Testimony in Trump NY fraud trial concludes with bitterness and nostalgia

• "See you next year," the judge told both sides as testimony concluded in the Trump NY fraud trial.
• Closing briefs are now due at noon January 5, with summations set for January 11.
• The trial ended on a bitter, then nostalgic note, with angry questioning followed by handshakes.

More than 10 weeks of testimony reached an end on Tuesday in the Trump civil fraud trial in New York, with lawyers for both sides now sent home to spend their holiday breaks writing 50-page closing briefs.

The parties won't gather again in person until closing arguments set for January 11, only four days short of the Iowa caucuses, the starting bell of the presidential primary season.

A verdict in the fraud trial — the judge's final word in determining the future of Donald Trump's Manhattan-based real-estate and golf-resort empire — is not expected until late January.

For now, though, the last entry in the tens of thousands of pages of the trial transcript will remain these words from the judge: "I wish you all a happy holiday season, and see you next year."

As he sent everyone home Wednesday, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who has presided over the case since pretrial litigation began three years ago, sounded proud of keeping the massive effort on schedule.

"The most amazing thing" he said,"is that we actually got the trial started on October 2, hell or high water," he said.

"Hell or high water" was Engoron's original, frequently repeated threat concerning that ironclad start date, which was kept despite multiple efforts on Trump's side to delay proceedings.

At one point, in March, the defense had argued that it needed a six-month delay just to read all the state attorney general's trial evidence — some 250,000 documents totaling 2.6 million pages.

The state had argued back that the bulk of the documents, which filled four hard drives, should already be familiar to Trump, since they're his.

The last of some 40 people to take the stand in the trial was Eric Lewis, a Cornell University accounting professor who was the second of two state rebuttal witnesses.

In testimony that started Tuesday, Lewis, called as an expert witness, spent hours rebutting the defense's lead expert, who'd testified that the sometimes "glaring" misstatements in Trump's annual net worth statements should have been caught by Trump Organizations' outside accountants.

Lewis countered on Wednesday morning that catching and fixing these red-flag misstatements was the responsibility of whomever issued the net-worth statements.

Trump personally issued the statements prior to 2017. From 2017 on, they were issued by Trump's trustees, Trump Organization executive vice president Donald Trump, Jr., and former CFO Allen Weisselberg.

All are defendants in the case, along with Eric Trump and former company comptroller Jeff McConney, a key witness implicating the GOP frontrunner as heading an alleged conspiracy to defraud lenders and insurers.

The cross-examination of Lewis was the last of scores of contentious exchanges between witnesses and lawyers in the trial.

Trump defense lawyer Jesus Suarez even confronted Lewis with his Cornell student reviews, reading several aloud into the record, including one that said of the professor's accounting classes, "you don't learn much."

"Could you pick any good ones for balance?" Lewis joked in response.

Suarez had one of those ready, too.

"It's a good class if you want to chill and not learn much," Suarez said, reading from a piece of paper. "Does that qualify as a good one?"

When Lewis stepped down from the witness stand, at 12:17 p.m., the defense made the last of some half-dozen unsuccessful requests for an early verdict in their favor.

The judge set a 50-page, or 25,000-word, limit on closing briefs, which are due at noon on January 5.

Lead Trump attorney Christopher Kise then stood to thank the judge, stenographers, and court officers, noting, "It was an extraordinary effort."

Then the judge told everyone, "See you next year," and a court officer shouted in his booming voice, "Members of the audience, please remain seated."

For a brief few minutes, as first the defense team and then the state's team left the courtroom, there was almost a collective sigh of relief, and smiles on many faces.

"In a strange way, I'm going to miss this trial," the judge had said earlier Wednesday, and at the end, the sentiment seemed to be widespread.

Some of the departing lawyers patted each other on the back, and many shook hands warmly with the court officers on their way out.

Before leaving the courtroom, New York Attorney General Letitia James, the top plaintiff in the lawsuit on trial, rose from her seat in the front row.

She walked up to the judge's bench to speak for a few seconds with the judge's principal law clerk, by then also standing up to leave.

The clerk, Allison Greenfield, has been the subject of two defense gag orders and hundreds of threatening, insulting emails and phone calls after Trump attacked her by name and image in an October 3 Truth Social post and subsequent statements.

James appeared to wish Greenfield well; Greenfield appeared to thank her for that.

"I feel like we all should be signing yearbooks," one state employee could be overheard saying.

James is hoping Engoron's verdict will permanently bar her defendants — Trump, his two eldest sons, and two longstanding Trump Organization executives — from ever running a business in her state again.

She also hopes the judge sets more than $250 million in penalties. The sum represents sales profits and loan interest savings Trump pocketed through lying about his net worth in financial documents, James' lawyers argue.

A pretrial ruling by Engoron has already ordered that his New York business licenses be revoked and that Trump Organization be put into receivership and "liquidated," a penalty, now under appeal, that exceeds what even James had asked for.

Trump and his lawyers have countered that real estate values are subjective and that the banks that extended loans, despite the disputed net-worth statements, made millions of dollars in interest.

They've accused James and Engoron, both Democrats, of pursuing a partisan attack, including on Wednesday, when Trump, who did not attend the final day of trial, complained about them in a Truth Social post.

"They've got nothing other than a corrupt Attorney General, who ran on, 'I will get TRUMP,' and a Trump Hating Radical Left Judge, who may be crazy," he wrote.

Read the original article on Business Insider