Reuters file photos
- Donald Trump's fraud-trial judge asked a pointed question in the New York attorney general's closings.
- "How would you compare the fraud you're alleging to the Madoff Ponzi scheme?" he asked on Thursday.
- "It's smaller," a lawyer for the AG said, adding both cases demonstrated a sense of entitlement.
In a possible bad omen for Donald Trump, the judge in his New York fraud trial interrupted Thursday's closing arguments to ask a lawyer for the New York attorney general's office to compare him with Bernie Madoff.
"I often say I don't enforce morality, I enforce the law," New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge presiding over the three-month nonjury trial, said at the end of daylong closing arguments — which included a surprise statement by Trump himself.
"But in a case like this, there is some place for morality," Engoron continued, addressing Kevin Wallace, a lead lawyer for New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office brought the $370 million lawsuit now heading to verdict.
"How would you compare the fraud you're alleging to the Madoff Ponzi scheme?" the judge asked.
"It's smaller," Wallace answered, "in that there were a smaller number of people affected." The Wall Street schemer, who died in 2021 in prison at age 82, swindled more than 24,000 victim-investors, many of whom lost their life savings.
"I still think it's significant, given the dollar amounts involved," Wallace added of Trump.
James alleges Trump pocketed some $370 million in loan-interest savings and asset-sale profits by inflating his net worth by as much as $3.6 billion a year in annual financial statements he sent to banks over the course of a decade.
Wallace conceded that Trump's and Madoff's frauds were different in scope.
But maybe, he wondered aloud, both fraudsters were alike in their sense of entitlement.
"The answer is," Wallace told the judge, gesturing toward the defense table, "if you're rich enough, you're going to get away with doing it."
Wallace argued in his closings that Trump's fraud defense boiled down to a series of claims that had already been rejected by the judge or, in some instances, rejected on appeal as well.
Trump's already-failed defenses included that "valuations are subjective, Donald Trump is rich, banks like rich people, these were sophisticated counterparties, there were no victims, the loans were repaid, and on and on and on," Wallace argued.
Trial testimony showed that Trump was at the head of a conspiracy to inflate his net worth, argued Wallace's colleague, Andrew Amer, another assistant attorney general who shared in making closing arguments on the state's behalf.
The judge has said he hoped to render a verdict by the end of January.
In addition to $370 million in financial penalties, the AG is asking for a permanent ban on Trump ever running a business in New York, along with shorter bans on his buying or selling real estate in the state.
In September, days before the trial began, Engoron found, based on two years of pre-trial evidence, that Trump engaged in persistent fraud.
The judge has ordered that Trump lose his New York business charters and that his impacted assets be "dissolved," or sold off.
That penalty remains stayed on appeal but could spell the end of the Trump Organization, the former president's real-estate and golf-resort empire.