Trump Sues AG James To Withhold Family Trust Docs
New York Attorney General Letitia James has been investigating former President Donald Trump, his family and his businesses for several years in an attempt to find evidence of wrongdoing — and, according to critics, increase her own political profile.
This week, Trump hit back with a lawsuit aimed at preventing James from getting her hands on financial documents from his family trust.
The move comes after James’ office filed a $250 million civil fraud case against the Trump family earlier this year.
“Crooked and highly partisan James now thinks it is the business of the State of New York to go after my revocable trust and pry into my private estate plan, only to look for ways to recklessly injure me, my family, my businesses, and my tens of millions of supporters,” the former president claimed in a statement this week.
As Trump’s lawyers argued in the lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach County, Florida, the Democratic attorney general is attempting to exercise “unprecedented oversight of President Trump’s business and financial affairs — including control over President Trump’s revocable trust — as she grandstands in demanding $250 million in ‘restitution’ for the people of New York.”
In defending the civil case she filed in September, James alleged that Trump and others involved in his business dealings artificially inflated the value of assets and otherwise misled lending institutions, tax officials, and insurance companies.
At the time, she claimed that her investigation “found that Mr. Trump, his children, and the corporation used more than 200 false asset valuations over a 10-year period.”
She went on to assert that the “pattern of fraud and deception that was used by Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization for their own financial benefit is astounding,” adding: “Claiming that you have money that you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal, it’s the art of the steal.”
In a social media post shortly thereafter, the former president wrote that James “is a fraud who campaigned on a ‘get Trump’ platform, despite the fact that the city is one of the crime and murder disasters of the world under her watch!”
According to Trump’s new lawsuit, “James knows that no restitution is owed but seeks only attention for herself and retribution against President Trump.”
