Fact check: Trump falsely claims that appeals court said ‘you won’ the civil fraud case he lost

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump continues to make false claims about the New York civil fraud case he lost – including a wildly inaccurate declaration on Tuesday that an appeals court previously said that he had “won the case.”

Trump has made similar claims for months. He delivered an especially unequivocal version at a Tuesday campaign rally in Wisconsin, the day after he posted a $175 million bond to prevent New York Attorney General Letitia James from beginning to collect on Judge Arthur Engoron’s $454 million judgment against him.

Trump said: “The Appellate Division actually gave me the case. I won the case, because I won it in the Appellate Division. …I won the case because it’s called statute of limitations. The Appellate Division ruled in my favor. That means most of the case is gone; the judge refused to honor it. Now, he – nobody ever heard of that before. So the Appellate Division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it,’ and the judge said, ‘I don’t accept it.’ He’s called a rogue judge. He’s a rogue judge; he’s a fake judge.”

Facts First: Trump’s assertion is false. The appeals court never said he won the case. While its June 2023 ruling did exclude the former president’s daughter Ivanka Trump as a defendant in the case, it did not dismiss the attorney general’s claims against Trump himself, his adult sons or his company. Rather, the ruling set a precise cutoff for claims in the case, saying that claims against Trump and the other defendants were too old if they concerned transactions that were “completed” before certain dates; the court set the cutoff date at July 13, 2014, for any defendants Engoron decided were covered by an agreement signed in 2021 by a top lawyer at Trump’s company. Engoron then ruled that Trump and all of the other remaining defendants were indeed covered by this agreement, that they submitted fraudulent financial statements more recently than July 13, 2014, and that they were therefore liable for civil fraud. 

Trump is entitled to argue that Engoron wrongly applied the appeals court’s language about the statute of limitations; he has filed an appeal of Engoron’s judgment, and it’s always possible he will win. But the appeals court’s 2023 ruling simply did not say what he keeps saying it did.

What Engoron actually said about the appeals court ruling

Trump’s assertion that the appeals court said, “You won the case, that’s it,” and Engoron said, “I don’t accept it” creates an impression of a judge who refuse to heed the open-and-shut words of a higher court. But that’s not at all what happened.

Rather, Engoron was tasked with interpreting what the appeals court meant when it barred any claims concerning transactions that were “completed” before July 13, 2014, for defendants covered by the “tolling agreement” signed in 2021 by Trump Organization chief legal officer Alan Garten. (A tolling agreement temporarily pauses the statute of limitations so the parties can try to work out a settlement. The cutoff date would’ve been February 6, 2016, for any defendants Engoron decided weren’t covered by the agreement.)

Trump’s lawyers argued to Engoron that transactions should be considered “completed” when loan agreements were entered into and the money was disbursed, even if financial statements were later sent to the lenders as required by the loan deals. But Engoron rejected that argument in the September 2023 ruling in which he found Trump liable – writing, “Obviously, the transactions were not ‘completed’ while the defendants were still obligated to, and did, annually submit current SFCs [Statements of Financial Condition] to comply with the terms of the loan agreements.”

James’ office, Engoron wrote, “is not challenging the loans, the closings, or the disbursements; it is challenging defendants’ submissions of financial documents containing false and misleading information. Thus, any SFC that was submitted after July 13, 2014, falls within the applicable statute of limitations.” He wrote that “each submission of an SFC after July 13, 2014, constituted a separate fraudulent act.”

Engoron addressed the matter again on the second day of the trial in October 2023. He said: “The general rule is that a claim accrues when someone can sue on it. Here, the attorney general is suing over the use of false financial statements in business, not over the underlying deals themselves. Obviously, she could not have sued on those statements until defendants issued them. Every use of a false financial statement in business starts the statute of limitations running, again, no matter when the transaction out of which [it] arose, closed.” 

Trump’s false assertions about the appeals court ruling have been corrected before, both by the media and by Engoron himself.

After Trump wrongly claimed to reporters, following the first day of the trial, that “about 80% of the case is over” because of the appeals court ruling, Engoron said in court the next day: “This case arrived at the App. Div., as we call it, with seven causes of action. It left with seven causes of action. It arrived with 16 defendants. It left with 15 defendants. It arrived at the Appellate Division with a six-year statute of limitations. It left with a six-year statute of limitations, extended by both Covid tolling, and a tolling agreement. I understand that the defendants strongly disagree with this, and will appeal, in part, on this ground.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.