(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump's eldest son, who helped run the former president's real estate business, told a judge that he certified but never verified the accuracy of financial statements at the heart of a civil fraud case brought by New York state.
“I would be comfortable trusting my team” of accountants and lawyers, who advised him to sign off on the documents, Donald Trump Jr. said on the witness stand Thursday at the trial of the suit accusing him, his father and brother Eric Trump of inflating asset values.
The state court judge in the case has already ruled the statements of financial condition were fraudulent before the start of the trial a month ago. The trial is now focused on who was involved in creating the statements, which were used in financial transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars over more than a decade.
Donald Trump Jr., who took on greater responsibility running the Trump Organization after his father was elected president, testified he has no recollection of how the asset valuations used in the financial statements were prepared by the company's accountants at Mazars USA LLP.
In earlier testimony, Mazars accountant Donald Bender said he relied on the Trump Organization to provide accurate valuation data and that he wouldn't have signed off on the financial statements if he had known they were inflated. Bender said under the terms of the contract with Trump, Mazars wasn't required to verify the appraisals.
The New York attorney general alleges the former president and his sons inflated the value of Trump's assets by billions of dollars to get better terms from banks and insurers. It's one of six trials Trump is facing as he seeks to return to the White House in 2024. Trump denies wrongdoing in all the cases.
Read More: Trump Directed Bogus Asset Inflation, Ex-Fixer Cohen Says
“I relied upon Mazars and our accounting team to tell me” about the preparation of a 2017 Trump financial statement, Donald Trump Jr. told the judge, who is hearing the case without a jury. “That's why we have accountants.”
“I don't recall ever being involved in that,” Trump said. “But yes, I would have also relied on their working intimately with Mazars,” he said. “Mazars was involved in every transaction, every LLC, they would have been a key part in compiling the accounting and they would have been well aware of that.”
Donald Trump Jr. also testified that he had no recollection of how he responded when he was made aware in 2017 that one of his father's biggest assets — his Trump Tower penthouse apartment — was being wildly overvalued.
A lawyer for the state showed him an email exchange from March 2017 in which Forbes magazine explained that the apartment his father claimed was 30,000 square feet was about one third that size.
“Insane amount of stuff here,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in an internal Trump Organization response to the Forbes email.
The state alleges that Donald Trump Jr. ignored the error days later when he verified to Mazars that his father's 2016 statement of financial condition, which falsely valued the penthouse at over $300 million, was accurate. He also sent the statement to one of the family's biggest lenders, Deutsche Bank AG.
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