Donald Trump's lawyers rested their case in the former president's civil fraud trial, as New York Attorney General Letitia James watched from the gallery.

Defense attorneys undertook several "housekeeping items" before concluding their case, including adding expert reports to the trial record "for appellate purposes."

"You're going to appeal," Judge Engoron deadpanned before breaking into laughter.

Both parties were argumentative until the end, squabbling over minor issues that threatened to draw out the defense's case.

"We don't want additional time, we want the case to end," said state attorney Kevin Wallace.

With all housekeeping finished, Trump attorney Chris Kise announced, "We do rest." He then made the defense's fifth motion for a directed verdict to end the case, saying he planned to submit a written motion on Friday.

"There is no way I am going to grant that," Judge Engoron responded. "You'd be wasting your time."

Wallace criticized Kise's plan to submit a written motion as "silly" and a "colossal waste of resources."

"We have already won on summary judgment," Wallace said in reference to Engoron's pretrial ruling. "I don't know what we are pretending is happening here."

New York Attorney General Letitia James is attending the afternoon session of Donald Trump's civil fraud trial.

Sitting in the gallery with her staff, James briefly walked into Judge Engoron's chambers before the trial resumed following the midday break.

Trump's legal spokesperson, Alina Habba, was also spotted entering the judge's chambers for a separate meeting.

Court then resumed with defense attorneys conducting their redirect examination of accounting expert Eli Bartov.

Bartov is expected to be the defense's last witness before they rest their case, which will likely be followed by a brief rebuttal case by the state.

In an effort to discredit the defense's accounting expert, state attorney Louis Solomon highlighted that Eli Bartov's testimony was rejected by a judge when he testified as an expert for the New York attorney general in her trial against Exxon Mobil in 2019.

The judge in that case wrote in his ruling that Bartov's testimony during that trial was "unpersuasive" and was "flatly contradicted by the weight of the evidence," according to Solomon's reading of the ruling in court.

Bartov said he was unaware of the ruling, and defense attorney Chris Kise objected to the line of questioning as irrelevant.

Bartov largely stuck to his initial testimony during two hours of cross-examination this morning, defending his overall finding while acknowledging his analysis found that Trump's statements included some marginal overstatements that "did not impact significantly Deutsche Bank's decision to extend loans."

While Bartov agreed that, in the real estate business, "price gets set first, then valuation follows" he said he saw no evidence to support the attorney general's allegation that Trump's statements were reverse engineered to provide support for the values determined by Trump and his executives.

"Do you know if they were reverse engineered?" Solomon asked.

"I have no knowledge of that," Bartov responded.

Present in the courtroom for Bartov's testimony was Eric Trump, who made a surprise appearance in the gallery. Like his father, Eric Trump initially planned to take the stand during the defense's case, but canceled his testimony.

In a social media post this morning, Donald Trump claimed he "wanted to testify on Monday" but blamed his decision not to testify on the trial's limited gag order, which prohibits Trump from commenting on Judge Engoron's staff.

When Trump on Sunday pulled out of his testimony, he touted the strength of his evidence and previous testimony as the reasons he decided not to take the stand.

"Anyway, the Judge, Arthur Engoron, put a GAG ORDER on me, even when I testify, totally taking away my constitutional right to defend myself. We are appealing, but how would you like to be a witness and not be allowed free snd [sic] honest speech," Trump wrote today.

In a statement to ABC News on Monday, Trump attorney Chris Kise also partially blamed the limited gag order for his client's decision not to testify.

"There is really nothing more to say to a Judge who has imposed an unconstitutional gag order and thus far appears to have ignored President Trump's testimony and that of everyone else involved in the complex financial transactions at issue in the case," Kise said.

In a court filing last week, Engoron's attorney wrote that the limited gag order "does not prevent statements about Justice Engoron himself, not the Attorney General or her staff, not the substance of the claims and allegations against petitioners, not the facts or evidence or witness testimony, not the judicial process, nor any other topic concerning the underlying action."

-Peter Charalambous and Soo Rin Kim

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.