MANHATTAN (CN) — Donald Trump, who is back in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan this week, will return next week as well for the long-awaited testimony of his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
New York Attorney General Letitia James made the announcement on Wednesday after a dramatic day in court.
“At the end of the day, we are here to seek justice and we will seek justice,” James told reporters outside of the courthouse. “I look forward to seeing Mr. Trump again. I understand that he will be returning next week for Michael Cohen.”
Trump’s legal team came out swinging Wednesday morning when attorneys accused a witness of perjury and got into a shouting match with the attorney general’s office less than an hour into the proceedings.
Trump attorney Lazaro Fields was continuing his cross-examination of real estate appraiser Doug Larson, who testified Tuesday that the Trump Organization cited him as a source of their asset valuations on their financial statements, despite largely ignoring his advice.
On Wednesday, Fields insinuated that Larson undervalued Trump’s 40 Wall St. building by $114.5 million in 2015. Larson didn’t bite.
“Our values were not wrong, no,” Larson said. “It’s what we knew at the time.”
The Trump Organization based its own valuation of the property off of generous future projections. Even if those projections turned out to be right years later, Larson testified, that’s not necessarily how he would have appraised it back then.
“We based our assumptions on what we knew at the time and the projections that we knew,” he said.
Fields then shifted gears, bringing up a 2013 email exchange between Larson and former Trump Organization controller Jeff McConney. In one message, McConney asked Larson about how a building’s lease terms affect its cap rate.
On Tuesday, Larson testified that he didn’t “work with” McConney to determine the building’s cap rate. Fields claimed the email is proof that Larson had lied during Tuesday’s testimony.
“You lied yesterday, didn’t you?” Fields asked.
Trump’s lead counsel Christsopher Kise stood up out of his chair and objected.
“The witness has rights,” Kise exclaimed, then asked for Larson to be excused from the witness stand to consult with his own attorney. Judge Arthur Engoron begrudgingly agreed and Larson left the courtroom.
“I think he needs to be advised for potential perjury,” Kise told the judge. “He perjured himself yesterday, in my opinion.”
“I’m not even sure this impeaches his testimony,” Kevin Wallace of the attorney general’s office shot back.
Wallace accused Trump’s legal team of “putting on a performance for the press,” considering Kise made the remarks during his own team's turn at cross-examination.
Engoron stepped in as the dueling legal teams exchanged heated jabs, offering that the language used in the witness' emails was vague. Larson’s attorney asked the judge to speak with her client since he was just accused of perjury in open court.
Raising his voice, Engoron opted to keep things moving.
“If he’s perjuring himself, he’s perjuring himself. If not, he has nothing to worry about,” the judge said. “I just want him to testify... The court’s instruction is to get the witness back on the stand.”
Trump appeared unhappy Wednesday during sections of Larson’s testimony. He shook his head and audibly grumbled in disapproval at some of Larson’s answers.
At one point, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office objected to Trump’s sounds of apparent frustration.
“Can the defendant please stop commenting during the witness’s testimony?” he asked.
Engoron sustained the objection.
Wednesday’s explosive exchange represents a consistent strategy from Trump’s legal team: to pin the financial inaccuracies on the Trump Organization’s scrutinized asset valuations on the number-crunchers, not the company’s executives.
They tried a similar tactic earlier this month when they asked ex-Trump Organization accountant Donald Bender if he “screwed up” when he didn’t catch the fact that Trump’s Manhattan penthouse was a third of the size as reported on financial documents.
“So the leader of the free world, who was keeping this country safe, relied upon you not to screw it up, and you did?” Trump attorney Jesus Suarez asked Bender on Oct. 3.
“I did not,” Bender replied.
But Wednesday’s theatrics hardly ended at Larson’s testimony. Just before the lunch break, several court officers had to intervene when a woman approached Trump at the defense table.
“Earlier today… an individual disrupted the proceedings by standing up and walking towards the front of the courtroom and yelling out to Mr. Trump indicating she wanted to assist him,” a spokesperson for the New York State Unified Court said in a statement to Courthouse News.
The woman was an employee at the court, according to the statement, who was placed on administrative leave and barred from entering court facilities pending an investigation. She was seen being loaded into a court police cruiser and was later charged with disrupting a court proceeding.
Trump didn’t return to the courtroom after Wednesday’s afternoon break. He’s expected to be back in court on Thursday, when Jack Weisselberg, son of defendant Allen Weisselberg, will resume his testimony.
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