Former President Donald Trump lashed out at New York Judge Arthur Engoron and Attorney General Letitia James early Wednesday morning ahead of his son’s fraud trial testimony.
Trump in a 2:28 am post on Truth Social listed a litany of complaints and allegations, calling it a “rigged trial” brought by a “racist” attorney general before a “Trump and developer Hating Judge.” Trump claimed that former lawyer Michael Cohen’s testimony that he lied to a judge in a different trial and testified he could not recall Trump telling him to inflate values on financial statements means that “this Fake Case should be dismissed.” Engoron already found Trump and his company liable for fraud and multiple witnesses have testified that financial institutions would have acted differently if they knew Trump’s financial statements were fraudulent.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is set to testify on Wednesday.
“Leave my children alone, Engoron. You are a disgrace to the legal profession!” Trump fumed in the post.
“Judge Engoron is a political hack who ruled against me before the trial even started. He is doing the dirty work for the Democrat Party. I was not even given the option of a jury, This Rigged Case should have never been brought,” Trump wrote in another post at 7:43 am, claiming “this is his big chance, and he was not going to let it go.”
Trump Jr., will be the first of the Trump children to testify at the trial. Eric Trump is set to testify on Thursday and Ivanka Trump is set to testify next week. Trump himself is also expected to testify on Monday. Both Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are named as co-defendants while a judge earlier this year dismissed James’ allegations against Ivanka Trump, ruling that the statute of limitations in her case had expired.
James’ lawsuit alleged that Trump, Trump Jr., and Eric Trump, along with other top Trump Organization executives, conspired to exaggerate his wealth by billions on financial statements that were used to obtain loans and make deals. Trump and his sons have denied any wrongdoing.
Both Eric and Trump Jr. have criticized the trial.
“This is the corruption my father and our family is fighting! The system is weaponized, broken and disgusting!” Eric Trump wrote on Truth Social last month.
Trump Jr. has called the trial a “kangaroo court.”
“It doesn’t matter what the rules are, it doesn’t matter what the Constitution says, it doesn’t matter what general practices and business would be,” Donald Trump Jr. said Monday on Newsmax. “It doesn’t matter. They have a narrative, they have an end goal, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get there.”
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig warned that the Trumps face significant risks on the stand. Honig explained that they could all take the Fifth but under New York’s state law, since it is a civil trial and not a criminal trial, the judge “can consider that against them” and can “essentially say I’m going to assume the worst of what your testimony would have done.”
“It’s up to the judge. He can say, ‘I assume that your testimony would have been bad for you here in this civil case,’” Honig said on Tuesday, adding that “the risk of testifying could be even greater” because “anything they do say could be used against them in any future criminal prosecution.”
Honig noted that prosecutors could investigate further and bring additional charges.
“The biggest risk they are facing here is the potential of some kind of criminal liability,” he said.
Former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told MSNBC that the Trumps “would be well advised to just plead the Fifth.”
"If they lie under oath, I would not put it past New York Attorney General Letitia James to charge them criminally with perjury,” he told host Nicole Wallace. "So it seems to me they have a lot to lose and almost nothing to gain."
Kirschner added that since the judge already ruled that fraud was committed, the main issue remaining is "how much money they're going to have to pay back at this point."
"I'm not sure what the upside is other than perhaps a perceived public relations upside to these four people, Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Trump himself, testifying substantively, you know, it seems like their attorneys would advise them, 'Listen, just plead the Fifth and let's get this over with because you can only hurt yourself,'" he said. "If they lie, Nicole, I'm not saying this is a perjury trap because the only thing you have to do to escape from a perjury trap is tell the truth."
