Award-winning researcher and professor of accounting at NYU’s Stern School of Business Eli Bartov ‘couldn’t find a single GAAP provision that was violated.’
Former President Donald Trump returned to Manhattan’s famous courthouse on Dec. 7 to hear the last expert witness testify in his defense before he will take the stand himself next week.
Eli Bartov, professor of accounting at NYU’s Stern School of Business and an award-winning researcher, has published several papers on financial reporting misconduct—the issue at the heart of the case against President Trump.
Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued President Trump for defrauding the state, and a week before his trial began this fall New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled in her favor, deciding that President Trump was indeed liable for fraud and had inflated his net worth on the yearly Statements of Financial Condition (SFoC) produced by the Trump Organization.
Defense lawyers are presumably preparing their appeal of the final ruling and orders, which they have said they believe will be unfavorable, and in recent weeks have been making public allegations of court bias and misconduct. Earlier this week, attorney Chris Kise told the judge they were streamlining the case, removing President Trump’s son Eric Trump from the witness list.
On Dec. 7, President Trump told reporters he wanted to remind everyone that the judge had already ignored an appeals ruling once.
“We won this case at the appellate division, and this judge refuses to acknowledge the appellate decision,” he said, referring to the appellate ruling that set a statute of limitations on the case. “Nobody’s ever seen something like this.”
“If you look at the case, we did nothing wrong, there were no victims,” he added, once again calling the case a “witch hunt” and pointing to the previous testimony of a former bank executive who detailed how Deutsche Bank courted the Trump Organization.
“There’s probably not a judge in the country that would have even taken this case,” President Trump said.
After Mr. Bartov’s testimony, President Trump told reporters that the judge had not known a lot of what was said in the courtroom when he made his summary judgment on Sept. 26. The judge had said he would take it under advisement, without confirming that he would revisit his ruling.
By Michael Washburn and Catherine Yang
