NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump has lost his latest attempt to end the corporate fraud lawsuit he is facing in New York as he campaigns to win back the White House.
Judge Arthur Engoron issued a written ruling Monday rejecting the Republican's latest request for a ruling in his favor in a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
And in doing so, the judge rejected the credibility of one of Trump's expert witnesses at the trial, a professor who testified that he saw no fraud in the former president's financial statements.
The lawsuit centers on allegations that Trump and other company officials exaggerated his wealth and inflated the value of his assets to secure loans and make business deals.
In the three-page ruling, Engoron wrote that the “most egregious” error of Trump's argument was to assume that the testimony of Eli Bartov, an accounting professor at New York University, and other expert witnesses would be accepted by the court. accepted as “true and accurate.”
“Bartov is a tenured professor, but the only thing his testimony proves is that some experts will say whatever you want for about a million dollars,” Engoron wrote.
Bartov, who was paid nearly $900,000 for his work at the trial, said in an email that the judge mischaracterized his testimony.
Trump took to the defense, calling Engoron's comments about Bartov a “major insult to a man of impeccable character and qualifications” as he denounced the judge's decision.
“Judge Engoron is challenging the highly respected expert witness for compensation, which is the standard and accepted practice for expert witnesses,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.
During testimony earlier this month, Bartov disputed the attorney general's claims that Trump's financial statements were filled with fraudulently inflated values for such signature assets as his Trump Tower penthouse and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Bartov said there was “no evidence of any accounting fraud.”
But Engoron noted in his ruling Monday that he had already ruled there were “numerous obvious errors” in Trump's financial statements.
“By persistently trying to justify each incorrect statement, Professor Bartov lost all credibility,” the judge wrote.
In an email to The Associated Press, Bartov said that during the trial he never “remotely suggested” that Trump's financial statements were “accurate in every respect,” only that the errors were unintentional and that there was “no evidence was of concealment or falsification.”
Bartov also argued that he charged Trump his standard rate.
Closing arguments are scheduled for January 11 in Manhattan.
__
Associated Press reporter Michael Sisak in New York contributed to this story.