Judge Arthur Engoron — who is overseeing proceedings in former President Donald Trump's civil fraud trial in New York — may be considering a harsher-than-expected penalty for Trump as he prepares to issue a final ruling in the bench trial.
The Daily Beast recently reported that Engoron was alarmed by a New York Times article from earlier this month about Allen Weisselberg, who was the former chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, planning to plead guilty to perjury for allegedly lying on the stand.
"As the presiding magistrate, the trier of fact, and the judge of credibility, I of course want to know whether Mr. Weisselberg is now changing his tune, and whether he is admitting he lied under oath in my courtroom at this trial," Engoron wrote in an email on Monday. "I do not want to ignore anything in a case of this magnitude."
Engoron added that he may use Weisselberg's alleged perjury as "a basis to invoke falsus in uno," in reference to the term "falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus," which is Latin for "false in one thing, false in everything." This suggests that Engoron may disregard Weisselberg's entire testimony during the civil fraud trial as untruthful and use that to inform his final judgment.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking up to $370 million in "disgorgement" penalties related to Trump allegedly inflating the value of his real estate assets to obtain preferential tax and insurance rates. She also is aiming to have Trump and his adult children banned from serving as officers in any New York-based company for at last five years.
A massive penalty is a near-certainty, as Engoron already ruled that Trump committed "widespread fraud" in financial filings submitted to the state. That decision was later upheld by a New York appeals court.
However large the final judgment may be, it will be a significant financial blow to the former president, who was already ordered to pay $88.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages to writer E. Jean Carroll in her defamation trial.
In order to appeal any civil judgment in New York, the appellant must put a bulk of the judgment in a court-controlled account while the appeals process pays out. This means that if he is ordered to pay the $370 million James is asking for, the ex-president would be almost half a billion dollars poorer as he attempts to raise money for his presidential campaign.
Both Trump's attorneys and James' prosecutors have been ordered to respond to Engoron's email by 5 p.m. on Wednesday.
