Donald Trump has said he’s already planning to appeal a summary judgement in New York finding he committed fraud for years by massively overvaluing his assets.
But one former Justice Department official had a blunt assessment when asked about the former president’s chances of success in that appeal.
“Slim to none,” former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC’s Katie Phang on Monday, saying Trump’s attorneys delivered “not much of a legal case.”
Trump’s attorneys now have just one “kind of strong” argument in that civil case: real estate valuations fluctuate all time time.
But even that one has two serious problems.
First, he said that argument tends to work only when there’s minor variations, such as valuing a condo at $100,000 that then sells for $105,000.
“This is nowhere like that,” Katyal said, noting Trump claimed, for example, that his 10,000-square-foot penthouse was actually 33,000 square feet.
“He got it wrong by massive, massive numbers,” he said.
Katyal said the other problem is that all the errors in valuations were in his favor.
“It’d be one thing if the valuation differences sometimes hurt him and other times helped him,” he said. “But they always helped him, every time.”
He said that means there’s a “very rocky road” ahead for Trump’s defense attorneys.
See the full segment, which includes civil rights attorney Maya Wiley, below: