Trump lawyers demand answers on evidence preservation in $450M fraud case

President Trump's legal team filed a letter with New York's Supreme Court on Thursday demanding that Attorney General Letitia James explain what she has done to preserve evidence in the civil fraud case that nearly resulted in a $464 million judgment against him. The core complaint is straightforward: James, they argue, has not complied with a court order requiring her to detail her office's evidence preservation practices and efforts. More pointedly, Trump's attorneys believe James is withholding communications between her office and Michael Cohen, Trump's former attorney who served as a central witness at trial.

The suspicion rests on a January article Cohen published on Substack in which he claimed that during meetings with James's lawyers, he felt "pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government's desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement and convictions against President Trump." Cohen had been instrumental in the prosecution's case, testifying that Trump routinely misrepresented property values and that Trump had given him specific net-worth targets to meet. If communications exist showing James's office shaped Cohen's testimony, Trump's team argues, those documents must be produced.

The judge rejected Trump's request for additional discovery—the formal process by which both sides exchange relevant materials—but did order James to detail how her office maintains and preserves information. Trump's attorneys now contend she has done neither. In their filing, they note that James's office "carefully avoids representing one way or the other whether any requested materials in fact exist, and, if they do, whether NYAG has confirmed that they are being preserved." Instead of specifics, they write, James simply cited her "standard litigation hold procedures" without explaining what those procedures actually are or when they began.

James's office responded by telling Fox News Digital that it has fully satisfied the court's order and objected to what it called an "extrajudicial discovery" demand—essentially arguing that Trump's team is asking for information outside the normal legal process. The back-and-forth reflects the broader legal battle now unfolding around the case. An appeals court previously vacated the monetary penalties Trump was ordered to pay, but James has appealed to reinstate them. Trump, meanwhile, is pushing to have the entire case dismissed.

In a separate filing earlier this month, Trump's lawyers laid out five major arguments for why the case should be thrown out. They contend James lacked the authority to bring the suit at all, since it involves private commercial transactions rather than direct harm to the public. They argue Trump's property valuations were subjective estimates that lenders independently evaluated, not fraudulent misrepresentations. They point out that the supposed victims—"a handful of ultrasophisticated banks and insurers"—never claimed injury and made over $100 million from the transactions. They challenge the underlying premise that real estate has one objective value and that deviations from it constitute fraud. And they argue the $450 million disgorgement penalty is excessive and unconstitutional.

Trump's team also raised a selective enforcement argument, noting that James has not brought comparable cases against other developers under the same state law. The original trial resulted in a $355 million judgment plus interest, along with a three-year ban on Trump obtaining loans from New York banks and a two-year prohibition on serving as an officer or director of any New York company. The evidence preservation dispute now sits at the center of Trump's effort to unwind that verdict entirely, with his lawyers using Cohen's own public statements to argue that the prosecution's star witness may have been improperly influenced by James's office.