Former U.S. President Donald Trump addresses a crowd January 28, 2023 during a 2024 campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina.
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New York’s attorney general’s office said Tuesday it will ask a judge to impose sanctions on former President Donald Trump and his attorneys in a pending $250 million fraud case for “falsely” denying facts they previously admitted and others Issues related to its recent court filing to impose .
Attorney General Letitia James’ team also plans to ask Manhattan Superior Court Justice Arthur Engoron to make a number of decisions that would affect Trump’s ability to contest her civil suit.
The proposed motions came to light nearly two weeks after a Florida federal judge fined Trump and his attorney, Alina Habba, nearly $1 million for overturning what the judge called a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others had submitted.
Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment on James’ plan, disclosed in a letter to Engoron from one of the attorney general’s attorneys.
James is suing Trump, the Trump Organization, three of his adult children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump — and others for widespread fraud involving false balance sheets and improper valuation of real estate assets. The defendants deny the allegations.
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Trump and the other defendants responded to the lawsuit last week with a court filing containing so-called verified responses to the allegations.
On Tuesday, a lawyer for James told Engoron that “each of the verified answers is deficient in a number of ways”.
“Defendants falsely dispute facts admitted in other trials,” wrote Kevin Wallace, senior enforcement counsel for the AG Bureau’s Economic Justice Division.
“They deny sufficient knowledge to respond to statements of fact clearly known to them,” Wallace wrote.
“And they propose affirmative defenses that have been repeatedly dismissed by this court as frivolous and unfounded,” he added.
Wallace said the attorney general’s office plans to file a motion asking Engoron to take several steps that would undermine Trump’s defense against the lawsuit. One would be the judge assuming Trump actually admitted to the allegations he and his co-defendants made wrongly denied.
James will also demand that Engoron “impose sanctions on defendants and their attorneys,” according to Wallace’s letter.
The letter said that “a cursory examination” of the verified responses “shows that a number of the denials are demonstrably false and in fact contradict affidavits made by the defendants in other trials.”
Wallace pointed to the Trump defendants’ denial in James’ lawsuit that Trump remained the inactive President of the Trump Organization while he served in the White House.
“But the allegation that Mr. Trump was the ‘inactive President of the Trump Organization’ while in the White House stems directly from his own affidavit in Galicia v. Trump dated October 18, 2021,” Wallace wrote. “Actually, [James’] Complaint uses Mr. Trump’s own language.”
Eric Trump denied in Verified Responses that Seven Springs LLC, controlled by the Trump Company, bought property in Westchester County, New York for $7.5 million in 1995 after the company admitted as much in a previous court filing said Wallace.
The attorney concluded by saying that Engoron had “already admonished the defendants and their attorney for their continued appeal of baseless legal claims, but exercised its discretion not to impose such sanctions after making its position clear.”
But Wallace added: “However, it doesn’t appear that point has been hit, and [Office of the Attorney General] would ask the court to reconsider the matter.”
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