Former President Donald Trump’s rambling testimony at his New York fraud trial on Monday bodes poorly for his chances of appealing the judge’s ruling, legal experts say.
Trump testified for hours at the trial, which is set to determine the scope of punishment he, his two oldest sons and his company should face after Judge Arthur Engoron issued a partial summary judgment prior to the trial finding them liable of persistent fraud. Trump’s lawyers appealed the ruling and have sought to lay the groundwork for additional motions throughout the trial.
Even Trump’s antics in court on Monday appeared to be an effort to try to “goad” Engoron into “some sort of mistake” or say something that could help his team on appeal, former U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg told MSNBC.
“Judge Engoron is an experienced jurist, I don’t think that has happened yet and I don’t see that happening,” he said. “From a theatrical perspective, maybe this plays in some other venue. From a legal perspective, this does not play in court,” he added.
Former U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg explores two possible motives for Donald Trump's outbursts on the stand today, including "trying to goad" Judge Engoron into saying something that could help Trump on appeal. pic.twitter.com/zY7R3TpOkj
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 6, 2023
“For all of his attacks, there was one key thing missing from Trump’s testimony, which is any semblance of a colorable defense, and that is Donald Trump through and through,” former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC on Tuesday, adding that the former president was clearly “trying to provoke the judge.”
Trump was “successful today by his metric because we’re talking more about his behavior and his temper tantrums than we are about the fact that the guy committed serious fraud,” he said. “So, it’s a distraction technique, and in some ways, it’s working. It obviously won’t work in the court of law, though.”
When Trump did answer the attorney general’s team’s questions, he made “important concessions” that may have further damaged his case, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN.
“To me, the most important sentence of the day, Trump said something like, ‘I saw those statements, I reviewed them, and at times I gave input.’ And it was a quick little moment, but that’s something that I think the AG’s office is gonna latch onto because he acknowledges he knew them and knew enough to give input into those statements,” he said, according to Mediaite.
“I think his testimony was inherently contradictory and a mess, but there’s some real useful pieces in there for the AG’s office,” Honig added.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, noted that the AG’s counsel got Trump to agree that the financial statements and Trump’s personal guaranty at the heart of the trial were to “induce banks to lend money.”
“Not only is this an astonishing admission, it will damage efforts to argue on appeal that the judge was wrong to grant judgement ahead of trial on the fraud claims,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. “That is pretty much Trump's last gasp at saving his NY business.”
Not only is this an astonishing admission, it will damage efforts to argue on appeal that the judge was wrong to grant judgement ahead of trial on the fraud claims. That is pretty much Trump's last gasp at saving his NY business. https://t.co/gFStpiHcMV
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) November 6, 2023
Former federal prosecutor Kristy Greenberg pointed out that Trump’s lawyers are laying the groundwork for appeal by arguing that the valuations listed in the financial statements were not to be taken at face value while arguing that those statements were still good-faith estimates of Trump’s properties.
"They were laying the record for an appeal with a lot of defense — these weren't material misstatements, nobody relied on the misstatements," Greenberg told CNN. "Again, I think, legally they're not on solid ground there... this idea of good faith, we acted in good faith, that will be something else that they raise on appeal."
The problem for Trump, Greenberg said, is that “a lot of these examples are egregious.”
"This isn't a matter of, 'Well, there's some wiggle room here.' If anybody were to go in and seek a loan from their bank and say, 'Well, my house or my apartment is three times the size of what it is, and 400 percent valued higher than what it is,' like, that's fraud,” she said. “That's not, ‘oh, we got some of the accounting principles wrong.’ That's just plain fraud, and so I don't think he really is going to have much room to succeed on appeal."
