Main: Then-former President Donald Trump holds up a copy of a story featuring New York Attorney General Letitia James while speaking during a news conference, Jan. 11, 2024, in New York (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File). Right inset: Michael Cohen leaves his apartment building on his way to Manhattan criminal court in New York, Monday, May 20, 2024 (AP Photo/Seth Wenig).
In a brief to “end” his civil fraud saga and vanquish New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump asked the Empire State”s top court Wednesday to find that his trial judge “erred as a matter of law” when he doled out a $464 million penalty and entered an “officer-and-director ban” against the president and his eldest sons.
And once again, the state’s “star witness” Michael Cohen has taken center stage.
The 100-page legal filing at the New York Court of Appeals recapped how Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron said the “frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience” when he ruled in February 2024 that Trump, his family business, and his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were liable for fraud and barred for years from overseeing businesses in the state to “protect the integrity of the financial marketplace and, thus, the public as a whole.”
While Trump succeeded a year later in challenging the massive fine as “excessive” and unconstitutional, a “fractured” appellate court left Engoron’s injunctive “officer-and-director ban” and liability findings in place. Those findings were aided by the testimony of former Trump “fixer” Cohen, whom the judge found “credible” despite being a “convicted perjurer” who sometimes offered contradictory statements at trial.
On Wednesday, Trump’s current lawyers said the AG’s “star witness” posted something on his Substack as recently as January, which the courts couldn’t have known about — but which, they say, exposes the “weaponized” nature of the case nonetheless.
“This Court should now overturn Supreme Court’s erroneous finding of liability on all causes of action, set aside its sweeping injunction, and put an end to this legally deficient case,” the brief said.
Challenging the AG’s authority to bring the case, citing her “‘unprecedented use’ of Executive Law §63(12)” to “get Trump,” the president said Cohen’s revelations of feeling “compelled and coerced” by James should matter.
“What Supreme Court did not address, because it was not public at the time, was that Cohen felt ‘compelled and coerced’ by NYAG to ‘deliver what they were seeking,'” the brief continued. “As Cohen has recently publicly explained, he ‘only provide[d] information and testimony that would’ help ‘secure a judgment… against President Trump.'”
In the Substack post from Jan. 26, Cohen twice said that he felt “pressured and coerced” by James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, both Democrats.
“From the time I first began meeting with lawyers from the Manhattan DA’s Office and the New York Attorney General’s Office in connection with their investigations of President Trump, and through the trials themselves, I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgment and convictions against President Trump,” he wrote.
Of James, he added: “I experienced a similar dynamic in the Attorney General’s civil case. Letitia James made it publicly known during her 2018 campaign for attorney general that, if elected, she would go after President Trump. Her office made clear that the testimony they wanted from me was testimony that would help them do just that. Again, I felt compelled and coerced to deliver what they were seeking.”
According to Trump’s team, the top court should find Engoron “wrongly” ruled all the Trump defendants “had intent to defraud” and shouldn’t have taken Cohen’s testimony as “credible” and “important” on the question of intentionally inflating assets.
“This unprecedented and legally unsound case is about far more than President Trump. No Attorney General has ever used Section 63(12) to police transactions among one New York business and a handful of ultrasophisticated counterparties with no broader impact on New Yorkers. Worse still, the theory of liability adopted by Supreme Court converts into ‘fraud’ unremarkable, proper conduct that no industry participant would consider deceptive—including the firms that were allegedly defrauded here, which actually profited handsomely,” the brief warned. “If left on the books, the mistaken legal rulings below threaten New York’s position as the Nation’s financial capital, as well as the State’s commercial real-estate industry.”
Taking direct aim at the “officer-and-director ban,” the brief said the AG “has not identified a single case imposing a remotely similar restriction.”
“The only case she has ever cited that involved any sort of officer-and-director ban was a federal case, SEC v. Posner,” Trump argued. “But the bar there applied only to working for public companies, which made sense in light of the defendants’ prior history of ‘securities law violations’ that had harmed ‘public investors.'”
“That is miles away from Supreme Court’s blanket prohibition on Defendants’ ability to serve as an officer or director for any kind of corporation or other entity,” the brief concluded.
