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On Wednesday afternoon, Judge Arthur F. Engoron dismissed Ivanka Trump from the witness stand, and the New York attorney general’s office rested its civil fraud case against Donald Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization. Ivanka, who was once a Trump Organization executive herself, as well as a White House official and the owner of an apparel business, strode out of the courtroom, and, soon after, cheers and jeers could be heard coming from outside the New York County Courthouse, where a small crowd of onlookers had gathered.
In September, 2022, when the state attorney general, Letitia James, first brought the civil charges against the Trumps, Ivanka was a co-defendant. In June of this year, however, an appeals court dismissed her from the case on the ground that the claims against her were barred by the state’s statute of limitations. (She left the Trump Organization in 2017 to serve as an aide in the White House, alongside her husband, Jared Kushner.) After making repeated efforts to avoid testifying, or to delay her appearance, she appeared at the trial as a reluctant witness for the government. In many ways, her nearly five hours of testimony encapsulated the entire trial so far, in substance if not in style.
The substantive outcome of the day was that the attorney general’s office used Ivanka’s appearance to buttress its argument that the Trump Organization used fraudulent Statements of Financial Condition, which greatly exaggerated Trump’s net worth, to help the company get favorable deals from banks and other financial institutions. Louis Solomon, a senior lawyer in the attorney general’s office, took Ivanka through a series of documents and e-mails relating to two Trump properties that she worked on extensively: the Doral golf resort in Miami, which the Trump Organization bought and redeveloped, and the government-owned Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., which the Trump Organization leased and converted into a luxury hotel.
Much of the trial, which has been running for the past six weeks, has consisted of similarly laborious exercises involving other witnesses, including Ivanka’s father and two brothers. But, if the basic format of Wednesday’s proceedings were familiar, the contrast between Ivanka’s conduct and that of her family members was glaring. From start to finish, she was polite to a fault. She smiled. She even swapped a lighthearted remark or two with Judge Engoron, who is partial to a bit of banter. All in all, she put on an impressive show, but one that ultimately rested on an acute case of selective amnesia.
Time after time, Solomon asked Ivanka whether she recalled certain communications or recognized certain exhibits. And, time after time, Ivanka said that she didn’t. Many of these communications involved Deutsche Bank, which gave the Trump Organization low-cost loans to finance the redevelopment of Doral and the conversion of the Old Post Office building. Solomon produced a November, 2011, document in which the securities division of Deutsche Bank, which operated separately from the private-wealth division, offered to supply a loan for Doral at an interest rate equal to the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) plus eight per cent. Ivanka said she didn’t recall having seen these terms. Solomon then produced a December, 2011, e-mail from Rosemary Vrablic, a senior executive in the private-wealth department at Deutsche, which contained an offer to provide two loans for the Doral project at interest rates equal to LIBOR plus two per cent and 2.5 per cent. It doesn’t take a finance wiz to figure out that LIBOR plus two per cent is a much better interest rate than LIBOR plus eight per cent.
Ivanka said she recalled that she “received high-level terms” from Vrablic, but she said she didn’t remember this particular proposal. Solomon then produced an e-mail that Ivanka sent to other Trump executives shortly after Vrablic e-mailed her, in which she forwarded the loan terms that the banker had offered. “It doesn’t get better than this. Let’s discuss ASAP,” the e-mail said. After reading it out, Solomon asked the witness: “Does this refresh your memory on whether you thought this was a good proposal for the Trump Organization?” Ivanka replied: “I think what we ended up doing was slightly different. But, yes, I thought generally the deal was positive.”
A key difference between the two loan offers from Deutsche Bank was that the one from the private-wealth department required a personal guarantee from Trump and the one from the securities division didn’t. Solomon brought up an e-mail that Ivanka received from Jason Greenblatt, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, in which Greenblatt pointed out that the offer from Vrablic required Trump to personally guarantee the loans and maintain a minimum net worth of three billion dollars, which “would seem to me to be a problem?” as Greenblatt put it. Ivanka replied: “That we have known from day one. We wanted to get a great rate and the only way to get proceeds/term and principle where we want them is to guarantee the deal.” Solomon asked the witness if she recalled writing this email. No, she replied.
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