President Donald Trump’s team has asked New York’s highest court to toss the liability ruling in a sprawling civil fraud case tied to property valuations, arguing the whole matter was legally shaky and politically driven. The appeal pushes back on penalties that linger despite an intermediate court voiding the monetary award, and it frames the lawsuit as an overreach by the attorney general. Court filings raise questions about authority, evidence, remedy, and the role of politics in law enforcement.
The reply filed by Trump’s attorneys urges the New York Court of Appeals to throw out the liability finding in the $464 million case and to reject efforts to resurrect penalties. They argue the case should never have been brought and that multiple legal errors poisoned the proceedings from the start. The brief frames the litigation as an unprecedented use of state power against a private business and its owner.
“This case should have never been brought, and the judgment cannot stand,” the appeal states. “This case is extremely unusual; it involves not only reams of improper statements targeting President Trump, his family, and his businesses, but also a decision to apply [New York law] against those targets in a completely unprecedented and unlawful way.” Those sentences are front and center in the filing, and they underline the defense view that politics infected the prosecution.
The core of the original lawsuit alleged repeated fraud in property valuations, with the attorney general saying the discrepancies helped secure better loans and insurance. Trump was found liable in 2023 and ordered to pay substantial damages and face business restrictions in New York. While an appeals court later vacated the monetary award, the liability ruling and several other restrictions remain at issue, prompting the latest push at the Court of Appeals.
Trump’s team presses five main defenses. They say the attorney general lacked authority to bring a case focused on private commercial deals rather than clear public harm, and they argue valuations are inherently subjective estimates reviewed by lenders, not fraud. The filing emphasizes that sophisticated banks and insurers were the counterparties, asserting they profited and never claimed injury in a way that justifies state intervention.
“The only supposed ‘victims’ here are a handful of ultrasophisticated banks and insurers that have never claimed to be injured, were eager to do business with President Trump and his family, and made over $100 million from these transactions,” the appeal states. That claim is used to argue the case does not fit the model of repeated public wrongdoing the statute requires.
Defense attorneys also challenge the idea that real estate has a single objective value and that any difference of opinion equals deceit. “Under that breathtakingly broad theory, NYAG can second-guess any business transaction in this State on almost any imagined grounds,” the filing states. They warn that accepting such a theory would give prosecutors unchecked power to relitigate ordinary business judgments.
On penalties, the appeal calls the disgorgement award excessive and unconstitutional, and it asks the court to strike down the remaining business restrictions. The brief paints the remedies as punitive, not corrective, arguing they exceed what the statute permits and harm individuals and firms beyond anything needed to protect the public. That posture frames the challenge as both a procedural and a constitutional fight.
Finally, the lawyers argue the case was politically charged and that rhetoric from the attorney general created an appearance of bias. “NYAG cannot point to a single Section 63(12) enforcement action against similarly situated developers (or any other type of defendant) based on practices comparable to those alleged here,” the filing states. The brief also reproduces statements attributed to the prosecutor to underscore the point that politics drove the decision to bring this particular suit.
“Ms. James repeatedly called President Trump a ‘criminal’; promised to ‘investigate President Trump and his business transactions,’ ‘review … Trump-related real estate transactions,’ and ‘take on … his business in New York’; and threatened President Trump’s ‘family’ and ‘anyone in his orbit,” the document states. That passage is aimed at convincing the Court of Appeals that fair enforcement standards were sidelined in favor of headline-grabbing litigation.
