A New York judge denied former President Donald Trump’s request to relocate the fraud lawsuit against him and the Trump Organization, exacerbating what legal experts described as a string of trying days in court for Trump.
The decision by Administrative Judge Adam Silvera of the New York County Supreme Court-Civil Term on Wednesday leaves the case filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James in the hands of New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who previously ruled Trump was in contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena earlier in the case.
According to Bloomberg, Trump requested that the lawsuit be transferred to the court’s Commercial Division in Manhattan, but Silvera determined that the case was properly assigned to Engoron, who presided over a long discovery clash between Trump and James.
Trump’s defeat came on the same day he was scheduled to appear in court for a deposition hearing in a defamation case filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a former advice columnist who claims Trump raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s.
A California judge ruled Wednesday that Trump’s attorney, John Eastman, must turn over multiple documents to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. According to Politico, the documents include emails purportedly proving Trump knew claims of election fraud were false while continuing to press them in court.
Legal analyst for MSNBC Lisa Rubin tweeted about the denial of Trump’s request in the fraud lawsuit, writing, “between this ruling, today’s deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case, and a [California] court’s holding that yet more John Eastman communications are evidence of Trump’s crimes … this is another ‘not good’ legal day for Trump.”
Anthony Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, also tweeted about the Eastman emails. Kreis wrote in his post, which included screenshots of the judge’s Wednesday opinion, that while Trump’s legal team had alleged voter fraud in a Georgia state court, the emails set to be released would show that Trump’s team knew the allegations were “wrong and overstated.”
“The key question here was always whether the former president was aware and knew that there was no evidence of massive fraud that questioned the outcome of the election when he made a demand to ‘find’ votes,” Kreis said in a following tweet. “This makes an innocent construction of that request less plausible.”
On Wednesday, Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, tweeted that Trump’s recent legal troubles show “more and more” that the former president “cannot run from accountability in the legal system.”
“Given the lawsuits against him and the number of credible criminal allegations against him, this is cause for cautious but real optimism,” Bookbinder wrote.
