The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s trial following years of fraud allegations repeatedly ordered his attorneys to “control” him for his evasive and meandering answers on the witness stand.
Within the first hour of Mr Trump’s testimony on Monday, an increasingly frustrated Judge Arthur Engoron and counsel with the office of New York attorney general Letitia James tried to get him to answer questions about his net worth and assets without giving speeches from the stand.
His answers are not only “nonresponsive, they’re repetitive”, said Judge Engoron, who warned that the former president’s ongoing rants could be negatively used against him in a case that endangers his business empire.
Over the next several hours, he accused Ms James of trying to “demean” and “hurt” him politically, slammed her as a “political hack”, called the case a “disgrace” and told a lawyer with Ms James’s office that he should be “ashamed” of himself.
Gesturing with his hands as he fumed on the witness stand, he turned his complaints towards the judge.
“You ruled against me and you said I was a fraud,” said Mr Trump, looking towards the floor in front of him. “He called me a fraud, and he didn’t know anything about me.”
Mr Trump’s testimony arrives in the sixth week of a trial that could collapse his family’s business and brand-building real-estate empire, following a lawsuit from Ms James that finds Mr Trump and his chief associates defrauded banks and insurers by inflating his net worth and assets by as much as $2bn a year over a decade.
The former president, wearing a dark suit and light blue shirt and tie, walked slowly with his gaze towards the floor behind his attorneys as he arrived inside the third-floor courtroom in lower Manhattan.
Ms James’s lawsuit seeks to recover $250m (£203m) in ill-gotten gains and to effectively block the Trump family from doing business in the state, dealing a potentially crushing blow to his Trump Organization umbrella.
Source: Independent
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