It has come to light that Judge Engoron snapped on Trumps attorneys and interfered with a witness examination. Trump’s attorney was showing inconsistencies in the accountants story year over year which would’ve blown a hole in the AG’s entire case. Instead of the AG objecting, the Judge jumped in and stopped the questioning.
https://twitter.com/travis_in_flint/status/1710309701940908124?s=46&t=MeYLTapzMduvkZEdyyUDmA
It has been noted that Donald Trump’s lawyers sparred with the judge overseeing the ex-president’s civil fraud trial in downtown Manhattan Wednesday, arguing for their right to ask repetitive questions.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who’s presiding over the trial, was having none of it.
“You’re not allowed to waste time,” he snapped at Trump’s lawyers during one testy exchange.
On Wednesday, Trump’s attorney Jesus M. Suarez continued his cross-examination of Donald Bender, an outside accountant who had compiled the Trump Organization’s statements of financial conditions until 2020. The New York attorney general’s office, which is bring the lawsuit, questioned Bender on Tuesday.
Suarez asked about whether Bender — and not Trump and his children — would be responsible for the statements, which the attorney general’s office said included outrageous valuations that were fraudulently used to obtain bank loans. The move was a continuation of a plan the Trump Organization’s lawyers employed during an earlier criminal trial — trying to shift blame to Bender.
The buck stops with you, right?” Suarez asked.
Bender highlighted during multiple questions that he and his accounting firm, Mazars USA, was responsible for compiling the documents but that the Trump Organization was responsible for giving them the market value and liabilities for each property.
Engoron was eager to rush things along. The trial is scheduled to last until late December.
At one point Wednesday morning, Suarez pulled up a list of 200 corporate sub-entities of the Trump Organization — many of them appearing to be corporations for particular apartments — and started asking the same set of questions about Bender’s work on each one.
“Can we just agree the questions will be the same and the answers will be the same for each of them?” Engoron asked, sounding peeved.
