New York Attorney General Letitia James is hunting for evidence that former President Donald Trump encouraged a witness to lie under oath during Trump's recent $454 million civil fraud trial.
Trump is resisting James' demand for more documents that she believes may prove that Trump, his co-defendants or his lawyers encouraged Alan Weisselberg to lie. Weisselberg, Trump's former chief financial officer, was sentenced to five months in prison on April 11 after previously making a deal with Manhattan prosecutors on perjury charges.
On March 4, Weisselberg agreed to plead guilty to two felony counts following testimony he gave during a 2020 deposition about the size and inflated value of Trump's apartment triplex on several years of financial statements.
The fraud case eventually led to Trump and parent company The Trump Organization being fined $454 million for illegally inflating the value of assets to get a better deal on bank loans.
In a September 2023 summary judgment, Judge Arthur Engoron found that Trump and The Trump Organization had engaged in civil fraud and in February ordered them to pay $354 million in damages, with the total coming to $464 million once interest was included.
In the latest filing, Kevin Wallace, senior enforcement counsel at the Division of Economic Justice in James's office, said that Trump or his attorneys may have encouraged Weisselberg to lie.
"Weisselberg has admitted that he perjured himself during discovery and the trial in this action," Wallace wrote. "The Court is well within its authority to determine if Defendants and their counsel facilitated that perjury by withholding of incriminating documents."
Trump could be indicted for facilitating perjury if James's office finds sufficient documentation and his lawyers resist attempts to hand over more financial documents to James's office.
They wrote to the court to explain that, as the discovery process has ended in the fraud case, James has no right to more documents.
Wallace strongly rejected the argument in his response.
"Defendants' argument boils down to the proposition that the Court is powerless to determine if a fraud was committed upon it during the course of two separate proceedings because discovery is now closed," he wrote.
Wallace wrote that if the court was to accept the Trump team's arguments, that would mean a judge could not investigate perjury that occurred during a trial "even when a named Defendant admits to having committed perjury during the discovery process and subsequent trial."
Wallace added that more documents are required from The Trump Organization.
"The potential failure to properly produce documents in a legal proceeding relevant to the valuation of Mr. Trump's triplex plainly falls...within the power of this Court to safeguard the integrity of its own proceedings," Wallace wrote.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's attorney and James's office via mail for comment.
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Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more
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