Having Ruled that Trump Inflated Assets, Judge Engoron Is Suddenly Stunned That Assets Appear to Have Been Inflated!

Is there anything about the Trump legal cases that is normal?

That’s a rhetorical question, of course.

As you may recall, a seemingly endless bench trial has still not been concluded in the civil fraud case brought by New York state’s attorney general, elected progressive Democrat Letitia James, against former president Donald Trump. James is asking for the corporate death penalty — i.e., that the Trump organization be put out of business in the state — as well as a whopping $370 million in disgorgement damages, notwithstanding that there are no fraud victims in the case.

In light of this gargantuan potential punishment, the lawsuit should have resulted in a jury trial, not a bench trial. But whether because of the monstrous statutes involved, bad lawyering by Team Trump, or some combination of both, it is a bench trial before a state judge, elected progressive Democratic Arthur Engoron.

So (and yes, that’s me sighing), the New York Times reports that Judge Engoron, not surprisingly, was reading about himself in the New York Times when he stumbled upon revelations — which I wrote about here — that Manhattan’s district attorney, elected progressive Democrat Alvin Bragg, may be about to charge Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s chief financial officer and co-defendant in the civil fraud case — with perjury, based on statements Weisselberg made in testimony at the trial before Judge Engoron. If it happens, it would be the second time Bragg has charged the 76-year-old CFO — last time, after a conviction on minor tax charges, Weisselberg was jailed at Rikers Island for about a hundred days, as the notoriously progressive prosecutor pressured him to flip on Trump.

Specifically (best we can tell from the reporting), Weisselberg implausibly testified that he never paid much attention to the size of Trump’s plush Trump Tower triplex apartment which, though a bit less than 11,000 square feet in area, was estimated at about 30,000 feet in Trump’s statements of financial condition (which are the core of AG James’s case). As a result, the apartment was valued at a risible $327 million — nearly four times as much as the $88 million price tag for what, at the time, was the record-high sale price of a comparable dwelling in Manhattan.

On October 12, after Weisselberg’s testimony, Forbes published a story headlined, “Trump’s Longtime CFO Lied, Under Oath, About Trump Tower Penthouse.” The report related that, for years, Weisselberg played a key role in trying to convince the magazine of the value of the apartment, in connection with his (and Trump’s) assiduous campaigns to convince Forbes that Trump’s fortune was worthy of recognition it its profiles of the fabulously wealthy.

In other words, Weisselberg’s incredible testimony about the triplex was . . . yes . . . incredible.

Perhaps that would be a revelation to Captain Obvious, but it shouldn’t be to Judge Engoron. He cited the inflation of this asset as part of his conclusion that Trump had committed persistent fraud even before the trial started, and thus long before he heard Weisselberg’s testimony. (See Judge Engoron’s September 26, 2023, opinion, p. 21, describing the exaggeration of the triplex apartment’s size, concluding it had been overvalued by up to $207 million, and observing that Trump, Weisselberg, and their co-defendants continued their “misrepresentation” even after they “received written notification from Forbes that Donald Trump had been overestimating the square footage . . . by a factor of three” — after which, in footnote 11, Engoron elaborated that the matter had been brought to Weisselberg’s attention, who declined to correct the misrepresentation.)

Nevertheless, based upon reading the Times – i.e., not based on any formal motion from James’s office about any need to address Weisselberg’s apparently false testimony — Engoron contacted the parties and directed Trump’s lawyers to address Weisselberg’s testimony and what the court is to make of it in light of the reportedly ongoing criminal plea negotiations.

This is inane. The record in the trial was completed weeks ago, after summations. The only thing we have been waiting for is Engoron’s verdict — and not exactly with bated breath. He has been as solicitous of James as could be throughout the proceedings, and there’s no reason to believe his final judgment will depart from that. In a normal trial, if a juror read something in the newspaper that was not part of the evidentiary record and wanted to include it in the jury’s deliberations on the case, that would violate the rules and draw an admonition from the judge. Here, the judge himself is bringing media reporting into his deliberations.

Plainly, if the state believed a potential Weisselberg perjury plea altered the record in a material way, its attorneys could make a motion to reopen the record and present new testimony. That the state hasn’t done that indicates that (a) nothing of moment has happened at this point because Weisselberg has not been charged, much less pled guilty to making false statements, and (b) the state doesn’t see Weisselberg’s potential guilty plea as material because the evidence that his testimony was false and that the triplex was ridiculously overvalued is overwhelming.

So why is Engoron doing this? I can only assume that he is poised to clobber Trump with the bonkers $370 million fraud judgment that James is asking for but he realizes, given the dearth of fraud victims, that there will be significant blowback — condemnations that Trump is hardly the first New York businessman to exaggerate his wealth, that no one was actually harmed, that the punishment does not fit the crime, and that the case is a partisan hit job. Ergo, the judge is seizing on a new “revelation” that is really no surprise at all and that does not shed a scintilla of new light on the evidence, but that Engoron can point to as felony misconduct that further justifies a ruinously harsh sentence.

Think of it as, oh, I don’t know, an asset that Judge Engoron is inflating out of all proportion.