New york state

A New York State Supreme Court judge issued a ruling on Tuesday that, if it stands, would have major consequences for Donald J. Trump.

The ruling came as part of the New York attorney general’s civil case against Mr. Trump. The attorney general, Letitia James, has accused the former president of fraudulently overstating the value of his assets on annual financial statements by as much as $2.2 billion a year in order to receive favorable terms on loans and benefits.

In the ruling, the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, agreed that Mr. Trump committed fraud when he sent those statements to banks and insurance firms. A trial in the case could start as soon as Monday; if Mr. Trump does not successfully have the ruling reversed before then, the proceeding will largely focus on the size of the penalty against him. Ms. James is seeking a fine of $250 million.

The financial statements are deceptive, Justice Engoron wrote, and he punctuated his order with harsh criticisms of the legal strategies deployed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, whom he fined $7,500 each for using arguments that he had already rejected.

Mr. Trump, a Republican, has denied all wrongdoing and accused Ms. James, a Democrat, of political persecution. He noted Tuesday in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Justice Engoron was also a Democrat.

One of his lawyers, Christopher M. Kise, indicated that he might appeal the ruling, which he called “outrageous” and “completely disconnected from the facts and governing law.”

Here are some takeaways from Justice Engoron’s decision.

The decision dealt Mr. Trump a major blow.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers were preparing to challenge Ms. James’s accusation that he had fraudulently inflated his net worth by billions of dollars, but Justice Engoron has short-circuited that aspect of the trial. In effect, Justice Engoron ruled that no trial was necessary to determine that Mr. Trump’s financial statements were fraudulent.

In his ruling, Justice Engoron wrote that the statements that Mr. Trump had submitted to banks and insurance companies “clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had planned to argue that the banks that lent Mr. Trump money were hardly victims — they turned profits on their dealings with the Trump Organization — and that valuing property can be subjective.

Consequences for his company may be serious.

Ms. James had sought to bar Mr. Trump from doing business in New York, in part by canceling certificates that allow his properties to operate there. Justice Engoron granted that punishment, which could have enormous repercussions for the Trump Organization.

For example, Mr. Trump could lose control of several properties, including Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan and a flagship commercial building at 40 Wall Street. His grip over his Westchester County golf club is also threatened. At one point in his order, Justice Engoron referred to the limited liability companies that he had shut down as “the canceled LLCs.”

Mr. Trump’s family business itself has not been dissolved. Although popularly known as the Trump Organization, it actually comprises hundreds of entities, many of which were not named as defendants in the lawsuit. But the decision could still have a sweeping impact, with the potential to shut down an entity that employs hundreds of people working for Mr. Trump in New York.

The ruling is a victory for New York’s attorney general.

Ms. James’s investigation into Mr. Trump opened in 2019 and heated up after he left the White House. Mr. Trump was deposed twice: In the first instance, he avoided answering questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment rights; in the second instance, he answered questions and claimed that as president he had helped the world avoid a nuclear holocaust.

Nonetheless, Ms. James sued him in September 2022, accusing him of “staggering” fraud. She has said in legal filings that the undisputed facts show that Mr. Trump overvalued his assets by as much as $2.2 billion each year.

On Tuesday, Ms. James said in a statement, “We look forward to presenting the rest of our case at trial.”

Criminal cases against Mr. Trump are not affected.

Ms. James’s case is civil. She does not have the authority to indict Mr. Trump.

Yet the former president has been indicted in four other cases, two brought by a federal special counsel and one each by local prosecutors in Manhattan and Georgia. Those cases are separate from Ms. James’s lawsuit and will not be directly affected by Justice Engoron’s ruling.

The first of the criminal cases, which involves Mr. Trump’s effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election, is scheduled to go to trial in March.

The judge was harsh with Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

There is little love lost between Justice Engoron and Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who tried to move the case to another judge and more recently sued the judge himself.

He has often expressed impatience with them. In an appearance last week, he appeared to grow tired of a particular line of argument advanced by Mr. Kise and, pounding on the bench, said, “You cannot make false statements and use them in business.”

In his order on Tuesday, he took the unusual step of fining each of Mr. Trump’s lawyers $7,500, writing that their continued assertion of arguments he had previously rejected was “indefensible.”

That sum was more than what Ms. James was seeking when she asked the judge to penalize them.

At one point, he criticized the arguments of Mr. Trump’s lawyers as straining credulity, including the notion that the square footage of an apartment could be subjective.

“That is a fantasy world, not the real world,” he wrote.

Trump is not out of options.

Mr. Trump has at least two routes left to challenge Justice Engoron. He can appeal the ruling and seek an emergency stay of the trial, a move that Mr. Trump’s lawyers indicated they might pursue.

Even if that does not work, Mr. Trump is awaiting a decision from an appeals court on the lawsuit he filed against Justice Engoron. In it, Mr. Trump argued that the judge had ignored an earlier appeals court ruling that raised the prospect that some evidence against the former president was too dated to be used at trial.

The appeals court is expected to rule as soon as Thursday.

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the building-within-a-building that is giving new life to an old sugar refinery. We’ll also find out about the chorus of Democrats in the Senate calling for Robert Menendez to resign.

On a map of Brooklyn, you can find waterways like Mill Basin and the Gowanus Canal.

You won’t find the Sea of Molasses.

That was a nickname for the gooey mess left behind on the floor of what was once the world’s largest sugar refinery.

Today that structure begins a new chapter with the opening of a building-within-a-building — a 15-story office tower that has been built within the Domino refinery’s old brick walls. There has already been a much-photographed event in the penthouse, where the luxury brand Hermes held a men’s wear runway show during New York Fashion Week last month. Vogue reported that Matt Damon was in the front row.

How different that was from what used to go on there. The refinery once produced more than one million pounds of sugar every day. The company that operated the refinery came to control 98 percent of sugar processing in the United States, and by the end of World War I, 4,500 workers were on the payroll. That number dwindled after World War II as sweeteners like corn syrup captured market share. By the 1990s, only liquid sugar was being refined there.

There was also labor turbulence: A bitter strike from 1999 to 2001 ended in what even union leaders said was a loss. The 284 strikers began crossing the picket line after nine months, when their unemployment insurance ran out and they said the walkout was not making a difference. Domino was allowed to cut 110 jobs under the new contract. It closed the refinery in 2004.

To go from industrial relic to office building and event space in the now-popular Williamsburg neighborhood, the developers first had to deal with the gooey floor.

“Everything was sticky,” said Jed Walentas, the chief executive of Two Trees Management, which was instrumental in redeveloping the industrial neighborhood that became Dumbo. “It was funny to walk around and get it on your shoes.”

“Everything smelled like sugar,” he said, but the aroma was not all sweetness. “You could imagine a mixture of sugar molasses and urban decay all in one.”

There were also “some of the biggest raccoons you’ve ever seen, who were probably diabetic” but, he said, no rats. “The raccoons kept the rats away.”

Once the floor had been cleaned and the old machinery had been taken apart and hauled away, there was the matter of how to adapt the building. Two Trees, working with Practice for Architecture and Urbanism , kept the old outer brick shell — the “brick wrapper,” Walentas called it — and put a building-within-the-building inside.

In the 12-foot-gap between the old brick wall and the new office-building wall is a garden with 17 trees that had to be placed by a crane . And the old gas-burning manufacturing plant was turned into an all-electric site that Two Trees says will have net-zero carbon emissions. All of the wastewater from the office building will be treated and reused there as well.

Walentas said Two Trees would now begin leasing the office space. I asked if the project had benefited from timing — if the pandemic had made office space away from Midtown Manhattan more appealing.

“It’s not that Midtown is going out of business,” he said, “but that huge amounts of human capital have moved to Brooklyn and Queens. People want to live and work in the same communities, go home at lunch and see their young children.”

He also said that the adjacent 10 Grand Street building , completed shortly before the pandemic, had been fully leased in 2021. “If you wanted space in that building,” he said, “there is zero square feet.”

Weather

Enjoy a mostly sunny day and a break from the rain, with temps rising into the mid-60s. At night, it will be partly cloudy, with a low in the mid-50s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Saturday (Sukkot).

The latest Metro news

Local news

• Migrant court : A judge on Staten Island temporarily blocked the city from using a former school as an emergency shelter for migrants. The decision could have broader implications for the city’s long-established obligation to offer shelter to anyone who asks for it .

• Trump fraud ruling : A New York judge ruled that Donald Trump persistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets, and stripped the former president of control over some of his signature New York properties .

• The city’s sprawling private universities : As New York City’s budget tightens, its wealthiest universities, N.Y.U. and Columbia, are bigger and richer than ever. Some officials think it’s time for the two schools to pay more in taxes.

• Big bank settles : JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle claims that it facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation .

• Gallery exhibitions : Our list of 15 New York City gallery exhibitions that changed the city’s history and the culture at large begins with a show 80 years ago. Read more from The New York Times Style Magazine here.

• Lived lives : Phil Sellers, a brash, high-scoring forward who helped transform Rutgers University into a national basketball power in the 1970s, died on Sept. 19 at a hospital in Livingston, N.J. He was 69.

Booker joins Senate Democrats in calling for Menendez to resign

After Senator Robert Menendez was indicted last week, other New Jersey Democrats — notably Gov. Philip Murphy — said he should resign. Menendez’s colleagues in the Senate were largely silent.

That changed on Tuesday.

Senator Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey, issued a statement that said that the indictment contained “shocking allegations of corruption and specific, disturbing details of wrongdoing.” He called Menendez’s defiant refusal to step down “a mistake” after noting that he and Menendez had “a working relationship and a friendship that I value.” Booker testified as a character witness during Menendez’s corruption trial in 2017.

The chorus of Democrats calling for Menendez to leave the Senate included endangered incumbents like Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a state that Donald Trump won by more than 16 points in 2020. Tester said that Menendez needed to go “for the sake of the public’s faith in the U.S. Senate.” Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada, who opened her re-election bid by predicting that her race would decide control of the Senate, said that the charges against Menendez were a “distraction that undermines the bipartisan work we need to do.”

Menendez is expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan today, along with his wife and two of the businessmen who were indicted with them. The fifth defendant in the case, Wael Hana, an American Egyptian businessman who prosecutors say was the linchpin of the scheme to bribe Menendez, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday and was granted release on a $5 million personal recognizance bond.

My colleague Annie Karni writes that Democrats consider the fact that they were able to get all of their vulnerable senators to run for re-election in 2024 their biggest source of strength in their push to hold onto their slim majority. And it was those vulnerable Democrats who helped open the floodgates, with more than a dozen Democratic senators rushing to release statements calling for Mr. Menendez’s resignation ahead of their weekly lunch in the Capitol on Tuesday.

“No one is entitled to serve in the U.S. Senate, and he should step aside,” declared Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado.

“That’s a breach of that trust and a burden I believe will prevent him from fully serving,” said Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. “He should resign.”

The bond between Booker and Menendez has been strong since Booker arrived in the Senate a decade ago. Booker was one of the first co-sponsor s of a bill introduced by Menendez that called for tougher sanctions on Iran as punishment for its nuclear weapons program.

METROPOLITAN diary

Wandering

Dear Diary:

I was wandering through Greenwich Village on a spring day, admiring the brownstones as well as the daffodils that were beginning to emerge from the earth.

I noticed a man and a woman walking toward each other in opposite directions. As they got closer, I could tell from their glances that they were checking each other out.

They passed and continued on in their respective directions. Moments later, I saw the man look back over his shoulder for one more glimpse of the woman. Shortly after, the woman did the same.

They missed each other’s second glances by a matter of seconds, and to this day, I wonder what might have happened if they had looked back at the same time. I like to imagine that they now stroll through that neighborhood hand in hand, walking in the same direction.

— Amie Hammond

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here .

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee . You can find all our puzzles here .

Bernard Mokam and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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