Trump lashes out at financial monitor in business fraud case after she reports errors

Donald Trump on Monday lashed out at the financial monitor overseeing the Trump Organization and urged a judge to fire her days after she reported a range of issues — and flagged a questionable $48 million loan — in the former president’s New York civil business fraud case.

The independent monitor, Barbara Jones, “desperately seeks to justify the continued receipt of millions of dollars in fees going forward,” an attorney for Trump wrote in a letter to Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron.

The attorney, Clifford Robert, said Jones has collected more than $2.6 million in 14 months on the job. New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked Engoron to order that Jones continue to monitor the Trump Organization for at least five years as part of his judgment in the case.

But Robert wrote that Jones’ findings “simply do not support or provide any evidentiary basis for continued oversight.”

Robert made that argument three days after Jones submitted a report to Engoron accusing the Trump Organization of providing incomplete, inconsistent or incorrect information about its financial disclosures.

In a footnote in that report, Jones said she identified a loan between Trump himself and an entity related to Trump Chicago Tower that later turned out not to exist. She was told that the loan was believed to total $48 million, but that there are no agreements memorializing it.

“However, in recent discussions with the Trump Organization, it indicated that it has determined that this loan never existed” and that it would be removed from subsequent forms, Jones wrote.

Robert called that “a demonstrable falsehood” in his letter Monday.

“The Trump entities of course never said the loan did not exist,” he wrote. “Rather, they provided a copy of an internal memorandum reflecting simply that ‘no liabilities or obligations are outstanding’ under the loan at…