Ivanka Trump has been a more cooperative witness—and a disaster for Donald Trump
The morning session of Ivanka Trump’s testimony in the New York fraud trial ended with a series of objections from her attorney that temporarily had Ivanka sent off to wait in chambers while Judge Arthur Engoron listened to the two sides bicker. Despite this, most of the morning was spent with Ivanka responding to documents, answering questions, and generally being a more cooperative witness than her father and her brothers.
Donald Trump spent his testimony on Monday railing against Engoron, attacking New York Attorney General Letitia James, and sneering about the injustice of it all. But Ivanka smiled at the prosecutors, laughed along with Engoron’s jokes, and appeared to study documents with the scrutiny of a student taking the SAT—even if her response after many of these high-scrutiny sessions was “I don’t recall.”
Much of the morning was spent looking at two projects in which Ivanka was heavily involved: Trump’s Doral Golf Resort & Spa in Florida and the Old Post Office property in Washington, D.C. But it wasn’t the value of either of these properties that was in question. It was how Trump obtained financing. And the answer to that may be the most devastating set of questions and answers of the whole trial.