MANHATTAN (CN) — After more than ten weeks, testimony in Donald Trump’s civil fraud case finally concluded on Wednesday with a rebuttal witness that prompted a venomous clash between defense and state attorneys.
The trial will now be on hiatus until Jan. 11, when counsel will return to deliver closing arguments. Judge Arthur Engoron said he hopes to have a decision by the end of January.
“In a strange way, I am going to miss this trial,” Engoron said nostalgically when opening court Wednesday morning. “It’s been an experience.”
Tensions were high this week between the dueling legal teams. After the defense rested its case on Tuesday, the attorney general’s office kicked off its brief rebuttal case with two expert witnesses: Kevin Sneddon, a real estate broker and former executive at Trump International Realty, and Eric Lewis, an accounting professor at Cornell University.
The testimony from Lewis, in particular, was one that sparked heated squabbles between Trump’s lawyers and the state’s. Trump’s legal team on Tuesday submitted a letter to the court calling Lewis unqualified and saying he would “simply offer nothing of value or with any shred of credibility to the trier of fact.”
“I probably have more experience in the practice of accounting than this witness,” Trump’s lead attorney Chris Kise told the court on Tuesday.
Kise took issue with Lewis’ resume. The Ivy League professor has a PhD in engineering systems with an accounting concentration, which Kise argued wasn’t a real accounting degree. He also argued Lewis didn’t have enough real-world accounting experience to be deemed an expert in the field.
Over Kise’s pleas, Engoron qualified Lewis as an expert in accounting. And on Wednesday, the professor delivered a blistering rebuttal to the defense’s argument that Trump wasn’t responsible for checking his financial statements for accuracy.
On the contrary, Lewis testified that such a responsibility would have indeed fallen on Trump — not his outside accountants as the defense had claimed.
“They don't have an obligation to review for GAAP [Generally Accepted Accounting Principles] departures, even obvious ones,” Lewis said of the accountants.
This directly contradicts the crux of the defense’s case: that Trump’s hired accountants at Mazars USA — not Trump himself — were ultimately the ones responsible for any issues on the statements of financial condition. The attorney general’s office is accusing Trump of fraudulently inflating his net worth on those yearly documents in order to gain business advantages.
As a whole, Lewis’ testimony was unfriendly to the defense. Trump’s lawyers objected dozens of times throughout his brief direct examination, questioning his qualifications and the appropriateness of his rebuttal testimony.
“[This is] such improper rebuttal, I don’t see how they’re being allowed to continue,” Kise said after objecting.
State lawyer Kevin Wallace, who was leading the direct examination of Lewis, grew increasingly frustrated with each interruption. He chided Kise for his “insane standards” for Lewis’ testimony and begged Kise to stop objecting after every question.
Trump’s lawyers didn’t let up, though. On cross-examination, defense attorney Jesus Suarez berated Lewis for his qualifications, background and teaching reputation in an effort to thwart the professor’s credibility.
“Are you aware that your students describe you as the worst professor in the Cornell accounting program?” Suarez asked Lewis, reading aloud several student-written reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.
“‘Good class if you want to chill and not learn much,’” Suarez read. “‘He does not teach, he only likes to share his mid-aged crisis life in the class.’”
Lewis chuckled at the critiques, eventually stating that his teaching record spoke for itself.
When the roughly one-hour cross-examination concluded, the attorney general’s office rested its rebuttal case, officially ending the case’s testimony. Trump’s attorneys reiterated their ask for a directed verdict on the case, which they alluded to on Tuesday. The trial won’t resume again until Jan. 11, but attorneys have to file their written closing summaries by Jan. 5.
In a statement to Courthouse News, Kise said that the past few months proved “that there was no fraud, there were no victims and there has simply been no harm.”
“The trial itself did little to instill public confidence in the integrity of the New York court system,” Kise continued. “At this point the trial court must and should follow the law and the indisputable evidence and put an end to the Attorney General's manifestly unjust political crusade.”
The attorney general’s office saw things differently.
“Today, we rested our case against Donald Trump for years of financial fraud,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “The judge already found that Trump engaged in significant fraud and unjustly enriched himself and his family. This trial revealed the full extent of that fraud, and Trump's inability to disprove it.”
James brought the case last year against Donald Trump and his co-defendants, accusing them of defrauding banks and insurers using phony statements of financial condition. Before the bench trial began, Engoron already found Trump liable for the case’s top fraud count. His incoming decision will determine damages and the remaining counts at issue.
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