President Trump’s deposition on Thursday at Manhattan possessed little of the fanfare of his criminal arraignment, but it holds the potential to threaten something that could be even more important to the former president than his liberty: The business empire he has built over a lifetime. 

Mr. Trump is being forced to answer questions under oath by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who is pushing a quarter of a billion-dollar civil suit alleging fraud on the part of the organization that bears Mr. Trump’s name. The action alleges that the Trump Organization overinflated property values, among other deceptions, to “obtain beneficial financial terms.”

Riffing on Mr. Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” Ms. James has accused him of being a practitioner of the “Art of the Steal.”  

At a September press conference announcing the lawsuit, Ms. James said that the former president “falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat the system, thereby cheating all of us.” She called the scale of the misrepresentations “astounding” and intoned that “white collar financial crime is not a victimless crime.”

In addition to demanding that Mr. Trump disgorge $250 million, Ms. James also seeks a five-year moratorium on the Trump Organization acquiring property at New York, a stiff penalty for the real estate mogul. The attorney general also asked for, and was granted, the appointment of an independent monitor to supervise the company’s compliance. Three of Mr. Trump’s children are also named in the suit. 

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have likely briefed him on the difference between a criminal case, where a refusal to answer questions cannot be held against a defendant — that comes from the Fifth Amendment —  and a civil one, where it can. In a statement, his lawyer, Alina Habba, noted that “President Trump is not only willing but also eager to testify before the Attorney General today.”

The former president, in a Truth Social post issued on Thursday morning, approached the deposition with considerably less sangfroid, calling Ms. James’s suit “ridiculous.” On the night Ms. James was elected, in 2018, she proclaimed that Mr. Trump “should know that we here in New York — and I, in particular — we are not scared of you.”

Mr. Trump has sat for questioning on this head before, most recently in August, before the lawsuit was filed. At that juncture, Mr. Trump refused to answer questions on more than 400 occasions, telling lawyers during the deposition that “anyone in my position not taking the Fifth Amendment would be a fool, an absolute fool.”

Mr. Trump has called the attorney general “Letitia Peekaboo James” as well as a “racist,” and labeled the investigation and subsequent suit a “witch hunt.” A trial is set for early October.