Former President Donald Trump was questioned under oath by lawyers for New York author E. Jean Carroll on Wednesday. She claims he raped her in a department store dressing room two decades ago and then slandered her when he denied it during his tenure. Trump, 76, had no choice but to testify on the matter after a New York judge last week rejected the former president’s latest attempt to delay the questioning. “We are pleased that we were able to take the testimony of Donald Trump today on behalf of our client E. Jean Carroll,” said the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink in an email. However, the lawyers are silent on the content: “We are not in a position to make any further comments.” Trump denies attacking or slandering Carroll, saying she made the allegation to promote her book.
Only a day before his testimony in the Carroll case, Trump suffered a defeat in another process
The court-ordered testimony illustrates the extent of Trump’s legal troubles, which include a criminal probe into his handling of sometimes confidential White House documents, attempts to pressure Georgia officials to find votes for him, and an investigation into his actions related to the January 6 uprising. Only a day before his testimony in the Carroll case, the former US President suffered defeat in another process: in connection with the preparation of a controversial dossier on Donald Trump’s Russia affair in 2016, one of the key figures is the Russian analyst Igor Dantschenko (also: Danchenko), has been acquitted of the charge of false testimony. Trump derided the dossier as fake news and a political witch hunt when it was released in 2017. A special investigator he had appointed in the case, John Durham, had accused Danchenko of repeatedly lying to the FBI in the course of the investigation into the Steele dossier – of which the court has now acquitted him.
Meanwhile, his already disproven claims of massive fraud in the US presidential election 2020 put Donald Trump at further legal risk. A judge in California found on Wednesday that the ex-president knowingly misrepresented alleged fraud figures in court documents. The judge saw this as sufficient evidence of an attempted misdemeanor to suspend attorney-client privilege for several emails between Trump and his attorney, John Eastman. The lawsuits concern Eastman’s attempts to keep email exchanges with Trump from before the US House of Representatives investigative committee into the January 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington. Trump’s supporters stormed the parliament building at the time – while Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election was to be officially sealed there. Trump had previously incited supporters at a White House rally by repeating his false allegations that Biden only won through voter fraud. After the election, Trump and his companions filed a few dozen lawsuits across the United States about alleged voting irregularities – practically all of them failed. The judge specifically referred to a lawsuit filed in Georgia, in which Trump and his attorneys allege, among other things, that 10,315 deceased votes were counted in Fulton County. A day later, Eastman wrote in an email that Trump was then advised that some of the information was incorrect. Nevertheless, Trump and his lawyers “filed the lawsuit with the same incorrect numbers,” the judge noted. And Trump also assured under oath that all the information was correct to the best of his knowledge. “The emails demonstrate that President Trump knew these particular voter fraud numbers were incorrect, but continued to disseminate them, both in court documents and to the public,” wrote California Judge David Carter. Eastman’s emails are related to a “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Eastman is now scheduled to submit 33 documents to the investigating committee by October 28. The committee recently decided to subpoena Trump.
The list of legal battles for Trump doesn’t end there: Another example: There is a court order for Trump to be questioned under oath in a civil fraud lawsuit by investors of a troubled multi-level marketing company until October 31 that Trump has been secretly promoting for years on his reality TV show for millions of dollars.
Trump’s attorney has not yet commented
But back to the Carroll case and the allegation of defamation after a rape: It is not yet known how long Trump was questioned by Carroll’s lawyers or whether he exercised his right to self-incrimination, as he recently did in a statement by the New Yorker Attorney General Letitia James did as part of a civil investigation into his company’s asset valuations. James then filed a $250 million fraud lawsuit against Trump. Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, has not yet responded to requests to comment on Wednesday’s survey. However, she previously said Trump was “ready and anxious” to testify. Other witnesses have been called in the past few weeks, including a writer who claims Trump sexually harassed her during an interview and a former saleswoman who says he groped her on a plane. Their statements are intended to clarify whether there is a pattern of Trump’s attacks on women or not.