A New York judge on Thursday ordered Donald Trump and two of his children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, to testify under oath as part of the state attorney’s civil investigation into his group’s tax practices. of New YorkLetitia James. She suspects fraud.
This is a new setback for the former president and Republican businessman, who casts doubt on his intention to seek his party’s nomination again for the 2024 presidential election.
Donald Trump, 75, can however still challenge the judge’s decision and could, in any case, choose not to answer questions from Letitia James, whose investigation he describes as a “political witch hunt”.
“No one is above the law”
After a videoconference hearing on Thursday, Judge Arthur Engoron denied the Trump camp’s motion to quash the request for testimony made by Democratic prosecutor Letitia James.
As a result, the judge ordered the 45th President of the United States to “come and testify within 21 days of this decision.” An order which also applies to his two children, also in the crosshairs of Letitia James, and to a request to provide accounting documents for the investigation.
“Justice prevailed,” immediately welcomed the prosecutor in a press release. “No one will be allowed to stand in the way of justice, no matter how powerful. No one is above the law,” added Letitia James, who withdrew from the Democratic nomination race for the New York state governorship at the end of 2021 to focus on her judicial functions.
“Significant evidence” according to the prosecutor
For the lawyer of the former president, the decision of Thursday “confirms what we have already known for some time: Donald Trump cannot benefit from a just decision in the State of New York”.
“The court clearly had a preconceived idea and had no desire to engage in an impartial debate on this critically important issue,” Alina Habba said in a statement sent to AFP.
The civil investigation was accelerated in January when Letitia James announced that she had gathered “significant evidence that suggests that Donald Trump and the Trump Organization falsely and fraudulently valued a number of assets” in order to obtain economic benefits.
A parallel criminal investigation
These proceedings are taking place in parallel with a separate investigation, criminal this time and carried out by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, in which the Trump Organization and its faithful chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been charged with tax evasion. They have pleaded not guilty and the trial is due to open in mid-2022.
For her part, Letitia James had asked to hear Donald Trump and her two children in early December. On January 18, she had substantiated her suspicions in a court document of more than 100 pages. She suspects the Trump Organization of having “fraudulently” overstated the value of certain properties when applying for loans from banks and of having understated these same properties with the tax authorities in order to pay less taxes.
According to her, Donald Trump had “decision-making power over a wide range of practices at the Trump Organization, including misrepresentations to third parties, including financial institutions and the US tax authorities (IRS)”.
The Trump family denounces “political” motivations
To drive the point home, Letitia James presented a document this week in which Donald Trump’s historic accounting firm, the Mazars group, claimed that its financial statements provided for a decade were not reliable. Mazars also informed the Trump Organization that he would no longer work for the group.
The Trump family had already been accusing Prosecutor James of “political” motivations for months, an argument that did not convince Judge Engoron. To refrain from conducting investigations or asking Donald Trump to testify “would have been a flagrant breach of duty” on the part of the prosecutor, he wrote Thursday, also sweeping away any argument about “personal animosity by Letitia James.
Donald Trump’s lawyers also stressed during the hearing the risk for their client to testify in this civil investigation, while a criminal investigation is open in parallel, accusing the prosecutors of working hand in hand to feed their files.
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