Ivanka Trump didn’t want to testify. But on the stand Wednesday in her father’s civil fraud trial, she took the opportunity to contend the family business has “overdelivered,” even as she kept her distance from financial documents that New York state says were fraudulent.
Former President Donald Trump’s elder daughter capped a major stretch in the lawsuit that could reshape his real estate empire. She followed her father and her brothers Eric and Donald Trump Jr. to the witness stand, and the New York attorney general’s office rested its case after her testimony. The defense gets its turn now.
Ivanka Trump has been in her father’s inner circle in both business and politics, as an executive vice president at the family’s Trump Organization and then as a senior White House adviser. But she testified that she had no role in his personal financial statements, which New York Attorney General Letitia James claims were fraudulently inflated and deceived banks and lenders.
“Those were not things that I was privy to,” beyond having seen “a few documents and correspondence” that referred to them, Ivanka Trump said.
The ex-president and Republican 2024 front-runner denies any wrongdoing. He insisted in court Monday that his financial statements actually greatly underestimated his net worth, that any discrepancies were minor, that a disclaimer absolved him of liability anyway and that “this case is a disgrace.”
In even-tempered testimony that provided a counterpoint to her father’s caustic turn on the stand, Ivanka Trump touched on some of the same notes that the ex-president has hammered inside court and out — portraying the Trump Organization as a successful developer of big-dollar projects that satisfied its lenders.
The Doral golf resort in Florida? A “Herculean” renovation undertaken to refurbish a faded treasure that Donald Trump had visited in childhood, his daughter testified.
The company’s historic Old Post Office building-turned-hotel in Washington? “A labor of love” to turn a dilapidated building into a super-luxury hotel, while navigating approvals from a raft of different government agencies.
|
|
