- Letitia James won a $454 million judgment against Trump, his punishment for a decade of fraud.
- She and Trump are now feuding over her claims that he withheld evidence from her fraud investigation.
- New York law allows James to seek additional fines if the evidence she subpoenaed is lost or destroyed.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is not content with her victory in the $454 million civil fraud trial, even as Trump’s debt to the state continues to snowball, mounting a punitive $5 million in interest since February.
No, James still has unfinished business with Trump on his calendar.
She’s asking tough questions about the $175 million bond that would protect at least some of what Trump owes New York while he appeals the trial loss. A financial soundness bond hearing is scheduled for Monday, April 22.
And James also intends to hold Trump’s feet to the fire, along with those of his lawyers, over something her office has been complaining about for four years: the withholding of evidence.
The integrity of the fraud process could be at stake, she argued in a letter Tuesday night.
The AG is looking at three internal Trump Organization email chains from 2016 that were never turned over to her office during the five-year prosecution of Trump for duping banks into thinking he was worth more than he was.
James knows the emails exist.
Manhattan prosecutors used them as evidence in sending former Trump CFO Alan Weiselberg to prison for perjury on Monday.
But the emails — in which Weisselberg and his Trump Org subordinates answered Forbes magazine’s questions about the value of Trump’s Manhattan penthouse — were not among the 900,000 documents the Trump Org turned over to James’ fraud investigation.
“The court is well within its authority to determine whether the defendants and their attorneys facilitated this perjury by withholding incriminating documents,” James argued in the Tuesday evening letter.
Resolving that mystery is “certainly within the power of this court to protect the integrity of its own proceedings,” she said.
Forensic examination
When James first learned of the missing triplex emails in October, she immediately asked a judge to order a forensic review of “electronic data stored by the Trump Organization for a very short period of time [of] August to September 2016 when the emails were written.
“The failure to release these later emails indicates a breakdown somewhere in the process of preserving, collecting, reviewing and producing documents,” her office complained in an Oct. 18 letter to the judge, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.
The forensic review will be conducted by a court-ordered monitor — former federal judge Barbara Jones — whose staff at Bracewell LLP has been looking into Trump’s finances since November 2022.
Six months later, the proposed forensic examination has still not been approved by Engoron.
Instead, it is the subject of a heated new document battle between Trump’s lawyers, who oppose the review, and a lawyer for James, who has been defending the 2020 withheld documents cause.
“We have already raised several times the possibility that the defendants withheld relevant and responsible information,” that attorney, senior executive counsel Kevin Wallace, wrote to Engoron last week.
His April 4 letter to the judge formally requests that the “Monitor be tasked with reviewing the electronic files collected by the defendants,” including those collected to be provided to Manhattan prosecutors.
A review of the monitor will determine whether the emails “were in the possession of the Trump Organization” and, if so, why they were never turned over.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Clifford Robert, this week spent seven single-spaced pages arguing against further expanding the monitor’s role.
“The NYAG’s astonishing request is an obvious ploy to turn the Monitor into its own special attorney,” he wrote.
He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Already a powerful monitor
With Engoron’s latest expansion to the monitor role, as of March 21, Jones’ powers are already vast.
Trump must give the retired judge and her staff five days’ notice of any cash or asset transfers totaling $5 million or more, as well as 30 days’ notice of the creation or dissolution of any of the more than 400 businesses under the umbrella of the trump organization.
She must also review all company financial documents, including tax returns, before they are sent to third parties.
History of missing documents
Trump’s alleged withholding of evidence has been an issue since at least 2020, when James first publicly complained that the Trump Organization was resisting her subpoenas.
For at least two years, James appears to have been steadily building a “rip-off” case against Trump and his company. This is the legal term for the loss or destruction of evidence that should have been preserved for a court case.
As James’ senior attorney, Wallace has repeatedly complained about missing evidence and has signaled that his office may seek “relief,” meaning potential sanctions.
At a hearing in April 2022, he compared obtaining Trump’s documents to “pulling teeth.”
Of the roughly 900,000 documents turned over, only ten were Trump “custodial” documents, meaning business files in the former president’s direct custody.
When Trump’s attorney Alina Haba insisted that Trump had no other personal custody documents to turn over, Wallace told the judge, “I’m going to be blunt. If that’s all, it raises a bunch of other questions.”
Sixteen months later, when Wallace wrote to the judge that the AG was ready for trial, he did not fail to add that James’ office “reserves the right to seek post-trial relief related to the defendant’s theft of evidence “.
Possible penalties include more fines
New York civil case law allows a judge to set penalties for larceny, which include finding them in contempt of court and any fines they see fit.
But there is a high degree of evidence, said Mark Fraser Scholl, a former financial crimes prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
The AG’s office will have to prove that Trump, Trump Organization executives and/or their lawyers had control over the documents that were subpoenaed and destroyed, or withheld them instead of turning them over.
“The first thing if you’re seeking spoliation sanctions is to prove that there was some duty to preserve the evidence when it was lost or destroyed,” said Scholl, who now of counsel at Lewis Bach Kaufmann Middlemiss.
If the AG does seek fines, they will likely be minimal and symbolic, he predicted.
James’ lawyers said many of Trump’s missing documents were eventually successfully subpoenaed by outside witnesses who also had copies.
“They got the documents in other ways, so they know they have to specifically ask for them,” in the case of Weisselberg’s emails, he added.
In the end, the AG’s office won the case, and by a lot – getting essentially everything they were suing for, including the massive financial judgment.
“Would they really have gotten a bigger sentence if they had more documents?” Scholl asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s a jab in the nose potentially against Trump’s council.”
