Former President Donald Trump decided not to testify this week at his criminal trial in Manhattan where he faces 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business documents to cover up payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election. (Daniels testified that she had a sexual encounter with Trump, which he denies.)
After the defense rested on Wednesday, Trump spoke with the WABC radio show Cats & Cosby. When asked why he didn’t testify — after saying repeatedly that he would absolutely testify — Trump provided a rambling response.
Trump is asked on WABC why he didn’t testify in the NY criminal trial and responds with a bunch of incoherent gibberish. He then falsely claims the decision against him in the NY civil fraud case before Judge Engoron was overturned (it was not). pic.twitter.com/capx0JGby4
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 22, 2024
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said, presumably about Judge Juan Merchan: “He made rulings that makes it very difficult it testify.” Trump added, “Anything I did, anything I did in the past they can bring everything up and you know I’ve had a great past but anything, but the other thing is and the main reason, and I don’t even mind that in fact I like talking about it, because we had rigged cases.”
Trump quickly pivoted to discuss his February New York civil fraud case before Judge Arthur Engoron, who ordered Trump to pay $355 million for fraudulently inflating his net worth. In April, an appeals court granted his request to lower the appellate surety bond amount Trump was required to post during appeal to $175 million — instead of the full amount, which Trump’s team told the court it could not secure. Notably, the appellate court — in reducing the surety bond amount required– did not overturn Engoron’s ruling.
Trump falsely claimed, “You know we won in the Engoron case. He doesn’t know anything about what he’s doing and he’s totally corrupt. That’s a different case. We had that overturned. We had a decisions [sic] overturned five times, I think it’s a record.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has made the false claim. While campaigning in Wisconsin in April, Trump said: “The Appellate Division actually gave me the case. I won the case, because I won it in the Appellate Division…I won the case because it’s called statute of limitations. The Appellate Division ruled in my favor. That means most of the case is gone; the judge refused to honor it. Now, he – nobody ever heard of that before. So the Appellate Division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’”