Donald Trump Jr returns to the witness stand in family’s fraud trial

Donald Trump Jr has returned to the witness stand in a fraud trial that threatens his family’s business.

During his testimony two weeks ago, under questioning from lawyers with the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, he emphatically denied having anything to do with making his father’s statements of financial condition at the heart of a lawsuit accusing the family of fraud.

In their testimonies, his brother Eric and sister Ivanka also denied any involvement in those documents, while evidence presented by the attorney general’s office appeared to show they were well aware of them.

On the stand on Monday morning, the former president’s oldest son now faces questions from his own attorneys, who begin their defence of the Trumps after Ms James’s team rested her case last week after six weeks of testimony from two dozen witnesses.

The attorney general’s case has portrayed Mr Trump, inflated by ego, as a key figure behind fraudulent documents that exaggerated his net worth and assets, lying to banks and lenders to get more favourable terms to boost his family business and its real-estate empire over a decade.

Mr Trump’s adult sons – both of whom are co-defendants in the lawsuit against them – have played central roles in the Trump Organization and its business throughout their father’s four years in the White House and the years that followed.

During Mr Trump’s presidency from 2017 to 2021, Donald Trump Jr operated a trust that managed his father’s assets, while Eric Trump ran the day-to-day business at the Trump Organization, the umbrella overseeing the family’s many operations and real-estate projects.

In his first day of testimony earlier this month, Donald Jr echoed statements he gave during a taped deposition, distancing himself from any responsibility for those statements of financial condition. He said he took the word of the accountants who helped prepare them.

“I listen to their expertise,” he said. “That’s what we paid them to do.”

He also repeatedly denied any knowledge of what constitutes “generally accepted accounting principles,” or GAAP, the guiding standards for creating those statements. He said they were something he learned about in “accounting 101” when he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His sister testified similarly, but she couldn’t recall a message that appeared to show she asked to “change the language” around them.

Attorneys for Ms James repeatedly confronted the siblings with documents and emails that appeared to show they were more aware of what went into those statements than they had previously stated under oath.

Fuming on the stand at one point during his testimony earlier this month, Eric Trump said “we’re a major organization, a massive real estate organization.”

“I am fairly certain that we would have had financial statements,” he said.

After two weeks of testimony from the Trump family, including Donald Trump and his three oldest children, Judge Arthur Engoron’s courtroom on the third floor of New York Supreme Court in lower Manhattan was relatively quiet on Monday morning.

There were only a handful of camera crews in the hallway just outside its doors, where cameras crowded on either side behind barricades to capture Trump and others coming and going from the courtroom.

The case – poking directly at the “businessman” narrative behind Mr Trump’s persona and presidential campaign – has clearly rattled the former president, whose testimony tried to thread a needle that downplayed the existence of the statements of financial condition while arguing that his net worth is actually much higher than the already inflated numbers on them.

He has raged at the case, the attorney general and the judge, who has brushed aside attacks against him while fining Trump twice for violating a gag order against comments about his court staff. The judge also expanded the gag order to include his attorneys, after they lashed out at the judge and his chief clerk immediately following two days of testimony from Donald Jr and Eric that the attorney general’s office called “extremely” favourable in their case.

The trial is a civil suit, so there are no criminal penalties involved, and the Trumps won’t be seeing any time behind bars. Instead, Ms James wants to recover at least $250m in ill-gotten gains and block the Trumps from doing business in the state.

After the attorney general rested her case last week, attorneys for the Trump family moved to end the trial and asked the judge for a directed verdict, arguing that the plaintiffs failed to prove their case.

But Judge Engoron has repeatedly signalled he wants to hear the case through the schedule he has assigned, up until the weekend before Christmas.

This is a developing story