- A "fertilizer bomb" threat against the judge nearly delayed closings in Trump's NY fraud trial.
- With Trump in attendance, the judge quipped, "Are we gonna be shot or something?"
Five hours after threats of a "fertilizer bomb" sent police rushing to his Long Island home, the judge in Donald Trump's New York civil fraud trial took the bench to preside over closing arguments without mentioning the incident to his packed courtroom.
But the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, did make a brief quip — "Are we gonna be shot or something?" — as he waited for a small group of news photographers to be escorted into the courtroom to take pictures of, or "shoot," the parties.
"We have a couple of reporters who would like to photograph — some of you anyway — so let's have them come in now," Engoron told court officers after entering the courtroom.
Trump himself watched, wearing a scornful expression, from the courtroom's defense table as a minute passed in uncomfortable silence. Eric Trump and state Attorney General Letitia James watched from opposite ends of the front row.
The silence was interrupted by the judge, who wondered aloud, "They're lining up? Are we gonna be shot or something? Trust me," he joked to the parties. "This will be painless."
A half-dozen pool photographers were led into the courtroom, took a flurry of photos, and were led out, leaving the judge to note with a smile, "The subjects of that photography don't look any different than they did a month ago," the last time the parties were photographed in the courtroom.
"First we'll hear from the defendants," the judge then continued, beginning the proceeding at around 10:15 a.m.. "They'll have until 12:45," he told the parties.
He congratulated the small crowd of lawyers ringing the room's two conference tables for reaching the finish line in the lengthy case, begun by the AG's office in 2019. Then he invited Trump's lead attorney, Christopher Kise, to approach a podium facing the bench.
"Not one witness came into this courtroom, your honor, and said they were a victim of fraud," Kise told the judge, starting his arguments.
The judge on Wednesday had denied the former president's request to deliver his own brief personal statement in addition to his lawyer's.
"The judge is not letting me make a summation," Trump told reporters before going inside the courtroom to hear closings.
"I really have no rights," he complained.
Trump made no mention to the reporters of the judge's on-the-record rationale for not letting him deliver a closing statement.
Engoron had issued his denial shortly after noon on Wednesday after Trump failed to promise he would not use his statement to make a campaign speech or attack the court or the attorney general's office.
Trump was left to complain outside the courtroom, rather than inside, about the attorney general, Letitia James, who has pursued a fraud case against the former president since first taking office five years ago.
"Letitia James, all she thinks about is 'get Trump,'" the former president told reporters on his way inside the courtroom.
For more than three years, Engoron has presided over litigation surrounding James' pursuit of Trump, his Manhattan-based real-estate empire, and four of his longstanding top executives — including his two eldest sons.
James alleges that Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth by as much as $3.6 billion dollars a year in annual net-worth statements issued to banks and insurers.
The frauds allowed Trump to pocket $370 million dollars in loan-interest savings and asset-sale profits he would not have otherwise been entitled to, James has argued.
Trump and his lawyers have countered that the case "is a manufactured claim to pursue a political agenda," as Kise told the judge early in his closing argument Thursday.
Kise further argued that in setting high values on his skyscrapers and golf courses, Trump was just seeing their true value.
"He's prescient. He's smart," Kise told the judge. "And he's been proven right," Kise said, noting that some of Trump's more aspirational asset values eventually turned out to be true.
"He knows exactly what he's doing," Kise said.
In arguing there were no victims, and that Trump's valuations were eventually proven right, Kise reprised some of the same fraud defenses Trump himself has raised over the years, including during an eight-hour pre-trial deposition in April.
Closings were expected to take most of the day Thursday. The judge, who has already found the Trump and his co-defendants liable for rampant financial fraud, has said he will render a verdict by the end of the month.
The verdict will establish any monetary penalties and whether Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, former CFO Allen Weisselberg, and former comptroller Jeffrey McConney conspired to break specific New York financial fraud statutes.