Former President Donald Trump will likely be "in and out as he sees fit" during his civil business fraud lawsuit trial in New York City while being taken off the campaign trail to fight for his family's business, Alina Habba, one of the attorneys representing him in the case, told Newsmax on Wednesday.
"It's very important to him," Habba said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "His entire life was not the presidency. The Trump Organization was Donald Trump, so this is important to him, and I think it sends a good message to New Yorkers and the world that at the end of the day, he's a human being. He's an American. He has a business. He's trying to make money."
She added that Trump wants the business he started to thrive and it has, and that he's "worth billions more than what's on his statement of financial condition."
Habba, however, declined to comment on the gag order Judge Arthur Engoron issued Tuesday after Trump recirculated a disparaging social media post about the judge's principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield.
She did however comment on New York's Democrat Attorney General Letitia James, accusing her of "ignoring the streets of New York and is doing this, in my opinion, for political gain. [She] campaigned in 2018 on getting Donald Trump, and we've got the campaign video to prove it."
Trump is slated to testify at the end of the month. His sons Eric and Donald Jr. are also likely to take the stand, Habba said.
"They have nothing to hide," she commented. "There wasn't an injured party. Everybody made money. The loans were paid back. Ultimately, we have a statute of limitations for a reason. This judge is allowing things that have expired, dating back to as long as 2011. What's the strategy there?"
She added that she would not comment on the defense's privileged conversations, "but if you look at the decision from June, the appellate division was pretty clear on the statute of limitations … it's our position that that's being disregarded at this point, so we just keep objecting."
Meanwhile, the case is one of civil liability, and Engoron in September issued a ruling that holds Trump and the Trump Organization liable for fraud, mirroring the central allegation in James' lawsuit against Trump."We already are liable the minute before we walked in," said Habba.
"He did it without looking at experts and without listening to witnesses," she said. "He granted that on summary judgment … we already were found liable for all of the things that they wanted to effectively accept, multiple counts of the same, before we walked into court."
Habba on Wednesday also refused to comment on the legal team's strategy concerning the ruling that a bench trial, not a jury trial, would be held. Still, she rejected blame for not checking a box to demand a jury, saying that there "is no box."
"There was no box to check," she said. "It is up to the judge if he wants to have a bench trial. He did want to have a bench trial. Obviously, we thought about it. Obviously, we know about challenging it."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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