NEW YORK >> Bankers whom Donald Trump is accused of defrauding testified at his civil fraud trial this week that they did not rely on his embellished claims of wealth, lending support to the central plank of the former president’s defense.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued Trump in 2022 for inflating his net worth on his annual financial statements to receive favorable loans from banks, notably including Deutsche Bank. Before the trial, the judge found that the statements were filled with examples of fraud; the trial will determine any consequences the former president might face.

Trump has protested the premise of the case, insisting that the banks did their own due diligence and that misstatements in the financial documents would not have affected the overall terms of the loans. It follows, his lawyers have argued, that the alleged fraud had no victim.

The bankers who testified this week supported that argument when asked about the loan process.

“We are expected to conduct some due diligence and verify the information provided, to the extent that is possible,” David Williams, a banker in the wealth management group at Deutsche Bank, said Tuesday. He said repeatedly that the bank had performed that diligence and factored its own analysis into the relationship with Trump.

The attorney general has said that the bankers’ having done their own due diligence is not a defense. Her lawyers argued that to obtain the pretrial ruling, they were not required to show that the fraud had harmed the banks and that Trump’s exaggerations had been so hyperbolic that they would be “material to any user” of the financial statements.

But Williams testified that Deutsche Bank understood that financial statements like those Trump submitted relied on estimates. As a result, he said, the bank conducted its own “stress test” and adjusted the numbers downward.

At one point in their lending relationship, Williams said, Deutsche Bank adjusted Trump’s net worth to $2.6 billion from the $4.9 billion that he had originally reported. Asked about his reaction to the “magnitude” of that adjustment, Williams was sanguine.

“My reaction was probably pretty measured, considering it’s not unusual or atypical for any client’s provided financial statements to be adjusted to this level, or to this extent,” he said.

Williams’ testimony and that of his former Deutsche Bank colleague Rosemary Vrablic, who oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Trump before she resigned in 2021, will most likely be key to any appeal that is filed by Trump’s lawyers after the trial.