A lawyer working on behalf of the Trump family has told a right-wing news outlet that she may yet advise her clients to plead the fifth amendment as a long-running investigation into their finances closes in on them.
Speaking on Newsmax, Alina Habba remarked that the Trumps had been put “between a rock and a hard place”.
“I haven’t made a determination on what I think is best,” she said when asked by the host if her clients would be invoking their protection against self-incrimination.
The investigation in question is a probe into the Trump real estate empire’s business practices, specifically allegations that properties were deliberately and dramatically over- and undervalued to minimise tax burdens and obtain more favourable loan conditions.
It is being led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who last week succeeded in her effort to obtain testimony from Donald Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Jr. A judge ruled that the three can be questioned under oath, thwarting an effort by the family to block her from questioning them on the basis that she is politically biased.
In the Newsmax interview, Ms Habba laid into Ms James along the same lines, appearing to confirm that the Trumps are intent on obstructing her. “We are going on all avenues against Letitia James,” she said, “not just with the courts, and it has to be stopped.
"And people in this state should really be frightened if you’re a real estate tycoon, and you have valuations of property and you happen to be on the other side of politics with Letitia James.”
She and the host then joked about the allegations, which they mused are not so unlike the supposedly routine overvaluing of residential property on the everyday American residential real estate market. (Mr Trump is accused of overvaluing some of his properties by a factor of 10.)
Mr Trump’s hopes of avoiding scrutiny were recently dealt a severe blow when his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, abruptly broke off its relationship with him and the Trump Organization and declared that the last decade’s worth of his financial statements should no longer be regarded as reliable.
