'Combative' Eric Trump snaps at prosecutor over financial statements
November 02, 2023
Prior to a break in the action in Judge Arthur Engoron's courtroom on Thursday, Eric Trump raised his voice and snapped at prosecutor Andrew Amer after being presented with emails that suggested he was aware of financial statements related to the Trump Organization — despite attempting to blow off questions about them.
Reporting for MSNBC on the $250 million financial fraud case, legal analyst Lisa Rubin described the differences between Eric Trump's testimony and his brother, Don Jr. who finished earlier in the day — and the surprising contrast when both were grilled.
"It was sort of the tale of two brothers," she explained to host Chris Jansing, "because we think of Don Jr. and Eric as a pair, but really both temperamentally and otherwise, they would not be more different in their approaches to testimony today."
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"You noted earlier that Don Jr. on the stand principally deflected, denied responsibility, and put it all on the accountants and lawyers who guided him; he is a person who over the course of his life has been used to outsourcing things to other people," she reported. "But the problem is, as an officer of the company and particularly as a trustee of his father's trust, there has to be a place where the buck stopped, and when his father was president, the buck stopped with he and Allen Weisselberg as the co co-trustees of the trust in which all the Trump Organization assets were put."
"Eric on the other hand, when he took the stand, has been combative from the start," she continued. "He doesn't want to give an inch. He didn't even want to admit that in 2012 he understood his father even had statements of financial condition. And so the attorney general is really working hard to establish that Eric understood that they sent their financial statements to other people outside the company who relied upon them, whether that's members of a golf club in North Carolina that the Trumps purchased in 2012 or to banks and others.
"When Eric was about to get off the stand, he finally showed a flash of Trumpian anger and basically said, 'Of course we have financial statements, we're a major corporation!' But he's been generally calm and collected if not particularly generous in his testimony so far."
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