Former President Donald Trump was outraged with his fraud trial judge sounded in September, when he ordered the dissolution of much, if not all, of the Trump Organization.
Back then, six days before trial, the judge scorned Trump’s history of fraudulent, “pie-in-the-sky” net-worth statements in a company-crippling ruling that’s on hold, for now, pending appeal.
Three months later, things are not looking any better for Trump and his golf-resort and real-estate empire.
After 10-and half weeks of testimony, and with only closing briefs and arguments left before he issues his verdict, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron appears even more convinced of, and gobsmacked by, Trump’s fraud.
“Voluminous,” Engoron called the state attorney general’s evidence of wrongdoing, in a mid-December decision that described Trump’s $1,350-an-hour star accounting witness with this wry statement: “For a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say.”
When the verdict comes down sometime before the end of January, will Engoron kill, cripple, or merely sting Trump’s business empire?
Experts Business Insider reached out to are leaning toward “kill.”
“The judge has already declared the corporate death penalty,” Diana Florence, a veteran financial-crimes prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office now in private practice, said.
“So unless he backs off of that, from now on it’s all about how painful and slow the death is,” she said.
