Donald Trump faces legal jeopardy for missing documents, NY AG lawyer tells judge

• Donald Trump faces 'a bunch of other issues' if he has no more personal business documents to turn over to a NY probe, a judge was told Friday.
• The warning was made by an attorney for NY AG Letitia James, after a Trump lawyer repeatedly said there are no more documents.

Donald Trump faces "a bunch of other issues" if he has no more personal business documents to turn over to a New York probe of his business, a Manhattan judge was told Friday.

The not-so-veiled warning was made by an attorney in the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, during a hastily-called conference before the judge overseeing multiple subpoena disputes between the AG and Trump.

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, had assembled the parties to discuss the contempt order and $10,000-a-day fine the judge had issued on Monday.

Engoron decided Friday that the contempt order and fine would continue — but first, lawyers for Trump and for James had a heated back-and-forth over how forthcoming Trump has been in producing personal business documents for the AG's three-year probe of the Trump Organization.

Trump's attorney, Alina Habba, stated repeatedly that Trump simply has no more documents to give.

These protests prompted AG attorney Kevin Wallace to hint of things to come. Trump could face additional liability for withholding documents in the probe, Wallace suggested, beyond any potential financial-wrongdoing charges from the probe itself.

"There's really nothing left in his custody," for Trump to turn over, Habba told the judge.

"I'll be frank," Wallace said, his tone ominous. "If that's all there is ... it raises a bunch of other issues."

The AG has been exploring the universe of Trump Organization business documents for more than two years, as it investigates whether Trump mistated the value of his properties in order to reap millions in bank loans and tax breaks.

James' lawyers have repeatedly said in hearings and in court documents that it has learned of the existence of some of Trump's missing personal business documents not through Trump, but from other witnesses and through the recent work of an independent, court-ordered document search firm, HaystacksID.

"We have been reading Haystacks' reports," agreed AG attorney Andrew Amer. "Things have not been collected," prior to the search firm's work, he said. "Things have not been imaged. There's huge gaps and holes."

James had expanded on those gaps in an April 7 filing.

"To date the Trump Organization has produced approximately ten documents from Mr. Trump's custodial files," the filing said, an often-repeated complaint of the AG.

Just seven, the filing said, have come from Trump's so-called "chron files," a chronologically-organized collection of paperwork going back years, and believed by the AG to reside in file cabinets at the Trump Organization headquarters in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Those seven documents, turned over by the Trump Organization on Feb. 9, total 542 pages, the filing says.

That tranche of documents "appears incomplete and to some degree unresponsive," the filing says. "It contains incomplete correspondence, and extraneous, irrelevant material, such as a document discussing whether a Trump Organization Security guard should receive a permit to carry a handgun," the filing says.

But neither Trump nor the Trump Organization has turned over "documents that logically should be part of Mr. Trump's production," the filing says.

That includes paperwork relating to Trump's net worth, and tax and audit documents relating to past litigation against Trump, the filing says.

Meanwhile, Trump's longtime personal assistant, Rhona Graff, has been ghosting the AG, the filing claims: "HaystacksID attempted to contact her counsel several times but has received no response whatsoever."

Trump, through attorney Habba, has begun the process of appealing the contempt order.

Trump has denied wrongdoing at the Trump Organization, and has characterized the investigation by James, a Democrat, as a politically-biased witch hunt.