NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s lawyers rested his defense Tuesday and sought anew to immediately end the New York civil fraud trial that threatens the former president’s real estate empire. The judge said “there’s no way I’m going to grant that.”

Trump’s lawyers — thwarted in a similar bid last month — were swatted down as they asked Judge Arthur Engoron to cut the trial short and issue a verdict clearing Trump, his company and top executives of wrongdoing. The judge reiterated his feeling that state lawyers had met their legal burden for seeing the three-month trial through to its conclusion.

New York Attorney General Letitia James alleges Trump duped banks, insurers and others by inflating his wealth on financial statements used in securing loans and make deals. Engoron has already ruled on James’ top claim that Trump committed fraud.

Trump’s lawyers renewed their request for what’s known as a directed verdict a day after Trump, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, skipped a planned return to the witness stand as the defense’s last big witness.

Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said the defense plans to send Engoron paperwork by the end of the week fully detailing arguments for a directed verdict.

“You’d be wasting your time, but I’m not going to tell you not to send me something,” Engoron told Kise. But, he warned, “It doesn’t mean I’ll entertain” or even read the written request.

State lawyer Kevin Wallace complained the long-shot bid — essentially an academic exercise given Engoron’s position on the matter — was a “colossal waste of resources.”

Closing arguments are scheduled for Jan. 11, just four days before the Iowa caucuses start the presidential primary season. Engoron, who is deciding the case in place of a jury, which is not allowed in this type of lawsuit, said he hopes to have a decision by the end of January.

Trump’s lawyers first asked for a directed verdict on Nov. 9 after state lawyers rested their case. Engoron said he was taking the request “under advisement” and ordered the trial to proceed as scheduled.

A few weeks later, Engoron rejected the defense’s request for a mistrial, denying its claims that he was politically biased and had irreparably harmed Trump’s right to a fair trial through “astonishing departures from ordinary standards of impartiality.”

Trump’s lawyers moved again on Tuesday to short-circuit the trial after finishing with their final witness — an accounting expert whom Trump lauded after he testified he found no evidence of accounting fraud in Trump’s financial statements. State lawyers later started calling rebuttal witnesses. Testimony is expected to wrap Wednesday.

The state’s case involved six weeks of testimony from about two-dozen witnesses, including Trump, his eldest sons Eric and Donald Jr., daughter Ivanka, outside accountants and Trump Organization executives.

The defense then called witnesses over the course of about five weeks. They included real estate developers and brokers, a former federal financial regulator and accounting gurus.

Donald Trump Jr. also returned to the witness stand, this time to present “The Trump Story,” a slideshow of golf course fairways, skyscrapers and gilded interiors. He hailed his father as a real estate visionary while making no mention of his casino bankruptcies or other ventures that fizzled or drew regulatory scrutiny.

The defense rested after New York University accounting professor Eli Bartov’s third and final day of testimony. Bartov has blasted the state’s case and said Trump’s financial statements “were not materially misstated.”

In cross-examining Bartov, state lawyer Louis Solomon sought to undermine the contention that major Trump lender Deutsche Bank didn’t rely on his financial statements. Bartov emphasized earlier in his testimony that the bank often reduced the values Trump provided, and the professor had concluded such cuts were not merely “mechanical” but the results of bankers’ own analysis.

Solomon noted that retired Deutsche Bank executive Nicholas Haigh had testified that he believed such cuts were “standardized” for client-reported commercial real estate values.

“There’s no contradiction at all between those two statements,” Bartov said. He opined that the bank would have scrutinized enough of Trump’s assets to be satisfied he had the wherewithal to warrant the loan, and then, to save staff work but still be conservative, bankers would have applied a standard deduction to the remaining holdings.

Later, Solomon asked about a Trump Organization calculation that set the net operating income for a Wall Street office building at about four times the number that appraisers listed. If the Trump Organization’s number was inflated, he asked, wouldn’t the bank’s adjustment also be too high?

“I don’t agree with your premise,” said Bartov, later explaining that appraisers and the company used different methods for the income calculation.

In an unusual turn, Solomon also pointed to one of his colleagues’ defeats in another high-profile case to try to cast doubt on Bartov’s views.

In the same courthouse, Bartov once testified as an expert witness for the attorney general’s office in its lawsuit accusing Exxon Mobil of duping investors about the toll that climate change regulations could take on its business. Exxon won that case, and Judge Barry Ostrager’s ruling shrugged off the professor’s testimony as “unpersuasive” and “flatly contradicted by the weight of the evidence.”

Trump attorney Christopher Kise objected that the Exxon episode was irrelevant.

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Former President Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial turned Tuesday to one of the topics that has vexed him most — the value of his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

Testifying for Trump’s defense, a Florida real estate attorney said the property could be sold as a home, notwithstanding decades-old legal documents in which Trump said he intended to forswear its use as anything but a club. Then a Palm Beach luxury real estate broker testified that he’d value the historic estate at over $1 billion as of 2021.

“It’s something breathtaking. It’s something amazing to see,” broker Lawrence Moens said before showing a glimmering video complete with swelling music, aerial shots of the property at sunrise and sunset and a closing image of an American flag.

His testimony was punctuated by wry remarks. He described a photo of a different part of ritzy Palm Beach as showing “some land, some houses,” for instance.

At one point, Moens even briefly answered a personal phone call while on the witness stand: “Dad, I love you, but I’ve got to get off the phone.”

Spanning 17 acres (7 hectares) with waterfront on two sides, the Trump estate and social club is his home, a place where the former president and current Republican 2024 front-runner has conducted high-profile meetings while in and out of office, and the spot where federal special counsel Jack Smith alleges he improperly stashed classified documents, which Trump denies.

Mar-a-Lago also is a key element of the current New York civil case and Trump’s vehement frustration with it.

State Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit claims that the ex-president and his company deceived lenders and others by giving them financial statements that greatly overstated the values of some of his prime assets, including Mar-a-Lago.

Judge Arthur Engoron, in a pretrial ruling declaring that Trump and his company engaged in fraud, found that he exaggerated Mar-a-Lago’s worth by as much as 2,300%, compared to the Palm Beach County tax appraiser’s valuations. They ranged from $18 million to $28 million.

Trump denies any wrongdoing, saying that his financial statements actually undervalued his assets and were accompanied by disclaimers that wipe away liability for any mistakes.

His frequent complaints about the case have often spotlighted the claims about Mar-a-Lago, one of the holdings he called “the Mona Lisas of properties” during pretrial questioning. As recently as last Friday, Trump vented on his Truth Social platform that the judge and James “falsified the value of Mar-a-Lago.”

The Palm Beach County tax assessment that the judge mentioned was based on Mar-a-Lago’s annual net operating income as a club, not on its resale value as a home or on its reconstruction cost. The county uses the operating-income method to value other social clubs, and the outcome carries tax benefits for Trump — a $602,000 property tax bill this year, compared to about $18 million if Mar-a-Lago were assessed at $1 billion.

In a 2002 agreement with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the club and Trump signed over “any and all of their rights to develop the property for any usage other than club usage.”

Yet when pulling information together for Trump’s annual financial statements, his former corporate controller Jeffrey McConney valued Mar-a-Lago club as though the property could be sold as a private home. The statements pegged it as high as $612 million in 2021.

James said that those values ignored the agreement with the National Trust. The attorney general, a Democrat, maintains that Trump should have valued Mar-a-Lago by its operating income, as the county does.

But Trump, in his own testimony last month, said he believes he retains the right to re-designate the property as a home. The National Trust has declined to comment on whether it agrees.

A defense witness, Miami-based real estate attorney John Shubin, testified Tuesday that “there is absolutely no prohibition on the use of Mar-a-Lago as a single-family residence.”

He noted that the property is simultaneously a club and Trump’s residence. Shubin also pointed to a 1993 agreement between Trump and the city that said Mar-a-Lago would revert to private residential use if the club were “abandoned.”

“Anybody who buys it … would just step into the shoes of President Trump,” defense attorney Christopher Kise said.

Some Palm Beach luxury real estate agents have told The Associated Press that the property would sell for $300 million to $600 million, and possibly $1 billion or more if it sparked a bidding war among uber-wealthy contenders.

So said Moens, a longtime Mar-a-Lago club member who has said he once sold another Palm Beach property on Trump’s behalf.

In a pretrial report, Moens pegged Mar-a-Lago’s 2021 value at more than $1 billion, saying it would be an “unparalleled” family compound for a rarefied cadre of the world’s financial elite.

Asked during pretrial questioning whom he meant, Moens said he could “dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates” and “kings, emperors, heads of state.”

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” Moens said during cross-examination Tuesday, borrowing a line from John Lennon’s song “Imagine” and hailing Trump as “a dreamer and a great American.”

The trial had been due to continue Wednesday with a second round of testimony from the former president’s son Eric Trump, an executive vice president at his father’s company. But defense lawyers decided they didn’t need to bring back the son, who’s also a defendant in the case.

Instead, testimony will resume Thursday with an expert on accounting.

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NEW YORK (AP) — When Deutsche Bank loaned Donald Trump’s company hundreds of millions lawyers of dollars, the bank always followed its own guidelines that include checking out information that would-be borrowers provide, an executive testified Tuesday at the former president’s civil fraud trial.

The loans — for projects in Florida, Chicago and Washington, D.C. — are a focus of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit contending that Trump and his company deceived lenders and insurers by giving them financial statements that baldly overstated his asset values and overall net worth. The defendants deny the allegations.

Deutsche Bank reviewed the financial statements before making the loans through its department that works with rich individuals — a pathway that allowed for more favorable interest rates than likely available from the commercial real estate division, according to the lawsuit. The deals came with conditions about Trump’s net worth and, sometimes, liquidity, and they often required annual submissions of his financial statements.

But, testifying for the defense, managing director David Williams said the bankers viewed clients’ reports of their net worth as “subjective or subject to estimates” and took its own view of such financial statements.

“I think we expect clients-provided information to be accurate. At the same time, it’s not an industry standard that these statements be audited. They’re largely reliant on the use of estimates,” Williams said, so bankers routinely “make some adjustments.”

At times, the bank pegged Trump’s wealth at several billion dollars lower than he did, according to documents and testimony. In 2019, for example, Trump’s financial statement listed his net worth at $5.8 billion, which the bank adjusted down to $2.5 billion.

But Williams said such differences weren’t necessarily unusual or alarming.

“It’s a conservative measure to make these adjustments,” he testified, characterizing them as “standard” and a “stress test” of financial strength.

The attorney general’s office, however, has maintained that such adjustments were never intended to account for the alleged fraud. A now-retired Deutsche Bank executive, Nicholas Haigh, testified earlier in the trial that he assumed the figures “were broadly accurate,” though the bank subjected them to ”sanity checks” and sometimes made sizable “haircuts.”

Trump acted as the guarantor for the loans and was quick to act when the bank raised concerns that the properties weren’t generating enough cash to make payments, Williams said. At one point, Trump moved $8.6 million into the Washington hotel’s coffers after its cash flow fell short of a requirement. No payments were missed, and the loans were never found to be in default, Williams said.

After Williams finished testifying, Trump’s lawyers sought — as they repeatedly had before — to have the case thrown out. They argued the bank executive had neutralized any allegations that the defendants deceived the lender about Trump’s wealth.

“The bank conducted its own due diligence. The bank had no problem with a $2 billion or a $3 billion difference,” defense lawyer Christopher Kise said. He argued the lender wasn’t harmed because it “didn’t change what it did based on what President Trump submitted.”

State lawyer Kevin Wallace retorted, “I think the idea that you can’t lie to a bank is pretty well established.”

Judge Arthur Engoron said he was taking the request for dismissal under advisement, but he noted “that the mere fact that lenders were happy doesn’t mean that the statute wasn’t violated.”

Engoron already has ruled that Trump and other defendants engaged in fraud. The trial is to decide remaining claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. There’s no jury, so Engoron will decide the verdict.

Trump, the current Republican 2024 presidential front-runner, casts the entire case as a political low blow from James, a Democrat.

Trump maintains that his financial statements actually lowballed his wealth and that any overstatements — such as listing his Trump Tower penthouse for years at nearly three times its actual size — were mistakes.

He asserted in his own testimony this month that his lenders cared more about property locations and the parameters of the deals than they did about the financial statements. And he argued that lenders were essentially told to do their own homework, pointing to disclaimers that said the statements weren’t audited, among other caveats.

Deutsche Bank guidelines told lending officers to “independently verify all material facts,” and Williams said the bankers followed those and other instructions when dealing with Trump.

“Are you aware of any time Deutsche Bank didn’t adhere to its own guidelines in making loans to President Trump?” defense attorney Jesus M. Suarez asked.

“No,” Williams replied.

James wants the judge to impose over $300 million in penalties and to ban Trump from doing business in New York — and that’s on top of Engoron’s pretrial order that a receiver take control of some of Trump’s properties. An appeals court has frozen that order for now.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The judge in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial fined the former president $10,000 on Wednesday, saying Trump violated a limited gag order barring personal attacks on court staffers.

The fine came after Trump was called to the witness stand to explain his comment outside the courtroom about “a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside” the judge in the case, Judge Arthur Engoron.

Weeks ago, Engoron ordered all participants in the trial not to comment publicly about his staff. The narrow gag order imposed on Oct. 3 came after Trump made a social media post maligning the judge’s principal law clerk, who sits beside Engoron in court.

The judge ordered Trump to take down that post and Trump did. But it lingered on his campaign website for weeks, prompting a $5,000 fine for Trump on Friday.

Trump and his lawyers said his comment Wednesday was about witness Michael Cohen, not the clerk.

Three of Trump’s attorneys objected to the fine, insisting that the comment was referring to Cohen, and they reiterated Trump’s claim that the judge’s law clerk was unfairly biased.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen returned to the witness stand Wednesday in his ex-boss Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial as the former president’s defense team tried to undermine the credibility and question the motives of his onetime personal attorney turned adversary.

Outside the courtroom, Trump’s commentary led the judge to weigh whether Trump had violated a limited gag order imposed earlier in the case.

With Trump at the defense table, his lawyer Alina Habba confronted Cohen with comments he had made praising Trump, before turning on him when Cohen’s legal problems started in 2018.

Habba tried to suggest that Cohen had angled unsuccessfully for a job in Trump’s White House — Cohen insisted he never sought one — and asked whether he had “significant animosity” toward Trump.

“Do I have animosity toward him? Yes I do,” Cohen replied.

“You have made a career out of publicly attacking President Trump, haven’t you?” Habba asked.

After a long pause, Cohen said, “Yes.”

Cohen worked as Trump’s lawyer and fixer for many years, before Cohen’s 2018 federal prosecution, guilty pleas and prison sentence for tax evasion, making false statements on a bank loan application, lying to Congress and making illegal contributions to Trump’s campaign. The contributions were in the form of payouts to women who said they had extramarital sexual encounters with Trump, who said the women’s stories were false.

Cohen is now a key witness in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil case against Trump. James alleges that Trump habitually exaggerated the value of his real estate holdings on financial documents that helped him get loans and insurance and make deals.

Trump denies any wrongdoing and says James, a Democrat, is targeting the leading Republican presidential candidate in 2024 for partisan reasons.

During a break in the testimony Wednesday, Trump complained that Judge Arthur Engoron, a Democrat, is “a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting along side of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

That remark came weeks after a Trump social media post about Engoron’s law clerk, who sits beside the judge, prompted Engoron to issue the narrow gag order and tell Trump to take down the post. That order bars all participants in the case from commenting about any members of the judge’s staff.

The judge fined Trump $5,000 on Friday after learning that the post had lingered on Trump’s campaign website for weeks, though it had been removed from his Truth Social platform.

After learning of Trump’s latest comment, Engoron asked “why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal of a clear court order.”

In response, defense lawyer Christopher Kise insisted that Trump was talking about Cohen, not the judge’s law clerk. Engoron said he would take the matter “under advisement,” and testimony resumed.

When the trial broke for lunch, the judge held a closed-door meeting that included Trump and his lawyers. When Trump emerged, he declined to disclose what was discussed, but told reporters that he had not violated the gag order, saying his earlier comment was not directed at Engoron’s clerk. Trump ignored questions about whom he was targeting.

During his first day of testimony Tuesday, Cohen said he and key executives at Trump’s company worked to inflate the estimated values of their employer’s holdings so documents given to banks and others would match a net worth that Trump had set “arbitrarily.”

In cross-examining Cohen, Habba emphasized his federal criminal convictions and worked to portray him as a liar, especially after he said Tuesday he had lied when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and loan application lies. Cohen asserted that he did not really commit those crimes and he sought to portray his conduct as a matter of omissions and failure to correct paperwork.

Habba returned to those themes Wednesday, underscoring that Cohen had admitted in open court to lying under oath in a federal courthouse next door.

Outside court, Trump said the trial was “very unfair” and a “pure political witch hunt.” Nonetheless, he said, “We’re happy with the way it’s going.”

“We have the facts on our side,” Trump said. He’s expected to testify later in the trial but meanwhile has voluntarily attended several days of the proceedings.

Cohen is also expected to be an important prosecution witness in a criminal trial scheduled for next spring in which Trump is accused of falsifying business records. That case is one of four criminal prosecutions Trump faces in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump returned Tuesday to the civil fraud trial that imperils his real estate empire, watching and deploring the case as an employee and an outside appraiser testified that his company essentially put a thumb on the scale when sizing up his properties’ value.

Incensed by a case that disputes his net worth and could strip him of such signature holdings as Trump Tower, the former president is due to testify later in the trial. But he chose to attend the first three days and came back Tuesday to observe — and to protest his treatment to the news cameras waiting outside the Manhattan courtroom.

Star witness Michael Cohen, a onetime Trump fixer now turned foe, postponed his scheduled testimony because of a health problem.

Instead, Trump company accountant Donna Kidder testified that she was told to make some assumptions favorable to the firm on internal financial spreadsheets. Outside appraiser Doug Larson said he didn’t suggest or condone a former Trump Organization comptroller’s methods of valuing properties.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Larson said of the way the ex-controller reached a $287.6 million value for a prominent Trump-owned retail space in 2013.

Trump, outside court, reiterated his insistence that he’s done nothing wrong and that New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit is a political vendetta designed to drag down his 2024 presidential campaign as he leads the Republican field.

“We built a great company — a lot of cash, it’s got a lot of great assets, some of the greatest real estate assets anywhere in the world,” Trump said outside the courtroom. He dismissed the case as “a disgrace,” the legal system as “corrupt” and the Democratic attorney general as a “radical lunatic.”

James’ lawsuit alleges that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and inflating his net worth on his financial statements.

“Mr. Trump may lie, but numbers don’t lie,” she said after court.

“He can call me names, he can engage in distractions,” she said, but “his entire empire was built on nothing but lies and on sinking sand.”

Trump says his assets were actually undervalued and maintains that disclaimers on his financial statements amounted to telling banks and other recipients to check out his numbers themselves.

Larson, a real estate brokerage executive and certified appraiser, assessed Trump properties for lenders. He was taken aback when told on the stand that he was repeatedly cited as an outside expert in former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney ’s valuation spreadsheets.

“It’s inappropriate and inaccurate,” Larson testified. “I should have been told, and an appraisal should have been ordered.”

When it came to valuing a storefront formerly known as Niketown, McConney relied on rates of return for a different type of property, rather than for comparable retail space, Larson testified. He also said he appraised a Trump-owned Wall Street building at $540 million in 2015, while McConney valued it at $735.4 million on Trump’s financial statement.

In cross-examining Larson, Trump lawyer Lazaro Fields asked whether anything “prevents President Trump, as a real estate developer, from valuing his own properties.”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t know,” Larson responded. Asked again, Larson said: “Not that I know of.”

Kidder, the Trump company accountant, testified that as she filled out spreadsheets documenting the value of a Trump-owned Wall Street office building, then-finance chief Allen Weisselberg told her to act as if the skyscraper would be fully leased by a certain date, even if some space was currently vacant. For a Park Avenue residential tower, she was told to project that unsold units “would all sell out” in a certain timeframe.

Kidder said she wasn’t aware that those assumptions would be used to improve Trump’s bottom line on financial statements that helped his company make deals and get financing and insurance.

Trump lawyer Christopher Kise objected to what he deemed “very granular” testimony from Kidder, who also alluded to a prior Trump tangle with New York state’s lawyers.

In explaining a spreadsheet, she noted an entry about a $12 million loan to pay a $25 million settlement of lawsuits from former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and others over the now-defunct Trump University real estate seminar program.

Judge Arthur Engoron is hearing the current case without a jury. The suit was brought under a state law that doesn’t allow for one.

Trump has repeatedly criticized both the statute and the judge, a Democrat. The ex-president said Tuesday that he had come to like and respect Engoron but believed that Democrats were “pushing him around like a pinball.”

After Trump maligned a key court staffer on social media during the trial’s first days, the judge ordered him to delete the post and issued a limited gag order, warning participants in the case not to smear members of his staff.

In a pretrial decision last month, Engoron resolved the case’s top claim, ruling that Trump and his company committed years of fraud by exaggerating his asset values and net worth on his financial statements.

As punishment, Engoron ordered that a court-appointed receiver take control of some Trump companies, putting the future oversight of Trump Tower and other marquee properties in question. An appeals court has since blocked enforcement of that aspect of the ruling for now.

The trial concerns the suit’s remaining claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.

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