MANHATTAN (CN) — Sporting a navy blue suit, a pink tie and carefully slicked-back hair, Donald Trump Jr. took the witness stand in New York State Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon to testify in his family’s $250 million civil fraud lawsuit.
As an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr. is a defendant in the attorney general’s case against the business group alongside Eric Trump, Donald Trump Sr., former Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg and the organization itself. New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused them all of inflating Trump Organization assets in order to gain more favorable loans and insurance premiums.
Donald Trump Jr. made his long-awaited walk to the witness stand Wednesday in front of a packed Manhattan courtroom. Fielding questions from Colleen Faherty of the attorney general’s office, the 45-year-old explained his professional history and role within the Trump Organization.
“I did a little bit of everything,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “Everything from design, sales and marketing, finance, construction, you name it.”
He acknowledged that his title puts him “very high” in the company’s pecking order but said that he is on equal footing to his siblings Ivanka and Eric, also executive vice presidents.
“We had our own silos,” Donald Trump Jr. said, clarifying that he had an equivalent place in the Trump Organization hierarchy as his siblings.
His father had authority over all of their work “until he assumed the presidency” in 2017, he added. After Donald Trump became president, Donald Trump Jr. said that he, Allen Weisselberg and his brother became the key decision-makers at the Trump Organization.
“And by your brother you mean Eric, not Barron, correct?” Faherty asked, posing a tongue-in-cheek question.
Donald Trump Jr. confirmed that he was referring to Eric — not his 17-year-old brother Barron.
In its questioning, the attorney general’s office seemed to be trying to establish Donald Trump Jr.’s power within the Trump Organization. Trump’s lawyers have been arguing that the family was not directly involved in preparing the scrutinized statements of financial condition, which Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in September were fraudulently inflated.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump Jr. stuck to that story. Despite being “very high” up the corporate ladder, the 45-year-old said he had nothing to do with preparing the financial statements.
He said this was even the case back in 2017 — a year when he was listed as a trustee on a statement of financial condition for the family organization.
“I did not [work on it],” Donald Trump Jr. said. “The accountants worked on it. That’s why we pay them.”
Donald Trump Jr. conceded that he might have been indirectly involved in crafting the financial statements. After all, he was a high-ranking executive within the company with firsthand details of some of the Trump Organization’s biggest deals.
He said that he “could have discussed the details” of a deal with someone like Allen Weisselberg, who did put the statements together. Donald Trump Jr. even said it was possible that those details could have influenced the findings of the document.
Ultimately, he ceded responsibility to the accountants. “These people had an incredibly intimate knowledge, and I relied on them."
Donald Trump Sr. wasn’t in court on Wednesday — but the testimony from his eldest son drew a crowd just the same. The Manhattan courthouse brought back heightened security measures for those entering the courtroom, a protocol usually reserved for when the former president is in attendance.
Donald Trump Jr. is expected to return to the stand on Thursday to resume his direct examination. Also slated for Thursday testimony is his younger brother, Eric Trump. Their father will testify on Nov. 6
OAG’s expert witness claims Trump cost banks $168 million
Despite this morning’s anticipation, Donald Trump Jr. didn’t take the stand until about 3:00 p.m. New York time.
Before him, the court heard from expert witness Michiel McCarty, the chairman and CEO of Connecticut-based investment bank M.M. Dillon & Co.
McCarty was called to testify as to how Donald Trump’s asset inflation could have affected the banks he borrowed from. When the case is over, his findings could ultimately help the court determine how much the defendants may owe in damages.
Trump’s team has repeatedly made a no-harm-no-foul argument, claiming that asset inflation doesn’t matter since everyone made money on the loans he took out. But McCarty sees it another way.
Based on the interest rates Trump was able to get on some of his loans using his fraudulent asset valuations, McCarty determined that the banks lost approximately $168,040,168 in interest. Had Trump given the banks a more accurate valuation of his assets, he would have owed that much more in interest, McCarty concluded.
McCarty's calculations were based on four properties: Trump National Doral Miami, Old Post Office in Washington D.C., Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago and 40 Wall Street.
All four were overvalued by Trump in financial statements, McCarty said, leading to the more beneficial loans.
Engoron leaned on that same logic in his summary-judgment ruling from September, which found that Trump and his co-defendants were liable for fraud. “The subject loans made the banks lots of money; but the fraudulent [statement of financial condition] cost the banks lots of money,” Engoron wrote.
“The less collateral for a loan, the riskier it is" — and "as risk rises, so do interest rates," Engoron added. Therefore, "accurate" financial statements "would have allowed the lenders to make even more money than they did.”
Throughout McCarty’s testimony, Trump’s lead attorney Christopher Kise continued claim that there were no grounds to argue that Trump’s gains were “ill-gotten.”
In order to do that, Kise said, the attorney general’s office would have to bring in the bankers and ask them if they still would have issued Trump the loans if they had known the real value of his assets, not the inflated ones.
Earlier this week, Trump’s attorneys used this same argument in a failed bid to keep McCarty from testifying altogether. Regardless, Engoron disagreed.
“I’m deciding that they’re ill-gotten; he’s just deciding the number,” Engoron said — once again referencing his September fraud judgment.
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