Trump asks New York appeals court to throw out $454 million civil judgment
By Kara Scannell, Lauren del Valle and Jeremy Herb, CNN
(CNN) — Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a New York appeals court Monday to throw out the $454 million judgment in his civil fraud trial, arguing that the monetary penalty was unconstitutional and that most of the case should have been barred because the conduct was too old.
The former president’s attorneys raised several other legal arguments they lost at the trial court-level, including that no bank or counterparty lost money on loans, saying the judge made reversal mistakes in his rulings.
The filings are Trump’s latest attempt to throw out the $454 million judgment levied by state Judge Arthur Engoron in February, who found Trump, two of his sons – Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump – and their real estate business liable for fraud. The New York attorney general’s office will file their opposition papers next month. The appeals court could take up the case as soon as September.
“The award of $464 million in a case with no victims, no proven injuries, and no losses is not remotely defensible,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. The additional $10 million relates to other defendants in the case.
“The ‘actual harm inflicted’ is nil,” they argued. “Thus, any punitive award would result in a ratio that is virtually infinite. The award of $464 million in a case with no victims, no proven injuries, and no losses is not remotely defensible.”
Trump’s attorneys said Engoron erred when he declined to toss most of the case after the appeals court ruled last year before the civil trial that certain conduct fell outside of the statute of limitations.
According to Trump’s attorneys, Trump personally should have been dismissed as a defendant. If the statute of limitations was enforced, they argue, roughly $350 million of the judgment would be wiped out.
The state appeals court previously dismissed Ivanka Trump as a co-defendant in the case before the trial last year, finding she was not an employee of the Trump Organization at the time a tolling agreement – or deal to stop the clock on the statute of limitations – was struck. In the filing Monday, they argued that Trump should have also been excluded from the case.
Trump’s attorneys asserted that the only claims in the attorney general’s complaint that were timely were the loans for the Old Post Office building in Washington, DC, and the 40 Wall Street building in Manhattan.
“Applying the correct statute of limitations eliminates $350,980,057 of the $464,576,229 judgment for Appellants bound by the Tolling Agreement, and it eliminates all of the judgment for those not bound by the Tolling Agreement, including the Trust and the individual Appellant,” they wrote.
Engoron ruled before the trial that even if the loans were closed before the 2014 statute of limitations, fraudulent financial statements that were subsequently issued constituted separate fraudulent acts.
The judge wrote in a decision at the time that New York Attorney General Letitia James was not “challenging the loans, the closings, or the disbursements,” but was challenging the financial documents containing false and misleading information.
The Trump attorneys accused Engoron of enacting a “punitive” penalty against the former president that was unconstitutional.
“The monetary award is a punitive penalty imposed for retributive and deterrent purposes. It is both grossly disproportional under the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause and grossly excessive under the Due Process Clauses,” Trump’s team argued.
Trump’s lawyers argued that Engoron incorrectly ordered him to pay too much in disgorgement – or the return of ill-gotten gains – for the sale proceeds of the Old Post Office and Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. Engoron did not account for any investments Trump’s company had put into the properties when he ordered the Trump Organization to pay back the full proceeds amount rather than calculating their net profit, Trump’s attorneys argued.
Trump’s lawyers say Engoron made uninformed judgments as to the valuations of Trump’s properties without considering any expert testimony when he ruled in the summary judgment that Trump inflated his asset value, the filing says.
Just like at trial, Trump’s lawyers in particular took issue with a reference in Engoron’s summary judgment opinion that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort was valued at $18 million.
“Supreme Court engaged in a series of erroneous valuations of President Trump’s properties, including valuing Mar-a-Lago at $18 to $27.6 million, a tiny fraction of its obvious value, and these errors infected the subsequent trial,” they wrote.
During the trial, Engoron said that he was not trying to assess the value of the property when he referenced the tax assessor value. Trump, when he testified, said Mar-a-Lago was worth at least $1 billion.
In a statement on Monday’s filing, Trump attorney Chris Kise called for a “complete reversal” of the judgment.
“Such an outrageous miscarriage of justice is profoundly un-American, and a complete reversal is the only means available to restore public confidence in the integrity of the New York judicial system,” Kise said.
The-CNN-Wire
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