Donald Trump returns to New York court for fraud trial proceedings
Former president Donald Trump returned to a New York court on Tuesday to watch and deplore the civil fraud trial that threatens to disrupt his real estate businesses, but he got no face-toface encounter – for now – with the star witness against him.
After attending the trial’s first three days earlier this month, Trump initially planned a return to coincide with testimony by Michael Cohen, his one-time attorney turned outspoken foe. But Cohen’s testimony was delayed until at least next week, with Cohen citing a health problem.
Instead, Trump sat in on a less splashy day in the trial, hearing testimony from one of his company’s accountants, Donna Kidder. Under point-by-point questioning about the intricacies of internal spreadsheets, she testified that she was told to make some assumptions favorable to the company.
For example, she said, the former Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg told her to act as if all space in a Trump-owned Wall Street office building would be leased by a certain date, even if some space was currently vacant. For a Park Avenue residential tower, she was told to project that unsold units “would all sell out” in a certain timeframe.
Kidder said she was not aware that those assumptions would be used to improve Trump’s bottom line on financial statements that helped his company make deals and get financing and insurance.
Doug Larson, a certified appraiser and commercial real estate executive, was taken aback when told on the stand that he was repeatedly cited as an outside expert in former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney’s valuation spreadsheets.
“It’s inappropriate and inaccurate,” Larson testified. “I should have been told, and an appraisal should have been ordered.”
Larson said he never suggested or condoned the ways that McConney valued various properties.
For example, rather than using rates of return for comparable retail properties when gauging the worth of a Trump-owned retail space formerly known as Niketown, McConney relied on rates for a different type of property, which “doesn’t make sense”, Larson testified.
He said he appraised a Trumpowned Wall Street building at $540m in 2015, while McConney valued it at $735.4m on Trump’s financial statement.
The lawsuit by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, alleges that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and inflating his net worth on his financial statements.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, denies any wrongdoing. He says his assets were actually undervalued and maintains that disclaimers on his financial statements essentially told banks and other recipients to check the numbers out for themselves.
“We built a great company – a lot of cash, it’s got a lot of great assets, some of the greatest real estate assets anywhere in the world,” he said as he headed into court, dismissing the lawsuit as “a witch-hunt by a radical lunatic attorney general” bent on dragging down his presidential run.
Although he is attending the trial by choice, Trump complained it was taking him off the campaign trail.
The attorney general, a Democrat, started investigating Trump in 2019 after Cohen testified to Congress that the billionaire politician had a history of misrepresenting the value of assets to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits. She did not comment on the case on Tuesday.
Cohen said on Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was not dodging Trump. In a text message, he said he had an “incredibly painful” medical condition but expects to testify as soon as the pain subsides.