Former president Donald Trump has returned to New York to be deposed in the $250 million civil-fraud case New York attorney general Letitia James has brought against him.
While the criminal probes into Trump gather steam in New York, Georgia, and Washington D.C., so do the civil suits against him. James filed a lawsuit against Trump and his children last year for misstating the value of real estate properties to obtain favorable loans and tax benefits. The attorney general seeks to recover an amount equivalent to Trump’s ill-gotten gains, as her office has put it.
Trump filed a suit against James in response.
The former president already sat for a deposition last August before James filed the suit. The questioning lasted several hours and resulted in Trump invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times, the Washington Post reported.
Trump took to social media last night to decry James’s lawsuit, saying it’s a persecution.
“I built a GREAT & prosperous company, employed thousands of people, built magnificent structures all over the World, but particularly in New York, & now have to prove it to this LOWLIFE who campaigned on a ‘I will get Trump’ platform, even before knowing anything about me!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
This morning he revealed he will meet with James at 9:30 a.m., accusing the attorney general of leaking the exact time.
The case is expected to go to trial in October. Discovery is ongoing at present and witnesses continue to be deposed.
The case is unrelated to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. After Trump pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan courtroom earlier this month, he returned to his estate Mar-a-Lago and gave a wide-ranging speech attacking Bragg, James, and many others.
“[Letitia James] should be focused on violent crime that’s driving people out of the state. This is a persecution, not an investigation. She’s putting my family through hell,” explained Trump during the speech.
“They want to settle the case. But I want no part of that,” Trump asserted.
The Trump organization and longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg have already been convicted of multiple fraud-related crimes.
The former president sought to delay James’s civil suit, saying he needed a six month extension to provide the necessary time to review the “staggering” volume of materials, including millions of pages of documents, and question dozens of witnesses, Reuters reported.
Trump has pursued a similar legal strategy in another civil case against him — namely, writer E. Jean Carroll’s rape and defamation suit against the former president. CNN reported that lawyers for Trump asked a judge to delay the start of the trial for one month to allow a “cooling off” period following Bragg’s historic indictment of Trump.
Lawyer Joe Tacopina argued that, due to media coverage of his arraignment, the pool of potential jurors will have the criminal charges “top of mind” when they are called and that could taint the jury pool.