Judge orders Trump and companies to pay nearly $355 million in civil fraud trial

Former President Donald Trump on Friday blasted a ruling by a judge ordering him and his companies to pay nearly $355 million in the New York civil fraud case and continued claiming, without evidence, he had been politically targeted because he’s running for president.  

“This ‘decision’ is a Complete and Total SHAM,” Trump posted on Truth Social in his first public comments following the ruling.  

Trump said in a separate post, “The Democrat Club-controlled Judge Engoron has already been reversed four times on this case, a shameful record, and he will be reversed again. We cannot let injustice stand, and will fight Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized persecution at every step.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James celebrated Friday's ruling against the Trumps.

In a separate statement, she referred to the order against Trump and his companies as a “tremendous victory.” The attorney general said the ruling proves “no one is above the law."

James is expected to speak to reporters this afternoon.

While Judge Arthur Engoron did not dissolve the business certificates for the Trump Organization, as he had initially laid out, he did order several restrictions and stipulations to be enacted for the next few years.

Engoron wrote that a monitor he put in place for the company was to stay in place for at least three years.

The monitor, who has access to records and the internal workings of the business, is a retired federal judge who specialized in high-stakes, high-profile matters, according to Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor and CNN senior legal analyst.

The monitor issued a report a few weeks ago that said she found inconsistencies in her initial review of the company. That could lead to more trouble for the Trump Organization, Honig said.

“But if the goal is to rehabilitate the company, then this is the right person for it,” Honig said.

CNN's Jeremy Herb contributed reporting to this post.

Judge Arthur Engoron cited Donald Trump’s valuation of Mar-a-Lago on his financial statements as one of the properties where the former president committed fraud — while also chiding the former president for claiming his Florida resort was worth more than $1 billion. 

Engoron wrote that Trump’s 2002 deed gave away the right to use Mar-a-Lago as a single-family residence, meaning that Trump paid significantly lower property taxes and that it could not be valued as highly as he claimed.

In a footnote, Engoron noted of Trump and the deed: "A fact of which he is well aware, having signed the deed himself."

“There is no legal gray area surrounding the permanent nature of the deed restrictions,” Engoron later wrote in his ruling. "Accordingly, there can be no mistake that Donald Trump’s valuation of Mar-a-Lago from 2011-2021 was fraudulent.”

One Democratic lawmaker who questioned Michel Cohen at a hearing where he testified that Donald Trump had inflated his assets called the ruling appropriate and said the evidence against the former president and others is “pretty overwhelming."

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the ruling was “a natural and logical extension of what happened back in February 2019” during Cohen’s testimony.

Some background: During that hearing, Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, testified about how the Trump Organization manipulated figures to change the value of the company.

He also indicated that his former client potentially committed a variety of financial crimes from bank to tax fraud in order to secure loans and even to move up in Forbes magazine’s rankings of the very rich.

While calling her a “thoughtful” and “poised witness,” Judge Arthur Engoron questioned Ivanka Trump’s inability to recall details of several projects she worked on despite documents presented in court showing otherwise.

Engoron specifically mentioned her inability to recollect her work on the Old Post Office building in Washington, DC, and the loans issued by Deutsche Bank.

More background: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump's eldest daughter, was dismissed as a defendant in this case by an appellate court ruling in June, but was subpoenaed to testify by the New York attorney general’s office.

Judge Arthur Engoron recapped Michael Cohen's theatrical trial testimony, acknowledging Cohen's credibility issues but saying he ultimately believed him.

Engoron pushed back on Trump's narrative that Cohen was a star witness for the attorney general's office.

"Michael Cohen was an important witness on behalf of the plaintiff, although hardly the linchpin that defendants have attempted to portray him to be," Engoron said.

The judge said the testimony from Trump's former fixer was compromised by his previous perjury plea in another case and some "seeming contradictions" in what he said at this trial, but Engoron believed Cohen when he testified that "Trump did not expressly direct him to reverse engineer financial statements, he ordered him to do so indirectly, in his 'mob voice.'"

Judge Arthur Engoron found Donald Trump liable for issuing false financial statements, falsifying business records, and conspiracy, all part of a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

James accused Trump and his co-defendants of fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to obtain more favorable loan and insurance rates.

Remember: Before the three-month-long trial started, Engoron had already found Trump and his co-defendants liable for persistent and repeated fraud.

Judge Arthur Engoron found former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and former controller Jeffrey McConney liable for multiple civil fraud counts in New York, including issuing false financial statements, falsifying business records, insurance fraud and conspiracy. 

He permanently banned Weisselberg and McConney from serving in the financial control function of any New York corporation or business, and banned them from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years. 

Weisselberg was also fined $1 million in the ruling.