AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
- It's the third week of defense testimony at the Trump civil fraud trial in Manhattan.
- Reps from Deutsche Bank, which NY says was defrauded, described actually prospering thanks to Trump.
- On Wednesday, internal documents showed the bankers practically swooning over Trump's billions.
Deutsche Bank executives practically swooned over Donald Trump's real estate fortune, according to internal documents made public by the defense in his New York civil fraud trial.
Trump was seen as a wealthy, fiscally-responsible "whale" who could open doors to his own billions and those of his "network" of fellow moguls, the documents revealed.
The internal emails and briefings, many more than a decade old, were shown on large screens in the Manhattan courtroom, to bolster the defense claim that Deutsche Bank was once among the former president's most well-rewarded Stans, instead of his biggest fraud victim, as state officials allege.
Trump's lawyers have repeatedly argued that there is no "victim" in this case.
"We are whale hunting," former Deutsche Bank executive Rosemary Vrablic told her fellow bankers of Trump in an email from 2011, soon after son-in-law Jared Kushner offered to make an introduction.
Whale hunting?
"It's a term used when there is a very high net-worth individual who is a prospective client," Vrablic explained in a crisp voice on Tuesday, after she was called to the witness stand by Trump's lawyers.
The bankers sometimes called their whale "The Donald," testimony showed.
This endearment was apparently used just among themselves, in internal emails during the heady, early days of the Trump-Deutsche Bank relationship, when the bank eagerly loaned the soon-to-be president more than $400 million.
It was money Trump used to develop his Miami golf resort, his Chicago skyscraper, and the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., projects that burnished his reputation as a billionaire developer and helped propel him to the White House.
"Given the circles this family travels in, we expect to be introduced to the wealthiest people on the planet,"' Vrablic rather breathlessly emailed her colleagues just 10 months into the banking relationship.
"The Chicago condos are selling like hotcakes," Vrablic said in an email to her fellow bankers two years later, displaying far more enthusiasm than on the stand Tuesday, when she dryly translated "hotcakes."
That particular term meant, "at a faster pace than we had expected," she testified, under direct examination by Trump attorney Jesus Suarez.
AP/Nam Y. Huh
Trump defrauded Deutsche Bank out of more than $100 million, the AG says
The former president has been on trial in the civil case for nine weeks now, as has his company, the Trump Organization, and five longstanding executives, including his two eldest sons.
The defendants have not routinely attended the trial, though they have cycled in and out of the courtroom as spectators and witnesses. Trump was compelled to testify last month under a state subpoena; he is scheduled to testify again, as the final defense witness, on December 11.
The judge presiding over the non-jury trial, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, has already ruled that a decade's worth of Trump's annual net-worth statements were fraudulent, finding that he exaggerated the value of his assets by at least two billion dollars a year.
State Attorney General Letitia James investigated Trump for three years before filing her fraud suit last year. She contends that Deutsche Bank was defrauded out of more than $100 million in interest income. This is interest, the state says, that the bank could have charged, using its own formulas, had Trump been truthful about his worth.
This $100 million in ill-gotten interest savings is part of more than $250 million that the state is asking at trial that Trump be ordered to pay back.
Before retiring in 2020, Vrablic was the most hands-on banker dealing with Trump, and his eldest children, too. Within a year of Kushner's introduction, Trump had moved $20 million in personal deposits to the bank, and Donald Trump, Jr., had also become a client, according to a Vrablic email shown in court Tuesday.
"Ivanka Trump will become a client for sure," Vrablic wrote her fellow bankers in the late 2011 email, adding, "She is the heir apparent of this empire."
An attempt to turn 'victims' into allies, one banker at a time
Vrablic was the third current or former Deutsche Bank executive called to the witness stand by the defense this week.
The defense is trying use Deutsche Bank's own executives to prove that they were not defrauded by Trump.
As a sophisticated international lender, the bank did its own risk analysis, apart from Trump's net-worth statements, the defense has argued. The bank walked away with more than $100 million in interest profits by the time Trump, who never missed a payment, paid off his final loan last month, the defense has also argued.
But the state has countered that any fact-checking, any profit-making, and any other non-victim-like behavior on the part of Deutsche Bank is besides the point.
The real point, as lead state's attorney Kevin Wallace argued Tuesday, is that you can't lie to a bank in financial documents.
Testimony in the defense case continues Thursday.