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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 probe led by the New York attorney general.
Beginning Thursday, Cushman & Wakefield will be fined $10,000 a day until it produces documents that are already more than a week overdue to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ Office, according to a Tuesday court filing.
James’ office subpoenaed the documents as it considers whether to file a civil suit against former President Donald Trump and his company. In a previous filing, James’ office said it has “uncovered substantial evidence establishing numerous misrepresentations in Mr. Trump’s financial statements provided to banks, insurers, and the Internal Revenue Service.”
Trump and his company have denied any wrongdoing, with the former president at one point calling the probe “a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time.”
The contempt order is the latest development in a lengthy 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 before refusing to provide the remaining records, New York Judge Arthur Engoron said in Tuesday’s contempt order.
While he acknowledged the “enormous number of documents” requested in the probe, Engoron said “Cushman & Wakefield has only itself to blame if it chose to treat the looming deadlines cavalierly.”
Last week, two days after a deadline for complying with the subpoenas following previous delays, Cushman & Wakefield filed a motion for an extension. Engoron denied the request on Tuesday.
“As an initial matter, this Court is incredulous as to why Cushman & Wakefield would wait until two days after the Court-ordered deadline had lapsed to initiate the process of asking for yet another extension,” Engoron wrote.
NBC News has reached out to Cushman & Wakefield for comment.
In a letter to Engoron on Tuesday, lawyers for real estate company said the firm had “produced more than 850,000 pages of materials,” in response to the attorney general’s subpoenas, and that a multi-million page “document dump” would end up delaying the AG’s probe.
In a related ruling last week, Engoron said Trump was no longer in contempt of court roughly two months after he declared the former president in contempt for a sluggish response to a civil subpoena issued by James’ office. Trump last month paid $110,000 in fines due to the contempt order.
