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,…
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