By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Donald Trump arrived at a New York court on Thursday to attend his ongoing civil fraud trial, where an accountant will testify to try to boost the former U.S. president’s case that his family company did not manipulate the values of its holdings.
Eli Bartov, an accounting professor at New York University, is the defense’s second-to-last witness in a trial over a lawsuit brought by the state’s attorney general accusing Trump, his adult children and family company of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars to dupe lenders and insurers.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is expected to testify as the final defense witness on Monday. He has denied wrongdoing and said New York Attorney General Letitia James, an elected Democrat, is biased against him.
Trump has appeared as a witness once already. In defiant and rambling testimony last month, he complained of unfair treatment and acknowledged that he was involved in some of the documents at the heart of the fraud case.
He has also turned up at the trial on other occasions to glower at participants from the defendant’s chair and air his grievances to TV cameras outside the courtroom.
Ahead of his appearance on Thursday, he repeated his insults of James and of Arthur Engoron, the judge overseeing the trial. “This case was decided against me before it even started,” he said on social media.
James has said Trump, his adult sons and 10 of his businesses manipulated financial statements to dupe banks and insurers into providing more favorable loan and insurance terms.
The trial largely concerns damages, because Engoron has already found that Trump’s financial statements were fraudulent.
Engoron has imposed gag orders in the case restricting Trump and his lawyers from speaking publicly about court staff, after Trump published a photo of the judge’s main law clerk with Democratic U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer on social media and falsely called the clerk Schumer’s “girlfriend.”
Engoron said the post left the court “inundated” with threats from Trump supporters. Trump is appealing the gag orders.
James is seeking $250 million in penalties, and wants Trump banned from New York state real estate business.
Over the past several weeks, bankers and others who did business with the Trump Organization have testified for the defense that they did not rely solely on Trump’s valuations in deciding deal with his company.
Trump faces four unrelated federal and state criminal indictments, including two over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
He has pleaded not guilty in all of those cases.
None of them have dented his commanding lead in the race to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in next November’s election.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Andy SullivanEditing by Noeleen Walder and Nick Zieminski)
