Donald Trump has expressed strong criticism towards Judge Arthur F. Engoron in recent posts on his social media platform, Truth Social. Trump referred to the judge overseeing the New York attorney general’s fraud case against him as “out of control.”
This week holds significant implications for the former president and the leading Republican candidate for 2024. Engoron is expected to deliver a final ruling that might compel Trump to pay substantial sums and potentially divest from his business. Additionally, another New York judge, Juan M. Merchan, may set a court date for Trump’s hush-money case, slated as the first criminal trial involving a former U.S. president, as early as next month. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in either of these cases.
In a post shared on Monday, Trump vehemently criticized Letitia James, the New York attorney general who has accused him and his family members of inflating the value of his properties by up to $2.2 billion, labeling her as “corrupt.” Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign team and James’ office for comments on Tuesday.
The former president asserted that James “knew nothing about my tremendously successful business, but still campaigned on, ‘I will get Trump’,” once again portraying the legal proceedings against him as part of a political vendetta aimed at undermining his position ahead of the 2024 election.
Trump then directed his ire towards Engoron, branding him as “the politically biased judge on this rigged case” who “refused to acknowledge that the Appellate Division has already ruled in my favor on Statute of Limitations, and effectively ended this litigation.”
Trump has consistently interpreted the appeals court’s decision, which dismissed his daughter Ivanka Trump from the case in June 2023, as a triumph for himself and his co-defendants. The court also constrained the financial transactions subject to James’s lawsuit, limiting them to those completed before July 13, 2014, for some defendants, or before 2016 for others.
However, the ruling, issued prior to the commencement of the trial, did not dismiss the case entirely. The appeals court has ruled against Trump on several occasions, notably by reinstating a gag order on the former president.
On Truth Social, Trump asserted that Engoron was “out of control, a political operative who valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 Million dollars, when it is worth 50 to 100 times that amount.”
In a subsequent post, Trump claimed that Engoron denied him a jury or a fair trial, accusing the judge of being “a pawn for the crooked attorney general, Letitia James, who used this case to try to run for governor, but failed.”
Since James initiated the fraud lawsuit against him, Trump has been targeting both the New York attorney general and Engoron, accusing the two Democrats of pursuing politically motivated vendettas against him. In response to a letter filed by Trump’s lawyers last week questioning Engoron’s impartiality, the judge retorted that “that whole approach is getting old.”
In one of the posts published on Truth Social on Monday, Trump demanded “that the VICTORY already given to us by the Appellate Division, that even the Judge admits took my daughter Ivanka out of the litigation, much to his fury and chagrin, be given its full force and effect, and this Case be finally and completely put to an end.”
The former president is facing 91 felony counts in four separate criminal trials and maintains his innocence in all of them. Last month, he was ordered to pay $83.3 million for defaming writer Jean E. Carroll, whom he was found liable for sexually assaulting in a New York department store in the mid-1990s.
