Amid tumultuous week, Trump takes the Fifth

… on Wednesday morning, Trump arrived at a Manhattan office building to be deposed in James’s investigation of his business dealings. While the case is civil rather than criminal, any information he provided in such a deposition could be used in some of the criminal investigations surrounding him.

Donald Trump spent hours in a deposition Wednesday with the New York attorney general and repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions, the latest in a series of ominous legal developments that would have once been considered devastating for a former president considering another run for the White House.

Trump emerged from the question-and-non-answer session with praise for the “very professional” way Attorney General Letitia James’s team handled the meeting, in which he refused more than 400 times to answer questions about his businesses, property valuations and loans, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion. This person, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed session, said Trump stated his name, formally declared his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, and from then on replied to many questions with two words: “Same answer.”

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