State of New York vs Trump, et al - the civil fraud case against the Trump Organization

[chancery]

https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/17 ... 2761643224

Lisa Rubin
@lawofruby
Alina Habba just took the podium to begin Michael Cohen’s cross exam; she acknowledges they’ve met a few times and asks whether she should address him as Mr. Cohen or Michael. Cohen, who is not a formal guy, says, “Mr. Cohen” to mild chuckles.

Habba starts with Cohen’s health, asking whether he is taking medication that would interfere with his ability to answer questions truthfully. He says no and admits that he has been deposed many times, including by her.

Now she is rehashing the same guilty pleas he admitted to on his cross examination, and is referring him to his 2018 plea allocution transcript.

Cohen is not making it easy for her. For example, he says he doesn’t recognize his plea allocution transcript by its cover sheet. But what she is doing is smart.

She is confronting him with his guilty pleas to the counts that he, to this day, denies constituted crimes.

The tactic is to force Cohen to admit to a lie: Either he was lying when he said he was guilty, or he is lying now when he denied he evaded taxes and/or lied on a home equity line of credit application.

Habba takes a lot of abuse on this app and in other places about her skills. But her questions are clear and well formed, designed to elicit yes or no answers, and I am the most awake I have been all day because she is compelling in the courtroom.

Now she is reviewing the SDNY’s sentencing submission to the court, where he is accused of a pattern of deception.

And here she goes, reminding him that when he pled guilty, under oath, on August 21, 2018, he had a legal obligation to testify truthfully. Now she is asking him whether he committed perjury in that proceeding, to which the AG’s office objected. Engoron overruled it.

Cohen said yes, he lied to Judge Pauley at his plea allocution in 2018. The woman next to me — another journalist — audibly gasped.

Although apparently this isn't news; he said all those things in his book, and said he did it to protect his wife from liability.

I agree with Rubin that this is competent cross.

[p0rtia]

Cohen has been trying (unsuccessfully thus far) to go after the SDNY people that he says pressured him into admitting to things he had not done to protect his wife.

I think it's effing stupid of Habba. The story is well-known; he's been consistent on it for years; and there's no jurty there to bamboozle. Plus, Habba is taking cheap shots, which is not going to impress Engoran.

[bob]

Plus, Habba is taking cheap shots, which is not going to impress Engoran.

Yet again: Audience of one (hint: not the judge).

[Suranis]

The audiance of one seens to be a bit sad.

image.png (63.02 KiB) Viewed 2490 times

Aww, you mean his big brain and Herculean visage didn't intimidate Cohen into shutting up? Bless.

[noblepa]

Judge Engoran has previously ruled that Trump did, in fact, fraudulently inflate the value of his assets, in order to receive better mortgage rates and other advantages.

Can (will) lenders now revisit those loans and foreclose, or at least demand renegotiating the mortgages to reflect actual asset values?

If a lender decided that the actual value of a property is less than the amount that Trump currently owes, that could be trouble. Trump would have to come up with cold hard cash to cover the difference.

Or will the lenders decide that Trump could and would make such a path very time consuming and expensive for them, and, since he seems to be making the payments on the inflated loan values, they are better off just continuing to take his payments?

Can taxing authorites, such as the city of New York, audit past tax valuations, which he undervalued, and sue for additional property tax money? Will they?

I assume that none of these scenarios will happen, if they ever do, until after this case is finished and all appeals have been resolved.

[Gregg]

As to the loans, Trump talks about them as if they are paid off.

I mean, he could be lying, I guess.

[p0rtia]

It's not that the loans were not repaid--or even that the bank didn't make money. The point is that he defrauded the banks by getting a lower interest rate becuase of his supposed great wealth--often by inflating the values of properties by lying about the development rights he said he owned when he didn't. Like valuing Mar A Lago as a residence, which made it much more valuable than its true designation: a club. Another term of one of the loans was that he maintain a net worth of some odd bllion dollars--which he lied about. This turns out to be illegal in NY

Too also, he got favorable insurance rates by manipulating the numbers.

I don't actually think the he underpaid taxes in NY (I could be wrong).

[neonzx]

As to the loans, Trump talks about them as if they are paid off.

I mean, he could be lying, I guess.

Lie? tfg?

But yes I noticed that too. The banks were paid and were happy, so he says.

[Suranis]

Depending on the time frame, it could be paying back the loans with more loads, or it could be the time where American banks took over the Trump org for a decade and managed it properly so it actually make money, despite Trump trying to take it back at every turn.

OR it could be the massive amounts of money he got from Russia starting 2005 that allowed him to actually pay off a chunk of his assets. But regardless pretty much everything he has is still mortgaged out the ass.

[Mr brolin]

To make a vaguely informed credit and loan decision the lender wants an accurate idea of the lendee's EBITDA, ( Earnings Before Interest, Taxation, Depreciation and Amortisation) is and if Trumpy poos minions materially misrepresented, therin lies other issues

[chancery]

Cohen has been trying (unsuccessfully thus far) to go after the SDNY people that he says pressured him into admitting to things he had not done to protect his wife.

I think it's effing stupid of Habba. The story is well-known; he's been consistent on it for years; and there's no jurty there to bamboozle. Plus, Habba is taking cheap shots, which is not going to impress Engoran.

Yet again: Audience of one (hint: not the judge).

Thanks p0rtia & bob, those are interesting points.

I haven't been following the saga of Michael Cohen, so the "I lied at my plea allocution" testimony was surprising to me.

I've had witnesses with prior conviction, and witnesses who had said things they needed to disavow, but I would be very concerned indeed about putting on testimony that included the plonking admission of having lied under oath to a judge.

There are lots of ways to characterize a guilty plea as unfair, and to me it would be worth a great deal of preparation effort to come up with a better way to put it than saying "sure, I lied."

However, since, as you say, Cohen is firmly locked in as having repeatedly said that he lied, I can understand that his lawyer and the prosecution probably concluded that they were better off sticking to it. And certainly, better to say it straight than to dance around it.

But I don't understand why you think the cross was cheap shot. Even if a story is well known, it's not in the record until it's put in the record, and it would be a blunder for Trump's lawyers not to do so. And I'm not saying it was masterful advocacy, just a decent piece of work, even if the fish was large and the barrel small.

And the thing is, we credit Cohen's testimony, because it's consistent with abundant long-standing evidence as to Trump's character and behavior, and because we want to. But while I'm willing to accept that Cohen has at some level seen the error of his ways, he's doing so now because it's in his interest. Does anyone think for a minute that the new Cohen will henceforth embody "the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive?"

It may be that the totality of the prosecution's presentation, including corroborating evidence for Cohen's specific testimony, will contain, if not fully immunize, the impact of this admission; we'll see.

[bob]

I haven't been following this closely, but it is a bench trial. Just get the facts into the record and move on.

Because the judge is the factfinder in this case, trying to convince a court that another (extremely prestigious) court did something nefarious isn't going to impress anyone.* And it isn't going to affect the outcome.

* Except one person (and his fan base).

[chancery]

I'm missing something. I thought it was Cohen that beef has a beef with SDNY. Was Habba trying to cast shade at the federal prosecutors? I agree that that's stupid, except of course for her Prime Imperative.

[chancery]

https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/17 ... 4666571096

Lisa Rubin
@lawofruby
But she has a zinger now: When Cohen was deposed in 2019 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he said he did not recall Trump asking him and Weisselberg “to inflate the numbers for his personal statement.”

Was he lying then to the Senate or now to the court? And then she insists on a yes or no answer. But when she cleans it up, he says he lied to the Senate.

[bob]

Gag order violated (again):

[p0rtia]

Kise is arguing that fuckhead was referring to Cohen, not the law clerk at his side.

The ball is in your court Judge Engoran.

[MN-Skeptic]

Fined $10,000 this time.

[chancery]

Beat me to it.

Here's some earlier context.

https://twitter.com/DanAlexander21/stat ... 0724694312

Dan Alexander
@DanAlexander21
11/ We're back after a brief break. The judge lambasts a statement that Trump reportedly made outside of the room when he suggested that the person alongside the judge is partisan. This is after the judge put a partial gag order on Trump, barring him from talking about his staff.

12/ "Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal of a clear court order?" the judge asks. Trump's lawyer stands up and says that Trump was referring to Cohen, not the judge's clerk. "I'll take the matter under advisement," the judge says.



20/ We’re back from lunch and, oh boy, the judge starts and impromptu hearing and calls Donald Trump to the witness stand to ask him about comments he made to the press this morning, referencing someone next to the judge.

21/ Trump goes under oath to testify about his comments to the press, and the judge questions him.

Trump claims, under oath, that he was criticizing Cohen, not the judge’s law clerk—the latter of whom he has a gag-order that prohibits him from talking about.

[Kendra]

[chancery]

Yeah, sure, but it's not a great thing. It's difficult for a judge to call a defendant to account for bad behavior like this without setting himself up for a charge of partiality. It's undeniable that Engoron is very upset with Trump, and a reviewing court might have legitimate concerns that this effected his judgment.

[Luke]

It's still being reported, but *T*** threw up his hands, stormed out of the courtroom, and angrily said to the press he won the trial and it should be over. The press clip has been posted. He's having a bad week.

[Kendra]

A pity there's no cameras in the courtroom.

[p0rtia]

Not enough. $50 k would have made the point.

[p0rtia]

So when fuckhead piles on the clerk again, making it clear that he meant the clerk, I presume Engoran will clip him with a perjury charge. Right?

[Kendra]

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ ... index.html

Donald Trump stormed out of his civil fraud trial after Michael Cohen backtracked in his testimony about whether he was lying to Congress in 2019 when he said that Donald Trump had never directed him to inflate financial payments.

On Wednesday morning, Cohen said he was lying in 2019 when he testified, “not that I recall, no,” in response to a question about Trump had directed him or Allen Weisselberg to inflate numbers for his personal statement.

But on Wednesday afternoon, Cohen said in response to additional questions that he did in fact stand by his congressional testimony that he had not been directed to inflate Trump’s financial numbers.

“So Mr. Trump never asked you to inflate the numbers on his financial statement," Trump attorney Cliff Robert asked.

“Correct," Cohen said.

Trump and his attorney Alina Habba threw up their arms at Cohen’s response. Robert then asked the judge for a directed verdict to dismiss the trial because Cohen was a key witness in the case.

Judge Arthur Engoron denied the motion. Trump then said "I'm leaving," and walked out.

Outside the courtroom, Trump said, “The witness just admitted that we won the trial. And then judge should end this trial immediately.”
Cohen later clarified in response to questions from the New York attorney general’s office that Trump didn’t directly ask him to inflate the numbers – but the idea was implied.

“He speaks like a mob boss,” Cohen said.