President Donald Trump is taking his fight against the New York civil fraud judgment to the state’s highest court.
On Wednesday, the president filed a request to have the remaining findings against his business empire completely tossed out, marking the latest escalation in a legal battle that has already seen significant reversals.
The move follows a major development in August 2025, when a New York appeals court scrapped a nearly half-billion-dollar penalty against Trump, labeling the fine “excessive.”
That original penalty, ordered by Justice Arthur Engoron in early 2024, initially totaled roughly $355 million before interest. While the appellate court gutted the financial punishment, the underlying findings of fraud remained—until now.
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, speaking on “The Evening Edit” Thursday, argued that Trump holds a powerful hand as he moves to dismantle the rest of the case. Jarrett characterized the lawsuit brought by Democratic Attorney General Letitia James as an unprecedented and “politically vindictive” use of state power.
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“He absolutely has a case,” Jarrett told host Elizabeth MacDonald. “The civil fraud case was always legally absurd.”
Jarrett pointed specifically to James’s 2018 campaign, where she made the investigation and prosecution of Trump a central pillar of her platform. He argued that this “preordaining of an outcome” before an investigation even began represents a fundamental abuse of the legal system.
The core of Trump’s appeal rests on the fact that no private entities—such as the banks or insurance companies involved in his real estate deals—claimed to be victims. During the trial, the defense presented 12 experts in finance and accounting who testified that Trump’s valuations were acceptable and that the lenders involved performed their own due diligence.
“No one was ever defrauded,” Jarrett noted, pointing out that the lenders involved walked away with approximately $100 million in profits. “The attorney general offered no experts, just rank speculation. So this was truly a gross miscarriage of justice driven by political bias.”
As James moves to appeal the previous reduction of the fine in hopes of restoring the original penalty, Trump’s team is pushing in the opposite direction.
They are asking the high court to rule that the entire legal theory used to bring the case was flawed from the start. With the financial teeth of the original judgment already pulled by the lower appeals court, the focus now shifts to whether the remaining legal foundations of the case can survive this final round of scrutiny.
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