After four years of investigating and litigating, Letitia James was finally due for her day in court against Donald Trump.
But with that day fast approaching — a trial in her civil fraud lawsuit against him is scheduled to start Oct. 2 — the former president’s lawyers threw a legal Hail Mary that could delay the case and seeks to gut it altogether.
The last-ditch move that left the trial in limbo came in a familiar form for the famously litigious Trump: He filed a lawsuit.
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His targets were James, the New York attorney general, and the judge overseeing the trial, Arthur Engoron. Trump’s lawsuit argues that they ignored a June appeals court ruling that excused Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, from the case and also raised the notion that some of the accusations against the former president and his company might be too old to go to trial.
Trump’s lawsuit — and in turn the fate of James’ case against him — hinges on a passage in the June appeals court ruling that has become a legal Rorschach test of sorts, in which each side sees what they want. Trump’s lawyers are convinced that the June ruling effectively tossed out the claims against him, while James’ team has argued that it had little effect on the accusation at the heart of her case — that Trump overstated his net worth by billions of dollars in his annual financial statements.
Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Trump, recently argued to Engoron that James’ legal strategy...
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