The family takes turns taking the helm. Donald Trump Jr., the Republican billionaire’s first child to testify in his New York civil trial over massive financial fraud, assured the court on Wednesday that he had not delved into the financial documents at the center of the accusation.

The hearing of the eldest son of the former American president opened a parade of the family clan, which continues with Eric Trump, then Donald Trump himself and Ivanka Trump, who, however, appealed not to testify.

The executive vice president of the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr., 45, like his father and his younger brother Eric, is accused by the Attorney General of the State of New York, Letitia James, of inflating the figures to the tune of billions of dollars The group was expanded in the 2010s in order to obtain better loans from banks and more favorable insurance conditions.

Wearing a dark blue suit, light shirt and pink tie, Donald Trump Jr. confirmed his role at the helm of the Trump Organization, a host of companies that manage high-rise residential and office buildings, luxury hotels and golf courses around the world.

Who has held the reins of the group since Donald Trump entered the White House in January 2017, asked Attorney General Colleen Faherty? “A combination of me, my brother (Eric) and Allen Weisselberg,” the former finance director, who was sentenced to prison in 2022 for tax fraud, answered Donald Trump Jr. very relaxed.

“Leave my children”

However, he also presented himself as unfamiliar with accounting calculations. The eldest son is blamed by prosecutors for Donald Trump’s annual financial returns since 2016, a kind of photo of his assets at the center of the indictment, and said he trusted their accounting firm Mazars.

“I was not involved in the creation” of these documents, “the accountants worked on them, that’s what we pay them for,” he assured. Without convincing Attorney General Letitia James. “Trump Jr. has long been implicated in his family’s fraudulent business activities,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

The hearing was largely held in a cordial atmosphere, far from the vicious attacks that Trump, father and son, usually makes against the judiciary.

“Leave my children alone, Engoron. “You are a disgrace to the judicial profession,” Donald Trump Sr. posted overnight on his Truth Social social network, addressing Judge Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the trial and has already fined him $15,000 he was taken to his clerk.

Donald Trump, 77, is scheduled to be questioned on Monday, almost a year before the 2024 presidential election in which he hopes to return to the leadership of the United States. The defense asserts that the valuations of the group’s assets, such as Trump Tower and Wall Street Building 40, were subjective but honest and the banks lost nothing.

“Repeated scams”

But according to Michiel McCarty, head of the investment bank MM Dillon & Co., who spoke as an expert on Wednesday, lending banks like Deutsche Bank could have resorted to higher interest rates if the outlook was less rosy.

He examined four loans to finance projects around a golf course in Florida, two luxury hotels in Washington and Chicago and 40 Wall Street and estimated interest losses between 2014 and 2023 at $168 million. A calculation disputed by the defense.

Donald Trump was not in court on Wednesday. Since the beginning of the trial, as in the four other cases in which he is criminally charged, he has portrayed himself as the victim of a legal intrigue, particularly over an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

If he doesn’t risk prison time in this civil case, the case could result in him losing control of some of his real estate assets, in addition to a $250 million fine and a ban from running companies in New York.

Even before debates began on October 2, Judge Engoron estimated that the attorney general’s office had presented “conclusive evidence that the defendants overstated assets by “812 million (to) $2.2 billion,” depending on the year, between 2014 and 2021 .

Due to the “repeated fraud” he ordered the companies to be liquidated, a real legal blow, but his decision was stayed on appeal. The focus of the lawsuit is further violations of financial laws and the amount of the fine.

20 minutes with AFP

“On the second day of the war in Ukraine I went to the Russian embassy, ​​I felt that I had to go there and I said I was ready to go to Putin if it would be useful.” This was the intention by Pope Francis after the outbreak of the conflict. The Pope said this in the interview with the director of Tg1 Gian Marco Chiocci.

The war in Ukraine, what is there to know?

dossier – Traces of war

Live news from the Ukraine-Russia conflict

Important points

• 00:00

  Pope: “I wanted to go to Kiev and Moscow”

00:04

Estonia: “If we lose in Ukraine, we will lose in the Middle East”

“The fight against Russian aggression against Ukraine remains a priority for us. But there is also an ongoing war in the Middle East and we clearly see the connections between these two conflicts. If we lose in Ukraine, we will lose everywhere, including in the Middle East. Orient”. This was stated by Marko Mihkelson, President of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu), at the end of the meeting held today in Tallinn with a delegation consisting of representatives of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Commission of the Norwegian Parliament.

00:01

Speaker Johnson wants to separate aid to Israel from that to Kiev

New Republican Speaker Mike Johnson said the House would soon consider a new aid package for Ukraine, but it would have to be coupled with an increase in spending on border security with Mexico once it passes on May 14. Billion-dollar aid for Israel is approved. Johnson announced his intentions in a private meeting with Republican senators, to whom he also reported that the House of Representatives intended to pass a stopgap spending bill to fund the federal government through next year and avoid the shutdown on November 17th, when the current funds expire.

The new speaker, according to those in attendance, was in favor of aid to Ukraine, but has no intention of honoring the White House’s request to link funding for Kiev and that for Israel, along with increased spending on security at the southern border and other international crises.

00:00

Pope: “I wanted to go to Kiev and Moscow”

“On the second day of the war in Ukraine, I went to the Russian embassy, ​​I felt that I had to go there and I said I was ready to go to Putin if it would be useful.” This is what Pope Francis said in the interview with the director of Tg1, Gian Marco Chiocci. “The good ambassador, he’s ready now, an official from Russia. And from that moment on I had a good conversation with the Russian embassy. When I presented prisoners, I went there and they released them, they also released them from Azov. In short.” The embassy has done very well in releasing the people who were able to be released. But the dialogue ended there. At that moment, Lavrov wrote to me: “Thank you very much if you want to come, but it is not necessary. I wanted to go to both parts,” the Pope explained.

Like many Venezuelans who have left their country, illustrator Laura Guarisco (Caracas, 32 years old) has El Ávila, the protective hill of the capital of Venezuela, tattooed in her memory. Also on the skin, as a design was created using this silhouette on his left arm. “This will be the madness of the people of Caracas with El Ávila,” she says with a smile as she demonstrates it. He is accompanied by another tattoo on his right arm. A drawing of the “migratory warbler,” the bird he uses as an analogy in Nido (Planeta Cómic), the moving graphic novel he just published about the Venezuelan diaspora that has spread to neighboring Colombia and the rest of Latin America.

From the burgundy T-shirt to the suitcase in the colors of the flag that so many Venezuelans carry, the full nostalgic burden of migration is present in Nido’s vignettes. A comic that depicts the journey of those travelers who crossed moors and mountains by bus, on foot or hitchhiking to settle in a Colombian city in search of opportunities.

Illustrations from the book “Nido” (Planeta, 2023) by Laura Guarisco.Laura Guarisco

“The story wanted to connect to the emotional part,” to create a collective memory of a wound that many Venezuelans carry, says Guarisco, an architect and illustrator who lives in Medellín, on the terrace of a cafe on Avenida Jiménez in the historic center of Bogotá, on the slopes of Monserrate Hill, which fades in front of El Ávila. She does this on the sidelines of the Entreviñetas Festival, a space dedicated to comics and related arts, which led her to visit the Colombian capital last month.

The book begins with a birdwatching scene that introduces Ángel, the protagonist who, amidst vicissitudes, has crossed the border to settle in Medellín, like the author herself. He does so, driven by scarcity, hyperinflation and the violent suppression of protests in Caracas against Nicolás Maduro’s regime, a real event merging with fictional fiction. In the drawings you can almost hear the sound of suitcase wheels, which has become the soundtrack of the binational bridges between Cúcuta and the Venezuelan state of Táchira, the bottleneck of one of the largest migrant flows in the world. .

Illustrations from the book “Nido” (Planeta, 2023) by Laura Guarisco.Laura Guarisco

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More than seven million people have left Venezuela in successive waves, driven by the political, social and economic crisis. Although they have spread across the continent, Colombia is by far the main receiving country. Official figures – as of October 2022 – show that 2.9 million Venezuelans live on this side of the border, the vast majority intending to stay. Of these, almost 240,000 are in Medellín.

Every migrant carries his or her own story. Guarisco decided to leave Venezuela in 2016. “I was working in an architectural firm at the time, but there was a lot of inflation; One of the main reasons was that I no longer had enough money for many things,” he says. “Many had already left the country, I ran out of friends in the city I was living in and started looking for job opportunities in Colombia,” he remembers. His mother was born in Barranquilla, so he received dual citizenship and first arrived in the Atlantic capital, where he still has relatives. There he worked as a draftsman on architectural projects and later moved to Medellín.

Illustrations from the book “Nido” (Planeta, 2023) by Laura Guarisco.Laura Guarisco

Although he draws them in great detail in Nido, he never crossed the bridges connecting Táchira to Norte de Santander – although he did cross the border via Maicao further north in La Guajira when it was impossible to get plane tickets. “I was very shocked when I saw all these people crossing the bridge on the news, I put myself in their shoes. It touched me a lot to sometimes see whole families crossing with their suitcases, and also the stories of my friends. Many of my activities in Medellín crossed the border into Colombia.” He collected photographic information, watched documentaries, broadcast what he observed in Maicao, and also made the entire route on Google Street View to capture it in a story, which is captivating from start to finish.

–Are you aiming to create an archetypal character of the diaspora?

–I wanted to create a character that looked very Venezuelan. And in reality, they are parts of my Venezuelan friends. The stories I saw and heard, the stories that people close and not so close to me told, ultimately led me to Ángel when I wanted to draw him. I always imagined a male character because I wanted to tell the story of the demonstrations. When I went to marches, I was very shocked to see very young men who stayed until the end. Physically, it led to small friendships. Ultimately, all the stories that appear in Ángel happened to many of us. We all suffer directly or indirectly from water shortages, water shortages and marches. all these demonstrations or the deaths.

–Greek writer Theodor Kallifatides says that emigrating means distancing yourself from yourself. How do you deal with this distance from Venezuela?

– It is true that you move away from the person you were, but you also move closer to a completely new person who you do not know what he is like. And in the end a new person emerges. The experience with Venezuela was very painful at the beginning. Leaving the country of your own accord to study, learn about a new culture, or sightsee is not the same as having to leave the country because you have no other choice. You are forced to leave and leave behind family, friends, places, or who you were. It’s a kind of sadness. Drawing helped me bring out all of these emotions and be able to face them, put them on paper and look at them from the outside. My relationship with Venezuela is a little more peaceful. I have healed many things. I can now talk about Venezuela in peace, I’m back. I feel like I’m from both places because you can’t be from just any place. One of them is the places where it exists temporarily or permanently. You also need to take responsibility for where you live.

–Do you already consider Medellín your home?

-Yes. In addition, Medellín was a city that brought me back to comics, to find the spaces that helped me continue working on what I wanted to be. Even as a child, I always wanted to make comics. It also looks very similar to Caracas, it reminds me of my hometown. I found wonderful people who paved the way for me. That’s why I like him a lot. It’s been almost seven years now, I feel like I’m from Medellín, although they always ask me where I’m from when they hear my accent.

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