Trump tries to employ legal 'sleight of hand' to wriggle out of fraud lawsuit: report

Donald Trump's attorneys are attempting a legal gambit to help him wriggle out of the fraud lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, but experts are dubious that it will work, according to a report.

His attorneys have argued that Trump's business deals deemed as fraudulent by James took place so long ago they've fallen outside the statute of limitations, and an appellate court directed state Supreme Court Justice Arthur F. Engoron and the attorney general to determine exactly when those transactions took place, reported The Daily Beast.

“These issues are highly technical, and they are highly dependent sometimes on idiosyncratic features of particular statutes,” said Justin Murray, a professor at New York Law School.

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Trump's lawyers last week tried to delay the trial, which is set to start Oct. 2, while they explored the issue further, but the judge knocked that down in a nine-word order – and a review of his past rulings suggests that he won't be too sympathetic to their arguments about the statute of limitations.

Engoron issued a January order that faulted Trump's lawyers for continuing to cite the wrong state law to argue there was a shorter deadline for the attorney general to sue, and their argument that the statute of limitations should only be three years because the law setting up a six-year limit was enacted in 2019, but was not meant to be retroactive.

"But this was sleight of hand," wrote Daily Beast investigative reporter Jose Pagliery. "The state had previously had a six-year deadline. The entire reason New York lawmakers changed the law in 2019 was because they were scrambling to respond to new precedent from the state’s highest court the previous year that suddenly shortened the deadline for one of New York’s powerful anti-fraud laws, the Martin Act. So in reality, the statute of limitations was always meant to be six years. Legislators just bumped it back up."

The same appeals court that is handling Trump cases in Manhattan already clarified that the shortened time window should only apply to cases in a brief window between 2018 and 2019, and Engoron noted that Trump's lawyers keep citing those cases – which actually say the opposite of what they're arguing.

Now the judge will rule on that same issue and decide how the cutoff date applies to the real estate deals in question, and he'll also decide whether the ex-president showed a pattern of misconduct – and if he does, that could strip Trump of his business license in New York and possibly force his businesses into receivership.

That's the injunctive relief that James has asked the judge to provide, and Engoron alone will decide whether Trump lied to banks and insurance companies about his wealth in the upcoming bench trial.

“Injunctive relief is always about whether the relief is necessary given what you know about this individual, this entity," said Murray, the law professor, "and they revealed who they are because of their actions — even those outside the limitations period. Especially when the fraudulent activities are understood against the backdrop of the entire history of the conduct, which reveals who the person is and their fundamental lack of trustworthiness and the necessity of shutting them down.”