Trump property appraised firm in contempt of court

A commercial real estate firm that appraised several Trump Organization properties is being held in contempt by a state judge over its failure to hand over documents in a civil investigation led by the New York attorney general.

Cushman Wakefield will be fined $10,000 a day until it produces documents that are already more than a week overdue to the New York Attorney General Letitia James' OfficeJames' Office, according to a court order filed Tuesday.

James' office has a subpoenaed the documents as it considers whether to file a civil suit against President Donald Trump and his company. In a previous filing, James office said that it found substantial evidence proving the misrepresentations in Mr. Trump's financial statements provided to banks, insurers, and the Internal Revenue Service. The former president has called the probe a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time, with Trump and his company denying any wrongdoing. The contempt order is the latest development in a long legal battle that began when James office served subpoenas on Cushman Wakefield in September and again in February.

The real estate firm had partially responded to the subpoenas in March, but it refused to provide the remaining records, state Judge Arthur Engoron said in Tuesday's contempt order.

Engoron said that Cushman Wakefield has only one to blame if it decides to treat the looming deadlines cavalierly, despite the enormous number of documents requested in the probe. A week ago, two days after a deadline to comply with the subpoenas, Cushman Wakefield filed a motion for an extension. The request was denied Tuesday by Engoron.

As an initial matter, this Court is incredulous as to why Cushman Wakefield would wait until two days after the Court-ordered deadline had expired to initiate the process of asking for another extension, Engoron wrote.

In a letter to Engoron on Tuesday, lawyers for the real estate company said that it had produced more than 850,000 pages of materials in response to James subpoenas and that a multimillion-page document dump would delay her investigation.

In a ruling last week, Engoron said Trump was no longer in contempt of court about two months after he declared Trump in contempt for a sluggish response to a civil subpoena issued by James' office. Trump paid $110,000 in fines last month over the contempt order.