Donald Trump fraud verdict: $364 million penalty in civil fraud case

A New York judge ruled Friday against Donald Trump, imposing a $364 million penalty over what the judge ruled was a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated the former president’s wealth.

Trump also was barred from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years.

However, the judge backed away from an earlier ruling that would have dissolved the former president’s companies.

Trump's lawyers vowed to appeal. Attorney Alina Habba called the verdict “manifest injustice" and “the culmination of a multi-year, politically fueled witch hunt." She and Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said the verdict, if upheld, would damage the business environment.

Judge Arthur Engoron issued his decision after a 2½-month trial that saw the Republican presidential front-runner bristling under oath that he was the victim of a rigged legal system.

Engoron concluded that Trump and his co-defendants “failed to accept responsibility” for their actions and that expert witnesses who testified for the defense “simply denied reality.”

The judge called the civil fraud at the heart of the trial a “venial sin, not a mortal sin.”

“They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways,” wrote Engoron, a Democrat. He said their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”