A New York appeals court is set to hear arguments Thursday in former President Donald Trump’s bid to have the $454 million civil fraud judgment against him dismissed.
The appellate hearing is yet another legal development for Trump playing out the same time as his presidential campaign hits the homestretch. In addition to the civil fraud appeal, Trump’s lawyers have argued to dismiss the guilty verdict in the New York criminal case, the federal election interference case in Washington, DC, and the E. Jean Carroll defamation verdict – all in the past month.
On Thursday, Trump’s lawyers are seeking to overturn the $454 million judgment levied by state Judge Arthur Engoron in February, who found that Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and his business liable for fraud, as well as issuing false financial statements and false business records.
Engoron ruled that Trump and his co-defendants inflated the value of the former president’s assets in order to obtain more favorable loan and insurance rates.
Trump is not expected to attend Thursday’s hearing, sources told CNN. He posted a $175 million bond in April while the appeal is ongoing.
The judgment against Trump was for $354 million, with an additional $100 million in interest that had accrued when the judge’s ruling was issued in February. The interest is still accruing at a rate of nearly $112,000 per day while Trump appeals, and the amount had surpassed $478 million as of Thursday, according to a person familiar with the judgment.
The hearing will also give Trump’s lawyers an opportunity to air their grievances with the 11-week trial held last fall, in which the former president frequently clashed with the judge, including while on the witness stand. In his ruling, Engoron wrote that Trump and his co-defendants’ “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
Trump’s attorneys have argued in written filings ahead of Thursday’s hearing that the monetary penalty in the judgment was unconstitutional and that most of the case against Trump should have been barred because the conduct was too old.
The former president’s attorneys raised several other legal arguments they lost at the trial court-level, including that no bank or counterparty lost money on loans, saying the judge made reversal mistakes in his rulings.
“The award of $464 million in a case with no victims, no proven injuries, and no losses is not remotely defensible,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. The additional $10 million relates to other defendants in the case.
The New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case against Trump, has argued in written filings there was “overwhelming evidence” that Trump knowingly committed fraud and inflated the value of his properties on financial statements to obtain loans.
“This Court should affirm. Supreme Court’s liability determinations are supported by overwhelming evidence that, in each Statement, defendants used a variety of deceptive strategies to vastly misrepresent the values of Mr. Trump’s assets,” the attorney general’s office wrote in a filing last month.
The attorney general’s office argued that Trump’s lawyers, in their briefs, largely avoided “any substantive discussion of the many different deceptive practices they used to vastly inflate the values of Mr. Trump’s assets on each annual Statement.”
“Instead, defendants focus their appeal primarily on meritless legal arguments about the elements of” the law, they wrote. “These arguments are contrary to the statutes text and settled precedent and should be rejected.”
No decision is expected before the election, and the appeals court ruling can still be appealed to New York’s highest appellate court.
