Donald Trump had his worst day yet in his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York on Tuesday at the hands of his own key witness, a former Trump Organization executive who linked the former president directly to the fuzzy math at the center of the case.
The witness was Jeffrey McConney, who was the comptroller and spreadsheet czar at the Trump Org. McConney had been called to the witness stand by the defense, but on cross-examination by lawyers for the state attorney general’s office Tuesday, he linked Trump firmly to the conspiracy and fraud counts that have yet to be decided in the non-jury trial.
McConney was handed People’s Exhibit 3054, a draft of Trump’s net-worth statement for 2014. He was asked to look at a note scribbled in thin blue ink on the draft’s first page, “DJT TO GET FINAL REVIEW,” which he said he’d written.
Trump has denied involvement in preparing a decade’s worth of these annual net-worth statements, which New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has alleged — and the trial judge has agreed — were each year riddled with billions of dollars of exaggerations
The AG has alleged the net-worth statement that McConney was handed the draft for, from 2014, contained $3.5 billion in exaggerations
Donald Trump would get final review?” Andrew Amer, the state’s lawyer, asked McConney.
“That was my understanding, yes,” McConney answered from the witness stand, his voice gruff.
Why the spreadsheet czar’s scribbles matter
McConney’s testimony was significant for several reasons — not just the damage it did to Trump, but the damage it did to Trump’s two eldest sons; to the Trump Org’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg; and to McConney himself.
The three Trumps and the two ex-executives are all defendants in the AG’s lawsuit, which alleges that Trump used net-worth exaggerations to win hundreds of millions of dollars in interest-rate discounts and property-sale profits. James is seeking at least $250 million in penalties and to bar the five defendants from ever running a New York business again.
