At the end of the New York civil fraud case, Trump attacked the judge and defended his innocence International

Donald Trump arrived at the court building in Manhattan (New York) this Thursday and unleashed his usual rants about “witch hunts”, “political interference” and other common platitudes in his speech at the door. It included closing arguments by the prosecution and its lawyers in a civil fraud trial in which the plaintiff is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution for defrauding her accounts that benefited her for decades. The judge allowed the ex-president to intervene for a few minutes, presenting himself as the victim and attacking the judge and the prosecutor in the case.

“Right now, the judge won’t let me plea because I’m going to bring up things he doesn’t want to hear,” Trump said as he entered the building, calling the decision “political interference.” “This is a case that was never brought,” Trump said, maintaining his innocence. New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, wants the judge to impose $370 million in sanctions on Trump.

The prosecutor accused Trump, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and other top officials of the Trump Organization of participating in a scheme spanning at least a decade in which they used “numerous frauds and misrepresentations” to inflate Trump’s net worth. To get loans from banks on more favorable terms. The judge in the case already ruled in partial summary judgment that Trump had submitted “fraudulent valuations” of his assets, leaving the trial to determine additional proceedings and what, if any, penalties the defendants should receive.

Trump himself is playing cat and mouse with the possibility of intervening to make the final argument. Initially, his defense requested it, and the judge accepted it, but then his lawyers missed a deadline to accept a time limit on their intervention. This Friday, after arriving in court, he said he still planned to intervene in the final argument, but did not request it at the moment of truth. However, at the end of the lawyer, Trump spoke.

“Your Honor, this case is against the facts. The financial statements were complete. The banks recovered all their money and they were as happy as could be,” Trump defended in the closed-door session, according to statements collected by US news agencies and media. “This is a political witch hunt that must be set aside. “We have to get compensation for what we went through,” said the former president, defying a judge’s ban on getting into political issues. “I am an innocent man. “I feel persecuted by someone who is running for office and I think we have to go beyond the limits,” he continued. “This is fraud against me. What has happened here, your honor, is fraud against me,” he asserted.

He later accused the judge of not listening to him. “I know this bores you,” the former president said. “Control your client,” the judge warned Trump’s lawyer, who also attacked prosecutor Letitia James.

The former president maintained that tripling the square footage of his Trump Tower penthouse in his financial statement was an error, “an honest mistake,” which was corrected.

In the afternoon, the New York state attorney said in his closing argument that Trump and his “cash-poor” company could not have completed several development projects without loans and cash flow from interest savings allowed by falsified financial statements, the AP reports. “The fraud was fundamental to the conduct of the Trump Organization’s business,” said lawyer Kevin Wallace. He said Trump and the other defendants knowingly misrepresented the company’s financial statements.

Trump skipped the afternoon session in favor of a press conference that served as counterprogramming to the state’s closing argument. In a Manhattan office building he owns, which he could lose control of as a result of the trial, Trump met with President Joe Biden and the author who accused him of rape, E. Cursed Jean Carroll.

The New York trial is not one of four criminal prosecutions against the former president, but it shows that the lies he has used in his political life have roots in his business history. In both cases, yes, successfully.

Judge Arthur Engron explained that he would decide the case because neither side had requested a jury and state law does not allow for a jury in this type of lawsuit. He said he hoped a decision would be made by the end of the month. Last month, in a ruling denying a defense request for a preliminary ruling, the judge indicated he was leaning toward finding Trump and his co-defendants liable for at least some of the lawsuit. “Evaluation, as has been made abundantly clear in this trial, can be based on different criteria analyzed in different ways,” Engron wrote in the Dec. 18 ruling. “But a lie is still a lie.”

This was an unpleasant prelude to Thursday’s hearing. At 5:30 a.m., hours before the final day of the trial, Nassau County police said they responded to an “incident” at Judge Angoron’s home in Great Neck, Long Island, following a bomb threat. According to officials, nothing unusual was found at the scene.

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