Former President Donald Trump‘s attorney, Alina Habba, claimed New York‘s Democratic attorney general is “fame-hungry” after announcing last week the state is seeking up to $370 million in fines in a civil fraud lawsuit against his business empire.
New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Trump and his business associates in September 2022 over alleged fraudulent business statements inflating the value of his assets in order to secure more favorable business terms, saying he should owe $250 million. She issued new filings in the case last week, arguing new evidence has emerged that justifies raising Trump’s fines to $370 million.
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“Ms. James has, in my mind, always been a bit of a fame-hungry human being that has put her politics in front of the interest of New York State,” Habba, who is representing Trump in the case, told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures.
“She wants to completely wipe clean the bank account of the Trump Organization. She wants to hurt individuals who have done nothing wrong. She wants to disgorge them of their severance pay,” Habba said.
While Habba dismissed James’s filings on Friday as a shallow bid to “up the ante,” the attorney general pointed to evidence that has emerged throughout the case, placing the damages into three categories: Earnings Trump gained from interest rate savings due to misstating his assets, “bonuses” paid to Trump Organization employees who participated in the alleged scheme, and profit realized from two deals that James says were obtained fraudulently.
The two deals in question involved $139 million in profit from the sale of the Old Post Office in Washington and $60 million in profit from the sale of the Ferry Point golf course in New York City, according to court filings.
James’s interest in Trump has lasted longer than her five-year tenure in office, as she campaigned for office in 2017 on Trump being a “con man” and vowed to shine a “bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.”
Habba contends that the experts who testified at the trial on behalf of Trump, who said the “statements were undervalued,” should tell the presiding judge that Trump “did nothing wrong, that his statements actually gave too much information and there were no victims.”
“And Deutsche Bank said, ‘Hey, we loved working with Trump. He actually paid his loans off early in many instances, if not on time. We all made money, and he over-invested in the properties, the assets related to the mortgages, and he was a great client,’” Habba added.
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Judge Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the trial, ruled ahead of the case’s start that Trump was guilty of James’s allegations and ordered the dissolution of his New York business. Closing arguments in the four-month trial are slated for Jan. 11. Engoron said he will decide on penalties by the end of the month.
After his pretrial ruling, the purpose of the trial at that point became whether Trump and the defendants violated six state fraud statutes and whether disgorgement, the amount Trump should be forced to pay, would be ordered.
