New York Attorney General Letitia James on Tuesday requested that the state’s Supreme Court sanction Donald Trump and other defendants in her $250 million civil suit against him, accusing them of “frivolous conduct.”
James sued Trump, two of his children, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization last year over deploying deceptive business practices as part of a long-running alleged tax-dodging scheme. She also accused Donald Trump of inflating his net worth by $812 million to $2.2 billion each year from 2011 to 2021.
The case is set to go to trial Oct. 2.
In Tuesday’s court filing, James is asking that all defendants and their lawyers pay a total of $20,000 for using “previously-rejected arguments” several times.
She said her request for sanctions is “based on frivolous conduct by Defendants and their counsel in asserting legal arguments in connection with the parties’ pending dispositive motions that were previously rejected by this Court and the First Department in this action.”
Specifically, James argued that Trump used three arguments, including that the attorney general has no standing to bring this case against him, in several motions despite the fact that those arguments already had been turned down by the court in November 2022.
The court rejected these arguments for a second time in January after the defendants filed motions to dismiss, noting that they “were borderline frivolous even the first time defendants made them.”
James noted that Trump used rejected arguments as recently as this month following a joint brief by the defendants against her partial summary motion.
The New York prosecutor has asked for all defendants in the case to collectively pay $10,000 and that their attorneys also collectively be fined $10,000.
Clifford Robert, a lawyer for the Trump family, asked James to withdraw her sanctions request, in a filing Tuesday night, according to The Washington Post.
James had also brought charges against Ivanka Trump in the civil lawsuit, but a New York Appeals Court dismissed the case against her in June.