President Trump’s attorneys have filed a letter with the New York Supreme Court accusing Attorney General Letitia James of dodging a court order to disclose how her office preserved evidence in the $464 million civil fraud case against him.
The filing, submitted Thursday, is the latest move in Trump’s effort to get the case thrown out entirely as it undergoes reconsideration. Trump’s lawyers say James may be sitting on communications between her office and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and the prosecution’s star witness at trial, that she has never turned over.
The suspicion stems from a January 16, 2026 Substack post by Cohen himself. According to a court filing, Cohen wrote that in meetings with lawyers from James’s office he “felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement and convictions against President Trump.”
Cohen testified at trial that Trump gave him target net-worth figures to hit while helping build the case that Trump had inflated the value of his properties for years.
The judge overseeing the case denied Trump’s request for additional discovery but did order James’s office to detail how it has preserved relevant records. Trump’s attorneys say she hasn’t done it.
“[New York Attorney General’s Office] also carefully avoids representing one way or the other whether any requested materials in fact exist, and, if they do, whether NYAG has confirmed that they are being preserved,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
They added that instead of complying with the order, James’s office “simply recited in general terms that her ‘standard litigation hold procedures’ have been in place since the investigation phase of this matter.”
James’s office disputes that characterization. In a letter provided to Fox News Digital, the office said it “has completely satisfied its obligations under the Court’s Order for OAG to identify the preservation practices that existed and applied and continue to exist and apply,” and called Trump’s request for further detail “extrajudicial discovery.”
The Underlying Case
James sued Trump in 2022, alleging he habitually inflated the value of his properties. He was found liable, ordered to pay $355 million plus interest in disgorgement, and barred from seeking loans from New York banks for three years and from serving as an officer or director of any New York company for two years. An appeals court later vacated the monetary penalties, but James is appealing to have them reinstated.
Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, are pushing to have the entire case dismissed. Earlier this month they laid out five arguments for why it should never have gone forward, including that James lacked authority to bring a case over private commercial transactions, that Trump’s property valuations were subjective estimates independently vetted by lenders, and that the case was politically motivated from the start.
“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.
Trump’s team also argues the $450 million disgorgement penalty is excessive, unlawful and unconstitutional, and that James’s office cannot point to a single comparable enforcement action against any other developer under the state law she used against Trump.
“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.
