President Trump's lawyers filed a reply brief in New York's highest court arguing his $464 million civil fraud case should never have been brought, and that Attorney General Letitia James waged a politically motivated campaign against his family.
The brief, filed Wednesday in the New York Court of Appeals, amounts to a point-by-point dismantling of James's effort to resurrect financial penalties that a lower appeals court already threw out. Trump's representatives argued the liability finding itself should be overturned, along with remaining restrictions that still bar him from serving as an officer or director of any New York company for two years and from applying for loans from any New York bank for three years.
James sued Trump in 2022 under a New York state consumer-protection statute, Executive Law Section 63(12), which empowers the attorney general to prosecute repeated fraudulent or illegal business acts. She alleged 200 instances of fraud tied to overvaluation of Trump's real estate properties. A trial court found Trump liable in 2023 and ordered him to pay $355 million plus interest. An intermediate appeals court later vacated that monetary award, but James appealed to the state's highest court to bring the penalties back.
The reply brief lays out five core arguments for why the case cannot survive review. First, Trump's team contends there are no actual victims. As Fox News Digital reported, the brief states plainly:
"The only supposed 'victims' here are a handful of ultrasophisticated banks and insurers that have never claimed to be injured, were eager to do business with President Trump and his family, and made over $100 million from these transactions."
That framing strikes at the foundation of James's case. The state consumer-protection law was designed to protect the public from fraud. Trump's lawyers argue this case involves private commercial transactions between sophisticated parties, not a scheme that harmed ordinary New Yorkers. The banks did their own due diligence, profited handsomely, and never complained.
Second, the brief challenges the entire theory of overvaluation. Trump's team argues the prosecution rests on the flawed premise that real estate has a single objective value, and that any deviation from that number constitutes fraud. Real estate valuations, they contend, are subjective estimates that lenders independently evaluate before extending credit, not fixed figures a developer can manipulate into a crime.
Third, the brief argues the $450 million disgorgement figure is excessive, unlawful, and unconstitutional. The filing characterizes the penalty as wildly disproportionate, particularly given that no party claims to have lost money.
The fourth and fifth arguments go directly at Letitia James herself, and they carry the sharpest edge.
Trump's lawyers argue the attorney general lacked the legal authority to bring the case in the first place, because it involves private business dealings rather than public harm. They note that James's office cannot identify a single comparable enforcement action under Section 63(12) against any similarly situated developer or defendant. The brief puts it bluntly:
"NYAG cannot point to a single Section 63(12) enforcement action against similarly situated developers (or any other type of defendant) based on practices comparable to those alleged here."
If that argument holds, it would mean James stretched a consumer-protection tool into something it was never designed to do, targeting a political opponent's private business empire without precedent.
The fifth argument goes further, alleging the case was politically motivated from the start. The brief accuses James of prejudging the outcome before her investigation began, citing her own public statements. Trump's lawyers wrote that James "repeatedly called President Trump a 'criminal'; promised to 'investigate President Trump and his business transactions,' 'review... Trump-related real estate transactions,' and 'take on... his business in New York'; and threatened President Trump's 'family' and 'anyone in his orbit.'"
The brief argues that the politically charged nature of the prosecution should have been enough to halt the case entirely.
Beyond the immediate case, the reply brief raises a broader alarm about what James's legal theory would mean for every business operating in New York. Trump's lawyers warned:
"Under that breathtakingly broad theory, NYAG can second-guess any business transaction in this State on almost any imagined grounds."
That argument reframes the case as more than a fight over Trump's real estate valuations. If the attorney general can use a consumer-protection statute to challenge private deals between sophisticated parties who suffered no losses and lodged no complaints, the precedent would hand future attorneys general an open-ended tool to target any business for any reason.
The brief's opening line captures the full scope of the challenge in a single sentence: "This case should have never been brought, and the judgment cannot stand."
It also describes the prosecution as "extremely unusual," involving "not only reams of improper statements targeting President Trump, his family, and his businesses, but also a decision to apply [New York law] against those targets in a completely unprecedented and unlawful way."
Fox News Digital contacted the New York Attorney General's office for comment. James's office did not immediately respond.
That silence leaves the public record one-sided for now. James filed her appeal seeking to restore the penalties after the intermediate appellate court wiped out the $355 million-plus monetary judgment. The New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, has not yet indicated when it might schedule oral arguments or issue a ruling.
Several questions remain unresolved. The two-year ban on Trump serving as a corporate officer or director and the three-year ban on applying for New York bank loans appear to remain in effect, even after the monetary award was vacated. The brief's challenge to those restrictions, if successful, would strip away the last operational consequences of the 2023 verdict.
When an attorney general campaigns on a promise to investigate a specific person, brings an unprecedented case with no complaining victims, wins a verdict that a higher court partially dismantles, and then fights to reimpose the penalties anyway, the word for that isn't law enforcement. It's persistence in search of a target.
