Trump Bankers Testify They Did Not Rely on Him When Assessing Net Worth

Bankers whom Donald J. Trump is accused of defrauding testified at his civil fraud trial this week that they did not rely on his embellished claims of wealth, lending support to the central plank of the former president’s defense.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, sued Mr. Trump in 2022 for inflating his net worth on his annual financial statements to receive favorable loans from banks, notably including Deutsche Bank. Before the trial, the judge found that the statements were filled with examples of fraud; the trial will determine any consequences the former president may face.

Mr. Trump has protested the premise of the case, insisting that the banks did their own due diligence and that misstatements in the financial documents would not have affected the overall terms of the loans. It follows, his lawyers have argued, that the alleged fraud had no victim.

The bankers who testified this week supported that argument when asked about the loan process.

“We are expected to conduct some due diligence and verify the information provided, to the extent that is possible,” David Williams, a banker in the wealth management group at Deutsche Bank, said on Tuesday. He said repeatedly that the bank had performed that diligence and factored its own analysis into the relationship with Mr. Trump.

The attorney general has said that the bankers’ having done their own due diligence is not a defense. Her lawyers argued that to obtain the pretrial ruling, they were not required to show that the fraud had harmed the banks and that Mr. Trump’s exaggerations had been so hyperbolic that they would be “material to any user” of the financial statements.

But Mr. Williams testified that Deutsche Bank understood that financial statements like those Mr. Trump submitted relied on estimates. As a result, he said, the bank conducted its own “stress test” and adjusted the numbers downward.

At one point in their lending relationship, Mr. Williams said, Deutsche Bank adjusted Mr. Trump’s net worth to $2.6 billion from the $4.9 billion that he had originally reported. Asked about his reaction to the “magnitude” of that adjustment, Mr. Williams was sanguine.

“My reaction was probably pretty measured, considering it’s not unusual or atypical for any client’s provided financial statements to be adjusted to this level, or to this extent,” he said.

Mr. Williams’s testimony and that of his former Deutsche Bank colleague Rosemary Vrablic, who oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Mr. Trump before she resigned in 2021, will most likely be key to any appeal filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers after the trial.

Ms. Vrablic, who testified Wednesday, was introduced to Mr. Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and she worked directly with Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump to set up several of the loans that are at issue in the case. Mr. Trump had already established a long relationship with the institution but had damaged it through financial troubles and litigation. Ms. Vrablic helped smooth those conflicts, arranging several key loans for Mr. Trump. Eventually, she became close enough to him to attend his inauguration.

In old emails displayed to the courtroom on Wednesday, Ms. Vrablic expressed significant excitement about having the Trump family as clients.

“Given the circles this family travels in, we expect to be introduced to the wealthiest people on the planet,” she wrote in a 2011 email. In another email that year, she wrote of pursuing the Trumps as clients: “We are whale hunting.”

Ms. Vrablic testified that she served as an intermediary between Deutsche Bank and the Trumps in a relationship that became profitable for her employer. In 2014, Ms. Vrablic wrote to Ivanka Trump that the Trump family was one of the top 10 clients in her division in terms of revenue generation, and that her direct boss was thrilled with how their business had grown.

A lawyer for the attorney general’s office, Kevin Wallace, sought to clarify that despite the bank’s rosy assessment, Deutsche Bank had issued the loans only because the former president had personally guaranteed them. Ms. Vrablic agreed that was the case.

She also said, in response to Mr. Wallace, that she had not reviewed Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements while working out the terms of the loans.

Ms. Vrablic worked at Deutsche Bank for over 15 years but was pushed out after an internal investigation found she had done business with a separate client without disclosing it properly.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers clearly felt that the bankers’ testimony vindicated their client. After Mr. Williams testified on Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s attorney Christopher Kise asked the judge for an immediate verdict in his client’s favor, arguing that Deutsche Bank had performed significant due diligence and was fully satisfied with the deals it struck with Mr. Trump.

The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, said he would take Mr. Kise’s motion under advisement but suggested that he was unconvinced.

“The mere fact that the lenders were happy, doesn’t mean that the statute wasn’t violated,” Justice Engoron said.