Expert Witness Destroys Trump's Main Fraud Defense

An expert witness testified at Donald Trump's New York fraud trial this past week, and he absolutely destroyed Trump's favorite talking point, and possibly his main legal defense, during his testimony. The witness claimed that the fraudulent numbers that Trump gave to the banks resulted in him getting a lower interest rate than he would have otherwise received, which means his scam cost banks a combined $168 MILLION DOLLARS. This is bad news for Trump, as Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

During the New York fraud trial that took place this week. It wasn't just Michael Cohen coming out, you know, with kind of his explosive testimony. It wasn't just Donald Trump's kids making complete fools of themselves and probably dooming the company with their testimony. We also had an expert witness for the prosecution, uh, by the name of Michael McCarty, who destroyed one of Donald Trump's favorite defenses and possibly ended Donald Trump's only line of defense. Here's what happened. Well, before I even tell you what happened, let's talk about this defense, right? We have seen Donald Trump, I've read quotes from him just in the last seven days from truth social, where Donald Trump says, banks made a lot of money. I paid back all the loans. I did everything right. But most importantly, the banks made a lot of money, right? 'cause that's what he keeps saying, like, Hey, numbers, the numbers were not wrong.

He insists, but, you know, regardless, everybody made money, right? Nobody was deceived or screwed out of money, is what he's trying to say. Well, that's not exactly true according to this expert witness. So what happened at the trial was that a footnote from the summary judgment that Judge Arthur Geron had already issued was brought up in court. And this was something that, that I didn't even know existed. And I think most people didn't know. The footnote actually said, let me read it. The subject loans made the banks a lot of money, but the fraudulent statements of financial condition cost the banks lots of money. The less collateral for a loan, the riskier it is, and a first principle of loan accounting is that as risk rises, so do interest rates. Thus accurate statements of financial condition would have allowed the lenders to make even more money than they did.

So Mr. McCarty was asked like, do you agree with this statement? And McCarty goes, oh yeah. So they then asked McCarty like, okay, you've run the numbers. How much money did the banks lose by giving Donald Trump loans with interest rates based on his inflated values? And McCarty said, the banks lost $168 million to be exact. It's $168,040,168. That's how much more money the banks would have made if they had charged Donald Trump the proper interest rates. And those interest rates would've been based on his real values, his real assets. So they would've been higher than what he was given. Banks made money, but they were also screwed out of $168 million in additional profit, which also means by the way,

That Trump was technically able to save himself $168 million by lying to these banks. Now, here's where things take an interesting turn. If Judge Arthur Geron does not decide to go through with the Disgorgement process, which I talked about earlier, or actually this past week, if he doesn't do that, that actually opens the door for these banks who lent him money to be able to sue him. Assuming of course, we have not run out the statute of limitations, which given the fact that the state can still sue over this, the banks should also be able to still sue going back all the way through this and a summary judgment that already says Donald Trump did. It kind of does all of the legwork for these banks. So not only is Donald Trump's biggest legal defense pretty much destroyed now, but he may find himself in court again being sued for $168 million that he should have paid the banks but didn't because he lied to 'em.