‘Visit Anytime!’ Trump Fraud-Trial Judge Gets Odd Invite to Mar-a-Lago

• Trump’s NY civil fraud trial is in its tenth week.
• Tuesday, a Palm Beach real estate broker testified on Trump’s behalf that Mar-a-Lago is worth $1 billion.
• The AG can “come and visit any time,” he said, adding of Trump,  “I’ll make sure he’s not there.” 

No word yet on whether they should bring bathing suits.

The New York attorney general and the judge in Donald Trump’s New York fraud trial have a standing invitation to visit Mar-a-Lago “any time,” a defense witness for Trump testified on Tuesday.

Only in person could they feel the full effect of Mar-a-Lago’s “breathtaking,” billion-dollar beauty — and see for themselves that the 17-acre resort was not overvalued by Trump, testified the witness, a Palm Beach real estate broker.

Neither the judge in the non-jury trial nor New York Attorney General Letitia James has accepted the offer, which one of Trump’s lawyers conceded in court Tuesday was “inappropriate.”

Still.

“If it gets any colder outside,” the judge, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, joked from the bench of his courtroom in chilly Manhattan, “I’ll take him up on it.”

A Palm Beach broker-to-the-stars

The somewhat madcap exchange came during testimony by the tenth expert defense witness at the trial, Lawrence Moens, a celebrity broker who has sold property for Steve Wynn, Larry Ellison, and Trump himself.

“You have a beach club, you have a main residence, you have a ballroom – it’s quite amazing,” Moens told the judge of Mar-a-Lago.

“I invited the attorney general’s office to come and visit,” he said. The broker and lawyers for the AG had met in July, during a pre-trial deposition.

“I’ll make sure he’s not there when you come,” the broker added, turning to face the table where James’ lawyers sit, and making an apparent reference to Trump.

Moens had high praise for the former president and leading GOP candidate. He likened Trump to such visionary “dreamers” as “John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Thomas Jefferson, and “Martin Luther King.”

“If you have a dreamer, and a great American, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” the broker testified of his Palm Beach neighbor.

A quick call from “Dad,” 91

A brief interruption arose early on in Moens’ two hours of testimony, when his cellphone rang just as he was telling the judge about himself.

“I’m on the front lines every day in selling properties,” Moens was saying at the time, describing how his sales exceed a billion dollars a year. “And I have a pretty good handle on what’s going on currently in the market,” he added.

The ring tone featured the sound of an old-fashioned desk phone, and briefly jolted the trial to a halt.

“That’s a first,” the judge said, with a look of surprise that only grew when Moens pulled out the phone and, instead of shutting it off, actually took the call.

“Sorry, dad,” Moens said into his phone, as quiet laughter broke out in the courtroom. “I love you. I know.”

The witness hung up, turned to the judge, and explained, “He’s 91,” before continuing his testimony.

Dozens and dozens of cherubs

Most of Moens’ time on the stand – he’s charging Trump $975 an hour, he said – was spent extolling the “millions of dollars in gold” and “hand-inlaid stones” used in crafting the former president’s century-old landmark home and resort.

“You have dozens and dozens of hand-carved cherubs” on the living room doors, Moens testified at one point.

Since Moens’ offer of an in-person tour of Mar-a-Lago has gone unanswered, a virtual tour, produced by Moens, was screened in the courtroom instead.

The video, “defense exhibit 1063,” featured seven minutes of sometimes jarringly sweeping footage, the camera moving through thickets of palm trees and ballroom chandeliers.

Lush orchestral music played as the camera swept up the main entrance stairway into the club’s gilded vestibule, the vantage point at one point veering dizzyingly upward to show intricate high ceilings of coffered wood.

There were no classified documents in sight. Those were removed last summer by the FBI, which, unlike the state AG, was reduced to drafting its own invitation to Mar-a-Lago, in the form of a search warrant.

“Obviously, that was an impressive video,” Trump attorney Clifford Robert, who’d been questioning Moens, said after the film’s final drone shot, showing the sun setting over the property, over which flew an American flag.

“I would encourage you to watch the video again,” Moens told the judge.

Why Moens’ testimony matters

Engoron has already found, pre-trial, that a decade’s worth of Trump’s annual net-worth statements were raging frauds, riddled with at least $2 billion in exaggerated property values a year.

The current trial is all about whether Trump’s exaggerations were intentional, and Moens was called to the stand Tuesday to testify that Mar-a-Lago, at the least, was undervalued, not over-valued, in those net-worth statements.

Moens swore in a pre-trial deposition in July that Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and ‘kings’ would pay $1 billion for the 17-acre club, from which the broker lives just three miles down the road, and where he has been a member since it opened in the 1990s. The property is currently worth closer to $1.5 billion, Moens testified in the July deposition.

On Tuesday, he testified that over the last decade, Mar-a-lago’s actual value exceeded what Trump said it was worth by tens of millions of dollars a year.

By his estimate, the property was worth $1.2 billion in 2021, the last year relevant to the trial.

That same year, Trump issued a net-worth statement valuing Mar-a-Lago at just $584 million. The attorney general’s office has said its market value that year was closer to $28 million.

The trial resumes Thursday and is expected to last through next week, with Trump scheduled to take the stand for a second time on Monday.

After next week, the trial will go on hiatus while both sides prepare briefs, due January 5, arguing why the defendants should or should not be forced to pay a penalty of more than $250 million for violating New York fraud laws.

Closing arguments are set for January 11.