The Daily Fuckup

On Dec. 18, 2023, Judge Arthur Engoron turned aside Donald Trump’s latest bid to end the New York civil fraud case early, rejecting a directed-verdict motion from the defense and leaving the bench trial in place for a final decision. The ruling did not dismiss the case. It simply meant Trump and his co-defendants had not persuaded the court that the evidence, taken in the light most favorable to the state, required judgment in their favor before the judge finished weighing the record.

The case centers on allegations that Trump, the Trump Organization and related entities inflated asset values on financial statements used with banks, insurers and others. Engoron had already ruled earlier in the litigation that the defendants engaged in fraud by misstating those values. The Dec. 18 order kept that earlier finding in play and denied the defense another chance to short-circuit the case before a full post-trial ruling.

A major part of the defense motion rested on expert testimony from accounting professor Eli Bartov, whom Trump’s lawyers had presented as a rebuttal to the state’s fraud theory. Engoron was not impressed. In the ruling, he said the defense was assuming the court had to accept Bartov’s testimony as true, when the judge was free to assess credibility and reject testimony he found unreliable. The court said Bartov had lost credibility by treating the financial statements as essentially flawless, despite the judge’s earlier findings that they contained numerous errors.

That left Trump where he has been for much of the case: arguing that the numbers were ordinary business judgments, while the court treated them as a pattern of false statements with legal consequences. The ruling mattered because it preserved the state’s case heading into final judgment and undercut the idea that an expert witness alone could erase the documentary record already before the court.

The motion denial also narrowed the defense’s options. Instead of a fast exit, Trump still faced a decision on liability and remedies in a case that had already produced one of the most consequential fraud findings against his business empire. The Dec. 18 order made clear the court was not prepared to let the case end on a procedural shortcut, and not prepared to treat the defense’s expert as a shield against the underlying evidence.