President Trump’s defense team filed the last two legal briefs to appeal the verdict and the $464 million judgment in the civil fraud case brought against the Trump Organization by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. An appeals court will hear oral arguments at the end of September. The enormous judgment levied against the Trump Organization is of the ilk described by some observers in the business world as “the corporate death penalty.”  

The civil fraud case, which has received less attention than the three criminal cases Trump is currently battling, is nonetheless a source of great irritation to the 45th president, who takes pride in his family business founded by his father, Frederick Trump. The case targets Trump’s finances and his real estate empire, which he built on his family name and, prior to winning the presidency, his legacy.

In their first brief, defense attorneys Alina Habba and Clifford Robert, who filed their papers after the court had already closed on Friday evening, addressed the sanctions against them. Last year, the New York Supreme Court judge presiding over the case, Arthur Engoron, fined the defense attorneys $7,500 each for making “frivolous” and repetitive arguments on behalf of their clients. 

The attorneys argued that the court should not be permitted “to punish Counsel for zealous advocacy in this historic case merely because Supreme Court disagrees with certain of their arguments.”

Their other brief responded to Ms. James’ appeal brief, filed on August 22, as the Sun reported. One of the arguments that stands out in their appeal is that Ms. Habba and Mr. Robert asked the appeals court to apply the same reasoning it applied when it dropped the charges against Ivanka Trump, the former president’s eldest daughter, who was originally also named in the lawsuit, to the remaining defendants. 

Ms. James accuses Trump, his two adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and two veteran Trump Organization employees, the former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and former controller, Jeff McConney, of having inflated Trump’s net worth and various assets and falsified financial statements in a decades-long scheme to gain better interest rates from banks and more favorable insurance policies. 

Judge Engoron, who presided over the case in the lower court, found the Trumps guilty before the trial began, ruling against the family business in what is called a partial pre-trial summary judgment. The trial was held to determine, among other things, how much money Trump would owe New York state as a penalty for the fraud in which Judge Engoron found he had engaged. After eleven weeks and over 40 witnesses, including Trump himself, who took the witness stand to proclaim his innocence, the judge awarded the state more than $355 million dollars, and set interest payments exceeding $100 million. 

Throughout the trial, Trump and his attorneys had loudly inveighed against Ms. James’s stated hostility to Trump (she’d campaigned on a pledge to shine a “bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings” and referred to him as “a con man” and “a carnival barker”). They also denounced Judge Engoron’s principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, who sat next to the judge on the bench, as biased, and accused Ms. Greenfield of “rolling her eyes”, “co-judging”, and “whispering” to the judge. 

Trump posted a photo of Ms. Greenfield and Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, on social media and called her, without verification, “Schumer’s girlfriend.” After Ms. Greenfield received hate mail and hostile calls to her personal cell phone, and threatening messages on social media platforms and to her personal email accounts, many of which were antisemitic, Judge Engoron imposed a gag order on Trump, and later on his attorneys, forbidding them from making public comments about his court staff, including any remarks about the communications between him and his staff, who were hired to aid in carrying out his “adjudicative responsibilities.”

“I don’t want anyone getting killed,” he told the attorneys.

Trump was fined a total sum of $15,000 for violating the gag order, which he denounced as an unconstitutional restriction on his right to defend himself.

Following Judge Engoron levying the gargantuan judgment against the Trump Organization, the 45th president won a significant victory when the same appeals court which will now rule on the case, at the last minute, lowered the bond Trump had to secure in order to appeal from the awarded $464-plus million judgment to $175 million, preventing Ms. James from seizing Trump’s assets. However, the original judgment of almost half a billion dollars still stands as a verdict unless the appeals court decides otherwise. 

After failing to find a bank willing to secure his bond, Mr. Trump at the 11th hour got a lifeline from Don Hankey, a California billionaire known as “the king of subprime car loans”, who put up his $175 million bond.

In their response brief filed Friday, Ms. Habba and Mr. Robert wrote that, “This case involves no victims, no complaints, no misstatements, no causation, and no injuries or losses.”

Contrary to Ms. James’ allegations of “misstatements” and the Trump’s “capacity or tendency to deceive,” the attorneys argued, “the evidence demonstrates” that their defendant’s business partners were in fact “not deceived, that they performed their own due diligence and eagerly embraced highly profitable business transactions, and that the challenged statements did not affect the terms of any transaction.” Most importantly, the attorneys insisted that banks and insurance companies “were paid back in full, on time or early, incurring a prepayment charge, in stark contrast to today’s loan market, where defaults are at all-time highs.” 

The attorneys also fought back against the alleged overvaluation of Trump’s assets, writing that the lower court falsy valued Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence and private club in Florida, “at $18 million to $27.6 million, disregarding unrebutted expert testimony that it is worth over $1.2 billion.” 

Trump’s net worth was also misrepresented by the attorney general, the defense team wrote, as it “is far greater than the Statements reflect.” 

Before the case went to trial, Ivanka Trump appealed to be taken off the case on the basis that claims against her were untimely. The appeals court recognized that Ms. Trump was not working at the Trump Organization when the company and Ms. James signed a so-called tolling agreement, effectively extending the statute of limitations.

“The Court held that Ms. Trump was not a party to the Tolling Agreement, and all claims against her had to be dismissed,” the attorneys wrote. “The same reasoning applies to all individual Appellants.” 

It is unclear why the executive vice president and chief legal officer at the Trump Organization, Allen Garten, signed the tolling agreement in the first place. But according to the attorneys, eliminating the extension of the statute of limitations granted by the tolling agreement would eliminate over $350 million of the judgment. 

Ms. James argued in her brief that the tolling agreement stands and such agreements “are enforced according to their plain terms.” She added that, “a corporate tolling agreement binds the corporation’s affiliates, officers, or directors when the agreement makes plain that it applies to them.” And she found that the appeals court had ruled on the argument when it removed Ms. Trump from the lawsuit but allowed the case to go forward against the other defendants.

But Trump’s attorneys insisted that the agreement “does not bind the Trust.” While the attorney general, they argued, claims that  “[a]n attorney has the authority to make litigation decisions on behalf of its client,” Mr. Garten, who signed the agreement “was not an attorney for the Trust… and never has been. He was also not the attorney for the individual Appellants and could not bind them.”

Oral arguments are scheduled to be held in Manhattan on September 26. A clerk at the Appellate Division, First Judicial Department told the Sun that after these arguments are heard, the court would take four to eight weeks “at minimum” to reach its decision, making it highly unlikely that a final ruling will come before the presidential election in November. However, there is a chance that Trump could see a verdict before he assumes the presidency, should he win the election.