Defense attorney Jesus Suarez spent the first hour of court walking former Deutsche Bank executive Nicholas Haigh through a year-by-year review of the bank's credit reports about Trump's loans.

Under questioning, Haigh has acknowledged that Deutsche Bank's analysis supported approving Trump's loans.

At the same time, Suarez' approach is testing Judge Arthur Engoron's patience.

"We can all read, so I don't know why we are spending so much time on this," Engoron said at one point, describing the testimony as "redundant" and "obvious."

Engoron also criticized Suarez for appearing to highlight the fact that Trump never defaulted on the loans themselves -- an issue that is uncontested by both sides in the case.

As the trial's eighth eighth day gets underway, New York Attorney General Letitia James is absent from court for a second day.

While James attended the first six days of the trial, she did not appear at the proceedings yesterday.

Roughly a dozen lawyers and staff from the New York attorney general's office have been attending the trial each day.

Trump attorney Jesus Suarez will continue his cross examination of former Deutsche Bank risk management executive Nicholas Haigh when Trump's civil trial resumes this morning.

Deutsche Bank was the Trump Organization's largest single lender between 2011 and 2022, loaning the former president upwards of $300 million through the bank's private wealth management division.

Describing himself as an "ultimate decider" of the loans' riskiness, Haigh testified Wednesday that his decision-making process relied on Trump's financial statements -- documents that the New York attorney general alleges were fraudulent.

"I assumed that the representations of the assets and liabilities were broadly accurate," Haigh said yesterday.

Earlier witnesses have testified about how Trump's financial documents were drafted, finalized, and sent to banks -- but Haigh is the first witness to testify from the perspective of the banks, which the attorney general says were allegedly deceived by Trump's inflated financial statements.

Suarez, during his first hour cross examining Haigh on Wednesday, said Deutsche Bank was a sophisticated company that profited from the loans.

Haigh also acknowledged that the bank failed to conduct its own independent appraisals of Trump's top properties, and did not rigorously examine his financial information.

Deutsche Bank was a serious company in business with Donald Trump to make money, defense attorney Jesus Suarez said during his cross examination of former Deutsche Bank executive Nicholas Haigh.

At the height of its relationship with the Trump Organization the company loaned Trump over $378 million, and failed to commission independent appraisals of Trump's properties, Haigh acknowledged. While the bank listed lower estimates for the value of Trump's assets year after year, it continued to do business with Trump and his company.

"We ... the bank hadn't done all the due diligence one would do in the sense of the opinion of value you see in an appraisal," Haigh said, at one point agreeing with the defense's characterization that the bank's internal value services group conducted "sanity checks'' on the numbers.

The direct examination of Haigh by state attorney Kevin Wallace also left a central question about Deutsche Bank's activity unanswered.

In a letter to the court and in previous arguments, lawyers for the attorney general suggested that Haigh might have turned away Trump's business if he had known that Trump's assets were inflated in value.

"As this Court noted during summary judgment arguments, Mr. Haigh testified during OAG's investigation that he may not have authorized lending to the borrower if he had at that time been aware of the inflated asset values contained in Mr. Trump's SFCs [statements of financial condition]," a lawyer for the attorney general wrote to the court in a letter last week.

Wallace never directly posed the hypothetical to Haigh during his direct examination, leaving the question unresolved.

Court subsequently adjourned for the day, with Suarez telling the court he plans to continue his cross examination of Haigh through Thursday afternoon.

Defense attorney Alina Habba's cross-examination of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen featured frequent objections, cross talk and nonresponsive or argumentative answers that often breached customary courtroom decorum.

"You didn't ask me a yes-or-no question," Cohen scolded Habba at one point. "Yes I did," Habba shot back.

Cohen at times resisted answering questions, either objecting to them or insisting he did not understand them, while Habba paced the floor, blaring her questions into a hand-held microphone as Trump observed from the defense table.

"President Trump makes you relevant," Habba chastised Cohen. "If you didn't work for President Trump you wouldn't make most of your income today."

Cohen eventually conceded that he makes his living because of his prior relationship with Trump.

"Outside of your two podcasts, your merchandise and your books, is there any other form of income in your life?" Habba asked. "No," Cohen answered.

Habba's cross-examination concluded with a pointed question meant to question Cohen's motive for cooperating with the attorney general's investigation.

"Did you ever ask President Trump to pardon you while he was in the White House?" Habba asked.

"No," Cohen said.

"And he didn't pardon you?" she asked.

"No," Cohen replied.