Former President Donald Trump is sworn in for his Aug. 10, 2022, deposition, in the New York attorney general’s fraud investigation. (Image via NYAG)
Former President Donald Trump geared up for his second bout of deposition testimony on Thursday in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million fraud case.
If it’s anything like the first line of questioning, Trump will assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
Trump once claimed to avail oneself of this constitutional right is something the “mob” might do.
“If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Trump asked in 2016.
On Aug. 10, 2022, Trump revisited his former rhetorical stance.
“Now I know the answer to that question,” Trump said in a prepared statement preceding his questioning. “When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”
At the time, Trump had not yet become the first former president to face criminal charges in U.S. history. That distinctly ratchets up the stakes of any sworn testimony, and he is widely expected to respond to questions from New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office with more Fifth Amendment invocations. James assisted in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal investigations that produced the indictments of the Trump Organization and its former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.
A little more than a month after Trump’s first deposition, James filed her massive $250 million lawsuit against the former president, his adult children and his namesake corporation. On top of the massive award sought, the attorney general wants to permanently bar Trump and three of his adult children — Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump — from ever serving in a New York corporation.
James also wants the judge to extend the tenure and reach of a court-appointed monitor, who has been assigned to watch over the company pending trial.
Trump asserting his Fifth Amendment rights will shield him from any criminal consequences from his testimony, but it could hurt him in civil court.
The attorney general’s lawsuit accuses Trump, his family members, and his business of “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentation in the preparation of Mr. Trump’s annual statements of financial condition” from 2011 to 2021. Some of these discrepancies were quite drastic, James alleges. Her office has said that the former president inflated the size of his Trump Tower triplex by nearly three, and the Trump Organization valued rent-stabilized units 66 times higher than an outside appraiser did.
“With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization, Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system. In fact, the very foundation of his purported net worth is rooted in incredible fraud and illegality,” James said when she filed her complaint.
While his first deposition fell during pre-litigation discovery, Trump’s second turn on the hot seat will be the first to follow the filing of the lawsuit. The trial is slated firmly for Oct. 2, 2023. Last month, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron rejected a request to postpone it by declaring: “That’s written in stone.”
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