- Lawyers for Donald Trump and NY Attorney General Letitia James will spar in court on Wednesday.
- James wants a stack of new sworn statements from Trump executives explaining how they preserved his hand-written directives.
- Trump's side calls the request 'perplexing;' at stake is a potential $300,000 in new contempt-of-court fines.
Lawyers for Donald Trump and New York Attorney General Letitia James will spar before a Manhattan judge on Wednesday afternoon — with potentially $300,000 in new contempt-of-court fines at stake.
The AG learned last week that the Trump Organization — the former president's multi-billion-dollar hotel and golf resort empire — had no central policy for preserving Trump's handwritten directives.
The AG has said that such directives — typically scrawled in Trump's ubiquitous Sharpie, and often on Post-It Notes he affixed to contract and assessment drafts and other documents — are crucial to her 3-year probe of alleged financial wrongdoing at the business.
James is now demanding sworn statements from additional Trump Organization officials, detailing how those directives from Trump were, or were not, separately preserved at — for instance — the company's legal, financial, hotel and golf divisions. But in a filing late Tuesday, Trump lawyer Alina Habba called the AG's request for yet another stack of affidavits "perplexing."
Trump and other company officials have already fully complied with the AG's subpoeanas for Trump Organization documents, Habba wrote in arguing that a costly contempt-of-court fine should be permanently lifted.
And even if the request for that new batch affidavits is valid, "The document retention policies of separate, unrelated departments of the Trump Organization policies simply have no bearing on the individual document retention policy of [Trump himself]," Habba wrote.
New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron will hear virtual arguments on the matter at 3 p.m. Wednesday, and may rule — thumbs up or down — on lifting the contempt of court order by day's end.
Engoron had stopped the clock on a the $10,000-a-day contempt fine in early May, when it totaled $110,000.
If the judge finds that Trump is still not fully in compliance with the AG's subpoena for his document, he has promised to re-instate the fine retroactive to May 7, potentially adding more than $300,000 in fines to the $110,000 check that Trump has already signed over to the AG.
Those funds remain in escrow while Trump appeals the contempt-of-court order.