New York Attorney General Letitia James is poised to give Donald Trump a Memorial Day-worthy grilling, thanks to a court ruling on Thursday ordering that he, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr. all sit for sworn depositions.
As she winds down her three-year probe into the Trump Organization, James appears to have more fireworks in store.
Trump does not appear to be facing criminal charges. In a filing two months ago, James distanced herself from that idea. According to the legal brief, James is not trying to prosecute the Trumps or their business, which seems to be not much at all.
Instead, James may try to use her powers under state executive law to destroy Trump's business empire, something she has successfully done with the Trump Foundation.
She would do so through a massive lawsuit seeking New York's so-called "corporate death penalty", as she has signaled over the past five months in legal filings.
As she gets that grill going, here is what James may be cooking.
The top of any lawsuit will read "People of the State of New York" by the Attorney General of the State of New York.
As to who would reside at the bottom of the lawsuit's caption, as its defendants, James has given ample warning, and not just in the roughly five dozen public taunts and threats she has made at Donald Trump's expense since running for attorney general.
In legal filings this year, James has said that a decade's worth of Donald Trump's statements of financial condition were used to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in bank loans and tax breaks.
Mazars USA conceded in February that the statements it had prepared should no longer be relied upon.
Who will James look for in her legal defense?
It makes sense to consider Donald Trump, who personally certified the allegedly faulty financial statements to be accurate every year through 2016 and personally reviewed at least some of them before, the AG has alleged in legal filings.
The Trump Organization was placed in a trust in 2017, with the president as the sole beneficiary. The statements were certified by Eric Trump, the executive vice president of the family business.
The office of James claims to have seen a number of misrepresentations about Trump, including exaggerations of his cash on hand, claims that the values of some assets were set by outside professionals, and the inclusion of a hidden asset.
When he was deposed by James in October of 2020, Eric Trump pleaded the Fifth 500 times.
Donald Trump and his children have not said if they will follow in the footsteps of their father.
Lawyers for the Trump family have maintained that there has been no wrongdoing. They will likely argue that no Trump can be held personally responsible for the numbers certified in the financial statements and that real estate appraisals are always subjective.
The Attorney General's Senior Enforcement Counsel Kevin Wallace alleged at a hearing in Manhattan earlier this year that the focus of the investigation was not just subjective valuations. These are false statements.
Alan Futerfas, the Trump family lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.
The AG has said that 40 people have been subpoenaed and deposed. It is not known who were questioned as witnesses and who were targets.
James is not afraid to speak his mind. She won't be filing a lawsuit against the 500 or so separate entities that are part of the Trump Organization.
The AG's ongoing 2020 lawsuit seeking to shut down the NRA is more than 200 pages long and followed an inquiry for 18 months. Her Trump inquiry has taken twice as long as hers, and has been much more massive.
Dozens of James staff attorneys have gathered, organized, and reviewed more than a million financial documents in the Trump probe, working out of the AG's offices in lower Manhattan.
In Albany, where a federal judge last week tossed Trump's Hail Mary lawsuit to end James' probe, there have been three lawsuits aggressively met and litigated.
The amount of litigation has been mind numbing. The AG's response to the 3 Trumps' appeal of having to testify contains 5,587 pages of argument and evidence.
"Clearly the attorney general is preparing for something substantial here," said Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which issued a report in June on possible criminal charges.
I think that her determination that she's shown, her doggedness, just the sheer amount of litigation that she's devoted to this, puts her in a very different category from her colleague, who cut and run despite his own lead prosecutors determining.
There are at least 12 of the former president's assets that have been linked to questionable financial dealings.
The oceanfront Trump National Golf Club is on the west coast. The office of James has accused the former president of inflating the potential development value of the driving range to get tax benefits.
The Trump Tower in Chicago, the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, and the Trump National Doral Miami were all funded with loans fromDeutsche Bank that were based on faulty statements of financial condition signed by Eric Trump.
New York is home to both the Trump Organization and the bulk of its assets, and the state's top law enforcement officer has been looking into it.
The first subpoenas focused on Seven Springs, a 212-acre woodland tract purchased by Donald Trump in 1995 for $7.5 million, and where more than a dozen years of development attempts were thwarted by tough Westchester County zoning laws.
Donald Trump found another way to make money, according to the attorney general.
The AG accuses him of exaggerating its worth by tens of millions of dollars in statements of financial condition, when he valued it at $291 million.
The AG alleges that he misrepresented his valuation in donating a 156-acre easement to a local nature reserve. The AG wrote in January that Trump may have obtained more than $5 million in tax benefits from misleading valuations at Seven Springs and the LA golf resort.
James is interested in several Trump properties in Manhattan. The AG alleges that Donald Trump persisted for years in claiming that his triplex apartment at Trump Town on Fifth Avenue had three times its actual square footage.
James will likely wait for the depositions that are important enough to be taken in the AG's inquiry to file her massive lawsuit.
A deposition for Trump's personal assistant, Rhona Graff, is set for Tuesday.
A crucial witness is Graff.
The AG has a lot of questions for Graff, given that only 10 of the 900,000 documents turned over by the Trump Organization were from Donald Trump's personal business files.
Lawyers for James want to know about Donald Trump's retention and preservation practice, as well as the statements of financial condition.
AG Special Counsel Andrew Amer asked in a recent filing if he ever reviewed the draft form before signing the final version.
Amer asked if he had annotated any drafts with comments or questions.
What happened to those drafts? What form was the final version of the statement presented for Mr. Trump? He made his approval clear.
More appeals could be filed by the Trump lawyers or by a long-time Trump appraisers who were ordered to turn over their last batches of subpoenaed documents by this month.
The AG plans to file soon.
Wallace, the AG's senior enforcement counsel, said during a hearing in late April that they would likely need to bring some kind of enforcement action in the near future.
The power to investigate the former president of the United States, and potentially padlock his business, is given to Letitia James, the first woman elected to the office of New York Attorney General.
Kathy Hochul, the first female governor of New York, is still referred to in the Executive Law as the attorney general, but only using male pronouns.
Section 63(12) of the Executive Law begins with these words.
Whenever a person engages in repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or demonstrates persistent fraud or illegality in the carry on, conducting or transaction of business
The AG has filed hundreds of pages of court documents this year detailing the alleged pattern of misstatement in Donald Trump's financial statements.
Executive law allows the attorney general to begin a civil investigation, complete with subpoena power, and can seek fines, damages, and a state judge's order.
Where appropriate, the state attorney general can seek a judge's order dissolving the business.
The state's Martin Act, more mundanely known as New York General Business Law, has also been cited many times. The securities law was used against AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg.
The Martin Act may figure into James' plans, as the team has alleged that Trump used a misleading appraisal of his stake in 40 Wall Street to get a $160 million mortgage loan in 2015.
James has been promising something big for a long time. Seeking the death penalty and possibly millions of dollars in refunds for ill-gotten tax gains is a possibility.
She vowed in an IG post that she was definitely going to lawsuit him after New Yorkers elected her to be their top law enforcement officer.
She was dressed in her trademark power-red and grinning broadly on that warm, windy day, and promised that she was going to be a real pain in the ass.
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