Trump challenges $10,000-a-day fine and NY judge’s contempt ruling

By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Former U.S. President Donald Trump has appealed a $10,000-a-day fine and a judge’s contempt ruling over his failure to comply with a subpoena for documents in a case about his business practices, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

In a court filing with New York state’s Appellate Division, attorney Alina Habba said Trump had “proffered a timely response to the subpoena.”

Judge Arthur Engoron on Monday imposed the fine and held Trump in civil contempt for “repeated failures” to hand over materials to Attorney General Letitia James for her three-year-old investigation into whether the Trump Organization improperly valued assets to obtain financial benefits.

Habba said she would ask the appellate court to review whether the fine “serves any purpose as either a compensatory or coercive remedy,” arguing that James failed to show her office was harmed by Trump’s conduct.

The Republican former president denies wrongdoing and has called the probe by the Democratic state attorney general politically motivated. Habba, said during a court hearing in Manhattan on Monday that Trump did not have any of the documents James had requested.

Engoron said he would fine Trump $10,000 per day until he complies with the subpoena. The judge said Trump did not provide enough evidence that he conducted a thorough search for the documents.

“The judge’s order was clear,” James said in a statement. “We’ve seen this playbook before, and it has never stopped our investigation of Mr. Trump and his organization.”

James has said her office’s investigation had found “significant evidence” that the Trump Organization included misleading asset valuations in more than a decade of its financial statements.

The attorney general has questioned how the company valued the Trump brand, as well as golf clubs in New York and Scotland and Trump’s own penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan’s Trump Tower.

In some cases the assets were overvalued to obtain favorable loan terms and in other cases they were undervalued to win tax benefits, the attorney general has said.

Trump previously lost a bid to quash the subpoena, then failed to produce the documents by a court-ordered March 3 deadline, later extended to March 31 at his lawyers’ request.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Howard Goller)