressed himself angrily and took refuge behind a legal notice included in his company’s financial documents, a notice that was previously rejected by the judge.

Trump finally sat down as a witness after attending several days of the process, which began on October 2 and in which alleged illegalities related to fraud in the company, a compensation of 250 million dollars, and the veto of his businesses in the state of New York, as claimed by the Prosecutor’s Office.

After taking the oath before the judge, Trump testified for four hours; At first, he seemed calm, but he raised his tone in long answers as the irritation of Judge Arthur Engoron grew, who reproached him for giving political “speeches” and urged the defense to “control” his client or risk expulsion.

The former president refused to give simple answers to Deputy Prosecutor Kevin Wallace about the valuation of his assets in the financial documents on which the case is based, allegedly inflated to obtain advantages with banks and insurers, and even said the figures were higher. in reality than on paper.

Engoron already summarily ruled before the trial began that Trump and the other defendants – his two eldest sons and two former company executives – committed continued fraud, a decision that the former president and his lawyers denounced as unfair.

The tension increased until Trump exploded before the judge: “You ruled against me, you said I was a fraud before you knew anything about me,” he snapped at Engoron, looking directly at him, while he called the prosecutor, Letitia James, “corrupt politics”; Later, he attacked both through his social networks.

Trump insisted time after time that he did not commit fraud because the financial documents include a clause that warns of their subjectivity and renders them “worthless”; he added that the allegations are outside the statute of limitations because so much time has passed and that the banks got all their money back and “didn’t complain.”

The legal notice in question “is always respected in court, except by this particular judge,” he maintained, but the judge invited him to read the summary ruling in which he declared him responsible for fraud, and in which he opined, with certain jocularity, that Trump’s own argument about that clause is the one that has no value.

After the lunch break, and in a more restrained atmosphere, prosecutor Wallace exposed loan documents from Deutsche Bank to the Trump Organization in which one of the conditions was that it maintain a net worth of at least $2.5 billion reflected each year. in financial documents.

“The figures for my net worth are substantially higher than those included in the financial documents, therefore you have no case,” he reiterated, moving on to a diatribe in which he referred to the impact of the process on his aspirations to return to the White House.

 There will be no session, on Tuesday, since it is election day in the local Council and Supreme Court, but on Wednesday the Prosecutor’s Office will call Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, as a witness.