Why Trump’s New Argument in the New York AG Case Won’t Save Him

Trump's legal team continues to push a theory that Trump's deals are outside the statute of limitations. A judge is about to rule on the matter—and it doesn't look good for Trump. Jose Pagliery

The New York trial that could bankrupt Donald Trump’s corporate empire is only three weeks away, and the former president has bet the farm on the notion that his deals were too long ago to investigate—a ploy that increasingly looks like a dud. Trump wants to direct Justice Arthur F. Engoron’s attention to the dates he finalized some sizable real estate deals in Chicago, Miami, Washington, and elsewhere. But according to a source familiar with the case, the real action will be focused on the way he kept filing personal financial statements with bogus numbers years later that kept inflating his net worth by what investigators estimate to be some $2.2 billion. That amount sounds ridiculous, but it added up overtime. For example, the real estate tycoon bizarrely faked the size of his own gold-encrusted and marbled Louis XIV-style penthouse at Trump Tower in Manhattan by simply tripling the space from 10,000 to more than 30,000 square feet. Nearly every year each loan was outstanding, Trump kept submitting paperwork purporting to estimate his riches. If the judge decides that submitting fake documents resets the clock, New York Attorney General Letitia James will still have a powerful case that could yank the Trump family’s business charters in the financial capital of the world—thus preventing them from legally making a penny from their many buildings and golf courses. But first, there’s this thorny issue to resolve. This summer, a New York state appellate court directed Engoron and the AG to figure out when exactly the Trump family deals took place, a pivotal step that needs to be clarified to determine if they fall outside the statute of limitations. (Complicating the matter, the Trump Organization previously agreed to stop the clock to give investigators more time—a legal maneuver that sometimes helps both sides.) The cutoff goes as far back as July 2014, and it won’t be easy to figure out. For example, investigators claim that Trump’s faked numbers landed him a $170 million Deutsche Bank loan for the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. However, the credit memo approving the loan came just before the cutoff in May 2014, and the deal was closed just after the cutoff in August 2014.

But since that appellate decision, no lines have been drawn. And there are only weeks to go before a behemoth trial that’s scheduled to run up to 56 days long starts on Oct. 2. “These issues are highly technical, and they are highly dependent sometimes on idiosyncratic features of particular statutes,” said Justin Murray, a professor at New York Law School. Just last week, Trump’s lawyers made a last-minute push to delay the trial, citing this unresolved issue. Engoron swiftly rejected the timeout request in a pithy, nine-word order. It was the latest sign that the judge has increasingly lost his patience with the Trump crew, having endured their three-plus years of endless delay tactics and defiance of court-issued subpoenas. The judge is expected to address this timing issue immediately after a court hearing next week. The question is how much of the AG’s $250 billion-plus lawsuit is viable if several Trump deals are considered past the statute of limitations. A review of past rulings shows that, if the judge sticks to his guns, the Trump family will still face the full brunt of the AG’s civil investigation. When the Trumps asked the judge to summarily dismiss the entire lawsuit nearly a year ago, their lawyers made a litany of arguments: claiming that the AG didn’t even have the authority to do this, chalking up the entire investigation to a “witch hunt,” and—on this topic—saying that the real estate deals were simply too old to litigate. Source:thedailybeast.com