Trump Pleads The Fifth 440 Times To Demonstrate He Has Nothing To Hide
NEW YORK. Former President Donald Trump arrived at the Manhattan offices of Attorney General Letitia James on August 10, 2022, sat for a deposition lasting roughly four hours, and successfully answered exactly one question, which concerned the correct spelling of his name. To each of the remaining inquiries, more than 440 in total, the former president invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, a constitutional safeguard he exercised with the tireless consistency of a man determined to prove he had absolutely nothing to hide.
The performance marked a notable evolution in the former president's legal philosophy. In September 2016, addressing a campaign rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Trump had offered the electorate a tidy framework for interpreting such silences. "You see the mob takes the Fifth," he explained at the time. "If you're innocent why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?" Six years later, having apparently completed additional study on the subject, Trump answered that very question more than 440 separate times, each time by declining to answer anything else.
The inquiries Trump elected not to address concerned the valuations the Trump Organization had assigned to its assets, among them its golf clubs, the documents he had personally signed in connection with various mortgages and loans, and the reported size of his own Manhattan apartment, a figure his company had at one point listed at nearly three times its actual square footage. Investigators, who were examining whether the company had inflated the worth of its holdings to secure favorable terms from lenders and insurers, received in response a sustained, four-hour demonstration of the right to remain silent.
Before the silence commenced, Trump read aloud a written statement. He described the investigation as "the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country," accused James of "openly campaigning on a policy of destroying me," and explained that he had concluded he had "absolutely no choice" but to plead the Fifth following the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago residence two days earlier, "because the current Administration and many prosecutors in this Country have lost all moral and ethical bounds of decency." The statement was, by a wide margin, the most complete answer he would provide all day.
Legal observers noted that the Fifth Amendment is a foundational protection available to every American, guilty or innocent alike, and that invoking it carries no admission of wrongdoing in a criminal court. They further observed that James's matter was a civil proceeding, in which a jury is permitted to draw an adverse inference from a witness's refusal to testify, meaning the former president's 440 invocations could lawfully be interpreted in precisely the manner he had spent 2016 instructing the public to interpret them. James filed a sweeping civil fraud suit against Trump, his company, and three of his adult children the following month.
At press time, sources within the former president's orbit reported that Trump remained confident the strategy had established his complete innocence, on the grounds that a truly guilty man would surely have answered at least two questions.