A New York judge denied former President Donald Trump’s request to move the fraud lawsuit facing him and the Trump Organization, worsening what legal experts defined as a string of trying days for Trump in court.
The ruling Wednesday by Administrative Judge Adam Silvera of the New York County Supreme Court-Civil Term leaves the suit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James in the hands of New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who previously ruled to hold Trump in contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena earlier in the case.
Trump had requested that the lawsuit be moved to the court’s Commercial Division in Manhattan, according to a report from Bloomberg, but Silvera determined the case was appropriately assigned to Engoron, who presided over a long discovery clash between Trump and James.
Trump’s loss in court came on the same day he was scheduled to appear at a deposition hearing for a defamation case filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a former advice columnist who alleges Trump raped her at a New York department store in the 1990s.
Trump took another blow Wednesday in the investigation of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, after a California judge ruled attorney John Eastman had to turn over multiple documents to the House committee investigating the attack. The documents include emails purportedly showing Trump had known that claims of election fraud were false while he continued to push them in court, reported Politico.
Legal analyst for MSNBC Lisa Rubin tweeted about the denial of Trump’s request in the fraud lawsuit, writing, “between this ruling, today’s deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case, and a [California] court’s holding that yet more John Eastman communications are evidence of Trump’s crimes … this is another ‘not good’ legal day for Trump.”
Law professor at Georgia State University Anthony Kreis also tweeted about the news of the Eastman emails. In his post, which included screenshots of the judge’s opinion from Wednesday, Kreis wrote that while Trump’s legal team had alleged voter fraud in a Georgia state court, the emails set to be released would prove that Trump’s team knew the allegations “were wrong and overstated.”
“The key question here was always whether the former president was aware and knew that there was no evidence of massive fraud that questioned the outcome of the election when he made a demand to ‘find’ votes,” Kreis said in a following tweet. “This makes an innocent construction of that request less plausible.”
Noah Bookbinder, president of watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, tweeted on Wednesday that the recent legal troubles for Trump prove “more and more” that the former president “cannot run from accountability in the legal system.
“Given the lawsuits against him and the number of credible criminal allegations against him, this is cause for cautious but real optimism,” Bookbinder wrote.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s press team for comment.