Former US president Donald Trump was back in New York on Thursday to give a deposition in the state civil case accusing him of business fraud, as his legal woes continued to multiply.
Trump arrived in New York a little over a week after appearing in New York criminal court on a different matter, pleading not guilty to dozens of felony charges related to hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels and others during the 2016 presidential election.
He stayed at his Trump Tower skyscraper on Fifth Avenue near Central Park on Wednesday night and on Thursday prepared to answer questions behind closed doors in a $250m civil fraud lawsuit brought against him by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James.
Trump noted as much in a series of overnight social media posts that also lashed out against the case.
“I will finally be able to show what a great, profitable, and valuable company I built,” Trump said in one post on his Truth Social platform early on Thursday, after attacking the attorney general and what he called her “persecution”.
James’s lawsuit against Trump accuses him and others of a decade-long scheme to manipulate property values and his own net worth in order to obtain favorable loans and tax benefits.
The lawsuit alleges that Trump misled banks and others about the value of his assets, including allegedly fraudulently inflating the value of 23 properties including his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump Tower and what was previously the Trump International Hotel, in Washington DC.
“The complaint demonstrates that Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat the system, thereby cheating all of us. He did this with the help of the other defendants,” James said last year.
The trial in the case is scheduled to begin on 2 October. Thursday’s deposition could be used to try to discredit any testimony Trump may give at trial, or be offered as testimony if he is unavailable to appear.
As Trump arrived in New York to address his legal woes with the state, an appeals court in Washington DC on Thursday refused to make a decision on a different set of lawsuits involving Trump and 79-year-old magazine writer E Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her nearly 30 years ago.
In another potential blow to the former Republican president, the court of appeals refused to consider whether Trump can be shielded from the first of two defamation lawsuits by Carroll, saying that it did not have sufficient information to decide whether he was acting as president when he accused Carroll of lying about the alleged incident.
According to Carroll, Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in the luxury New York department store Bergdorf Goodman. Trump has denied and crudely pushed back against the allegations, calling Carroll a “nut job” and her allegations a “hoax and a lie”, as well as a “complete con job”.
At one point, Trump also said: “She’s not my type.”
The Washington DC appeals court has sent the case back to the second US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan, which last September asked whether under local law Trump made his comments in his role as president, or in his personal capacity, as Carroll argued.
The Washington court said the second circuit court or a federal district judge in Manhattan should assess Trump’s role.
A trial over the second denial is scheduled for 25 April in Manhattan federal court, where Trump could testify.
Trump also faces federal investigations stemming from his handling of government documents after leaving the White House and alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as a state-level probe in Georgia into whether he unlawfully sought to reverse the 2020 election results there.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that investigators from the US Department of Justice are looking into whether Trump took a map with him upon leaving office which contained “sensitive intelligence information”.
According to individuals familiar with the matter, investigators have asked whether Trump showed the map to others while on board a plane as well as to a journalist who was writing a book, the outlet reported.
Meanwhile, in a court filing last month, Trump tried to block Georgia’s investigation into his alleged attempts to influence the 2020 election by seeking to bar the use of a report from a grand jury on the case. Trump’s attorneys have lambasted the investigation as “confusing, flawed, and, at times, blatantly unconstitutional”.
The filing also sought to ban the involvement of Fulton county’s Democratic district attorney, Fani Willis, in the case.
As Trump’s legal entanglements grow, the former president filed a $500m lawsuit against his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen on Wednesday, a key witness in Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s case involving hush money payments that Trump allegedly made to adult film star Stormy Daniels over an apparent extramarital affair.
Trump’s lawsuit alleges that Cohen violated his attorney-client relationship and unjustly enriched himself.
