In Trump Case, Judge Lets Florida Real Estate Pro Testify About Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump’s legal team can call to the witness stand a Florida-based real-estate broker to back up the former president’s sky-high valuations of Mar-a-Lago, a Manhattan judge ruled on Friday in the ongoing civil fraud trial. 

The real estate pro, Lawrence Moens, claimed before trial began that Trump’s valuation of his Winter White House between $426,529,614 and $612,110,496, from 2011 and 2021, were too conservative. 

“I could dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates and everyone in between,” Moens testified in a pre-trial deposition. “Kings, emperors, heads of state. But with net worths in the multiple billions. I don't know how many people in the world have a net worth of more than $10 billion, but I think it's quite a number. There are a lot."

Before the trial began, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron rejected that reasoning as too “speculative.”

“Obviously, this Court cannot consider an ‘expert affidavit’ that is based on unexplained and unsubstantiated ‘dream[s],’” Engoron wrote in a footnote of a ruling ordering the dissolution of Trump’s New York business empire.

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s counsel Kevin Wallace pointed to that finding during oral arguments.

“He said he uses gut feeling,” Wallace said.

Trump’s lead attorney Christopher Kise described Moens as the “preeminent broker in Palm Beach.” 

On Friday, Engoron decided to give Moens another opportunity to bolster the defense’s case, finding his testimony permissible. No date has been firmly scheduled for Moens to take the stand. 

Throughout the trial, Trump has put the value of Mar-a-Lago at the center of his public critiques of the case, misleadingly claiming that the judge wrongly valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million. 

Engoron never assigned a value to the property, but he cited valuations by Palm Beach County appraisers about Mar-a-Lago in a ruling finding that Trump fraudulently inflated his assets on financial statements sent to banks and insurance companies. County appraisers valued the property between $18 million in 2011 and $27.6 million in 2021, and the judge cited those figures in his opinion, without personally assigning a current value for the property. 

To reach his higher estimate, Trump valued Mar-a-Lago as a private residence, even though his deed restricted its use as a social club. 

Engoron also will allow Trump’s defense team to call John K. Shubin, who specializes in legal theories of land-use, but the judge rejected the former president’s renewed request to call retired federal judge Barbara Jones, the court-appointed monitor watching over Trump’s businesses during the trial.

When the week began on Monday, Engoron denied Trump’s request to call Jones, finding the defense has no right to call an “arm of the court.” Engoron appointed Jones as the monitor in November 2022.