Donald Trump and his three oldest children have all testified in their New York business fraud trial, but most of them will probably be back on the stand soon enough.
Over the past two weeks, Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter Ivanka have testified in court about the Trump Organization’s business practices. The New York attorney general has accused them and their allies of fraudulently inflating the value of their real estate assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. Ivanka is not a co-defendant, because an appeals court ruled that the statute of limitations on her alleged involvement had run out.
But the testimony for all four Trumps spelled disaster, and they may try to rectify it.
“I think on balance, it was bad for the Trump family,” legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC Thursday, referring to the family’s testimonies. “But I will caveat that, saying, we expect three of those four Trumps to come back.”
Rubin explained that the questioning so far has been limited to the scope of Attorney General Letitia James’s lawsuit. Trump, Eric, and Don Jr. will likely testify again so that they can try to give more context to their previous testimony.
“[Trump’s] lawyers want to elicit testimony from all three of those male Trumps that goes beyond what the attorney general was interested in,” Rubin said. “And so they will bring them back to afford them … the latitude that they think the former president and maybe future president … should be afforded to explain himself.”
To say the Trumps’ testimonies went poorly is an understatement. They were repeatedly caught undermining their own defense. Trump, Eric, and Ivanka all had to admit they were involved in working with the organization’s financial statements.
Trump himself effectively admitted Monday that the organization’s financial statements were made with an eye to encourage favorable loans. The New York attorney general’s office revealed that Trump had signed financial documents intended to look good for banks.
The trial, which is only to set damages, has not been going well for Trump. He has been grasping at straws in an attempt to avoid accountability, using an argument the presiding judge has already deemed “worthless” and incorrectly insisting he was president in 2021.