After his news appearance at 40 Wall Street following the fraud trial, the former president Donald Trump returned to offer his supporters a fist-up salute.
Closing arguments in the fraud case, led by Attorney General Letitia James and overseen by Judge Arthur Engoron, were held on Thursday, and there were a lot of unexpected pyrotechnics. After his attorneys refused to accept the limitations, Trump’s lawyers first forbade him from speaking in court. However, Engoron eventually gave in, and Trump attacked the courtroom.
He went on a tirade in the courtroom, criticizing the judge and the prosecution and doing pretty much everything he had been told not to do when Engoron had initially forbidden him from speaking.
Trump further started a rant about the case several times outside the courtroom, rattling off a familiar series of falsehoods. Then he held a raucous and falsehood-riddled press conference at the building he bragged about on 9/11.
Trump attacked Biden repeatedly during his opening remarks, including falsely accusing him of engineering the dozens of criminal charges. He made a raft of other false claims as well, including doubling down on his insistence that AG James drove Exxon out of New York:
“REPORTER: Uh, yes. During the hearing, you said that Exxon left New York and because of the New York Attorney General’s case, but she actually — Exxon actually left in 1989.
TRUMP: No, they took the rest of their divisions out. They left earlier. They were treated very badly in New York. You could have had them in New York. They could have been paying a lot of money.
REPORTER: But it wasn’t Letitia James?
TRUMP: No, I think — if you take a look, you read the case, study the case, you’ll see that they took big divisions out after that. They originally left and then they took the rest out.”
As Trump wrapped up and walked away from the lectern, Trump fans in the building went absolutely nuts screaming, even as reporters shouted questions about the bomb threat at Judge Engoron’s home, which Trump declined to answer.
