This is on the Media's midweek podcast, I'm Michael Lohinger, another week, another Donald Trump case.

For me, US President Donald Trump has returned to court in New York for the second day of a multi-million dollar civil fraud trial.

Trump, his two sons and the Trump organization are accused of using false financial statements and inflating their net worth by billions of dollars.

In addition to this civil case, Trump is facing four criminal indictments.

The January 6th insurrection case in DC, the Stormy Daniels hush money case in New York, the classified documents case in Florida and the political interference case in Georgia.

It's a lot to keep track of, but for now at least, all eyes are on the downtown Manhattan courtroom.

Because if New York State Attorney General Latisha James is successful, this civil trial could result in Trump losing control of his businesses and his most valuable assets like Trump Tower.

Russ Butiner is a reporter on the New York Times investigation desk, the team that hunted down Trump's tax returns and other elusive financial documents.

I called Russ to learn about what Trump's history of fraud means for his future, the revelations of the trial so far, and what details have gotten lost in the deluge of coverage.

Before even the trial began, the judge decided that he had seen enough in the motion practice and the testimony to come before him and written for him to determine that the Trump's committed persistent and repeated fraud

during the course of this period of time that's covered that sort of burden of proof had been met and that.

So there is fraud that's settled. What exactly then will they be determining at the trial?

The big part of it will be determining the damages that will have to be paid. The Attorney General has asked for fines estimated to be at $250 million.

Could be more could be less to try to determine the financial benefit that went to the Trump organization and the Trump family in committing these frauds that they alleging that case.

Can you give an example of like one of the properties and the particular maneuvers that Trump and his organization allegedly went through to exaggerate its value?

One that's very clear is what he did to value his residence in Trump tower. He has a large apartment there.

He took a very optimistic per square foot rate saying his apartment was 30,000 square feet. Well, in actuality his apartment is 10,000 square feet.

So he just inflated it by three times.

How did he think he was going to get away with that? That's just such an outrageous lie.

It is outrageous and it's so obvious on the face. Even his defense attorney in the course of the pre-trial hearings acknowledged they had no defense for that. That was not a right thing to do.

This is all really important because he's trying to get the banks in a lot of cases to give him these loans on a personal guarantee. Just saying I'm Donald Trump, I'm rich, I'm good for the money.

And this is interesting because in public his defense is that no one was harmed by this. As it turns out in New York, the question of financial harm doesn't really factor into this type of culpability. Is that right?

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