Donald Trump owes the state of New York more than $350 million in damages for decades of fraudulent business practices, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled Friday.
The former president was also barred, under Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling, from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for three years.
Trump’s two elder sons, Eric and Donald Jr., are also banned from serving as executives for New York companies for two years. Both were hit with $4 million fines.
“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” the ruling states. “They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again.”
Trump’s business empire was not ordered to be dissolved, as the judge previously indicated would happen. The court instead said any restructuring or dissolution of any LLC will be subject to individual review by a court-appointed director of compliance.
The ruling also hit two former Trump associates, Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney. They were permanently banned from having financial control over any New York corporation or similar business entity in New York. Weisselberg, who last year served time for tax evasion, previously served as chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, and McConney was Trump’s corporate controller.
“The evidence is overwhelming that Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney cannot be entrusted with controlling the finances of any business,” the ruling states.
The defendants were dismissed by the judge for denying reality throughout the trial and refusing to accept responsibility or take action to prevent future wrongdoing.
“They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff,” the ruling says. “Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies.”
Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, called the verdict a “complete and total sham.”
“There were No Victims, No Damages, No Complaints,” he said in a statement that claimed the trial was a political attack by Democrats.
“The Democrat Club-controlled Judge Engoron has already been reversed four times on this case, a shameful record, and he will be reversed again,” Trump’s statement read. “We cannot let injustice stand, and will fight Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized persecution at every step.”
Trump attorney Alina Habba also lashed out against the verdict shortly after it was released, calling it “a manifest injustice.”
“Countless hours of testimony proved that there was no wrongdoing, no crime, and no victim,” she said in a statement. “Given the grave stakes, we trust that the Appellate Division will overturn this egregious verdict and end this relentless persecution against my clients.”
Over the course of a 44-day civil trial, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Trump of grossly exaggerating his wealth in order to secure favorable business loans by deceiving banks and insurers.
That includes overvaluing his Mar-a-Lago estate by as much as 2,300%, for example, and falsely claiming his penthouse in Trump Tower was three times larger than it actually was.
James initially argued that Trump and his affiliated businesses should disgorge $250 million, only to increase the figure to $370 million in a post-trial brief.
The amount is no arbitrary figure: The attorney general’s office estimates that Trump’s fraud yielded at least $168 million in illegal gains on his loan to purchase 40 Wall Street; $139 million related to the sale of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C.; $60 million from the sale of Ferry Point golf club; and $2.5 million in bonuses paid to accomplices.
Engoron found in an earlier part of the trial that Trump had indeed committed fraud for years. All that remained was to tally up the damages.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron concluded in his 35-page September ruling.
“In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies,” Engoron wrote. “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”
Defense attorney Chris Kise blamed Trump’s accountants for the fraud, describing the case against his client as “manufactured to pursue a political agenda.”
“President Trump relied on multimillion-dollar accountants at Mazars,” Kise said in his closing statement. Kise suggested that, instead of punishing Trump, he “should get a medal” for his business acumen.
The accounting firm Mazars cut ties with Trump in 2022, warning at the time that the financial statements it prepared for Trump from 2011 through 2020 “should no longer be relied upon.”
While on the stand as a witness, Trump repeatedly pointed to what he called a “disclaimer clause” appended to those statements that he believed absolved him of all responsibility for their accuracy.
“We would call it a worthless statement clause,” he said at one point, seeking to diminish the value of the fraudulent documents. “They were not really documents that the banks paid much attention to.”
Engoron dismissed the argument in a pretrial ruling.
“Defendants’ reliance on these ‘worthless’ disclaimers is worthless,” he wrote. “The ‘worthless clause’ does not say what the defendants say it says, does not rise to the level of an enforceable disclaimer, and cannot be used to insulate fraud.”
Over the course of the months-long trial, Trump complained frequently on social media about the lack of a jury, ignoring the fact that his lawyers hadn’t attempted to request one.
He repeatedly described the trial as “unconstitutional,” a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in addition to attacking Engoron and other court staffers on social media. Trump repeatedly violated a gag order intended to curtail those attacks, then demanded a mistrial, claiming in part that the order violated his First Amendment rights to free speech.
In additional attempts to dismiss the suit, Trump’s lawyers argued there wasn’t evidence that Trump’s actions had caused public harm and that the statute of limitations had expired for many of the allegations.
Trump declined to testify in his defense, despite having claimed he would, and backed out of delivering his own closing argument after Engoron insisted that Trump address only the “relevant” matters of the case should he do so.