SUB-HEADING: "Judge Arthur Engoron blasted expert Eli Bartov's testimony while denying Trump's motion to toss the case."
GIST: "The judge in Donald Trump’s Manhattan civil fraud trial filed a scathing order on Monday that blasted the former president’s star expert witness Eli Bartov.
Bartov, an accounting professor at New York University, told the court earlier this month that there was “no merit” to the attorney general’s claims that Trump committed fraud on his yearly financial documents.
Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the bench trial against the former president, hadn’t previously commented on Bartov’s testimony — despite already ruling that Trump and his co-defendants had committed fraud.
That changed on Monday, when he wrote that Bartov “lost all credibility” by testifying in this case.
“Bartov is a tenured professor, but all that his testimony proves is that for a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say,” Engoron wrote.
During his testimony, Bartov claimed to have been paid approximately $877,500 in total for his work as a defense expert.
The judge continued that Bartov’s testimony completely contradicted the findings of the court’s summary judgment from months prior, which ruled that Trump had fraudulently inflated the value of his assets and overall net worth on his statements of financial condition.
“His overarching point was that the subject statements of financial condition were accurate in every respect,” Engoron wrote. “As this court discussed in excruciating detail in its September 26, 2023 summary judgment decision, the statements of financial condition contained numerous obvious errors. By doggedly attempting to justify every misstatement, Professor Bartov lost all credibility.”
Engoron’s comments about Bartov were part of a larger response that ultimately denied Trump’s latest effort to toss the case via directed verdict. Trump’s attorneys asked for a directed verdict one final time as trial ended last week; it’s a move that’s become so common for the defense attorneys, even Engoron appears to have lost count of their requests.
“At least five times during the recently concluded ten-and-a-half-week trial of this matter, defendants moved for a directed verdict,” Engoron wrote. “The first such time was at the close of plaintiff’s case … The court took that motion, and most of the others, under advisement. It denied two of them on the spot.”
Given the frequency at which Trump’s lawyers kept asking for directed verdicts, Engoron hadn’t yet denied all of them. There were still several that the judge had held “under advisement” until Monday, when he denied all outstanding requests with one fell swoop.
“This court hereby denies that motion and, furthermore, denies all the prior motions that the court previously took under advisement,” Engoron wrote.
Engoron reiterated some of the same key points he made in his summary judgment from months ago, which Trump’s lawyers routinely challenged throughout the trial by trying to prove that Trump’s property valuations weren’t necessarily incorrect.
“Valuations, as elucidated ad nauseam in this trial, can be based on different criteria analyzed in different ways,” Engoron wrote. “But a lie is still a lie. Valuing occupied residences as if vacant, valuing restricted land as if unrestricted, valuing an apartment as if it were triple its actual size … are not subjective differences of opinion, they are misstatements at best and fraud at worst.”
The judge also once again refuted Trump’s argument that the presence of a disclaimer clause in his statements of financial condition absolve him of any guilt when it comes to the documents. In Trump’s own testimony, he called the disclaimers the “worthless statement clause,” implying that banks and insurers barely relied on his financial statements at all.
Engoron didn’t find that argument compelling back in September when he issued his summary judgment. Monday’s ruling shows he hasn’t since been convinced otherwise.
“They are not disclaimers at all,” Engoron said of the clauses. “They are not defendants’ statements, and they certainly do not shield defendants from liability; if anything, they expose defendants to liability.”
In a statement to Courthouse News, Trump's lawyer Chris Kise said Engoron's ruling "represents a complete failure to address the legal elements of the claims to be decided."
"Based on the decision, it appears the Attorney General's burden of proof does not matter, the testimony from the involved bankers does not matter, application of governing accounting standards does not matter, the express language of the financial statements does not matter, and the ruling from the First Department does not matter," Kise continued. "All that seems to matter is arriving at a predetermined destination."
Hours before Engoron issued the ruling on Monday, the attorney general’s office filed their own letter to the court calling Trump’s directed verdict request “beyond frivolous.”
“Defendants are once again ‘whistling past the graveyard’ by relying on arguments the court has already objected and making factual assertions that are squarely contradicted by the evidence or have no record support at all,” state attorney Andrew Amer wrote in the court filing.
New York Attorney General Letitia James brought the case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants last year, when she accused them of swindling banks and insurers by pumping up Trump’s net worth on yearly financial documents.
The trial ended last week, but lawyers on both sides will return in January to deliver closing arguments."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-123488014
