Former President Donald Trump has confirmed that he will be deposed under oath on Wednesday as part of New York Attorney General (AG) Letitia James' civil probe into the 45th US president’s business and finances.
“In New York City tonight. Seeing racist N.Y.S. Attorney General tomorrow, for a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. history!” Trump wrote on Tuesday, adding, “My great company, and myself, are being attacked from all sides. Banana Republic!”
The former POTUS is expected to face questions regarding what James argued is a decade-long pattern of financial misstatements on documents used by the Trump Organization to win hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and bank loans.
Neither a lawyer for Trump nor the AG’s office has commented on the matter yet.
The 45th president is the last member of his family to be deposed in the James investigation, with his eldest son Donald Trump Jr. and daughter Ivanka Trump — both of whom have served as Trump Organization executive vice presidents — being grilled last week.
The depositions were initially scheduled for July 15, but James agreed to postpone them after the former US president’s first wife, Ivana Trump, died the day prior.
Eric Trump, the brother of Ivanka and Don Jr and also a vice president for the Trump Organization, invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than 500 times when he sat for a deposition in October 2020. A privilege set out in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution gives an individual the right to refuse to answer any questions or make any statements that could be used in a criminal proceeding to help establish that the person committed a crime.
In early July 2021, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office charged Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg with second-degree grand larceny, and the company itself with "the crime of scheme to defraud in the first degree."
The indictment indicated the first criminal charges against the former US president's company since prosecutors started investigating it more than three years ago.
James' office opened a civil investigation into the Trump Organization in March 2019, looking into whether the company improperly inflated the value of its assets in financial records. The office also issued subpoenas to local governments seeking documents on several Trump Organization properties in Manhattan, upstate New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The Trumps have been fighting for months to avoid having to testify in the James inquiry, which has repeatedly been slammed by the 45th president as a politically motivated “witch hunt.”