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Following a historic civil fraud trial against former President Donald Trump, his eldest sons and their family business, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a Friday brief they should be fined at least $370M for fraudulently inflating the value of his commercial real estate holdings.
The proposed penalty is a $120M increase from what James sought when she initially filed the lawsuit in 2022.
"Defendants reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains through their unlawful conduct," James wrote to New York Judge Arthur Engoron in the brief, filed Friday.
Engoron, who is the sole decision-maker in the trial, ruled before the trial began in the fall that The Trump Organization and its principals were liable for fraud, proceeding with the trial to determine the extent of a penalty. He revoked the company's business license as part of that ruling, a decision that was reversed by an appeals court while the trial proceeded.
There were 44 days of trial throughout the fall, during which Donald Trump, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump all testified, as well as a phalanx of bankers, accountants and appraisers who had done business with the family over the years.
Engoron already sided with James in finding that Trump artificially inflated his net worth by overvaluing his holdings, which include Trump Tower, 40 Wall Street and Mar-a-Lago, by between $812M and $2.2B. With the trial concluded, he is expected to decide on a penalty in the coming weeks.
In addition to a fine of at least $370M, James is seeking to bar Trump for life from the New York real estate industry and to have a court-appointed monitor oversee The Trump Organization for the next five years.
During the trial, Trump's attorneys argued that there were no victims of any of the activity James cited as fraudulent, and employees for Deutsche Bank testified the bank turned a profit on the loans at the heart of the trial and didn't rely on Trump's financial statements.
Trump attorney Christopher Kise told The New York Times in a statement that the penalty James is seeking is “unconscionable, unsupported by the evidence, untethered from reality and unconstitutionally excessive.”
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