Donald Trump’s lawyers in his New York trial are wondering: Do you hear the people sing?

Clifford Robert, an attorney representing Trump and his family, wrote in a court filing that the court-appointed monitor overseeing the embattled Trump Organization is a “Javert” figure – a reference to the main antagonist in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables and the musical it inspired – looking to maintain power over Trump and his company.

“Further oversight is unwarranted and will only just enrich the monitor as she engages in some ‘Javert’ like quest against defendants,” Robert wrote, suggesting that Trump and his family were akin to the novel’s protagonist, Jean Valjean, who was arrested for stealing bread to feed his starving family.

Robert was responding to a letter from the former judge Barbara Jones to Arthur Engoron, the judge overseeing Trump’s fraud trial. Engoron in November 2022 appointed Jones to be the court-appointed monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s financial reports. Prosecutors had requested a monitor over concerns that Trump would try to restructure his business outside of New York without one.

In her letter, Jones told Engoron that while the Trump Organization was “cooperative”, Trump’s financial information contained multiple “deficiencies”, including incomplete or inconsistent reports that contain errors.

“Information required to be submitted to me … has, at times, been lacking in completeness and timeliness,” Jones wrote. She has been working with the Trump Organization, which has “agreed to modify the disclosures or implement processes that improve accuracy”.

Jones noted that she is “not in a position to conclude whether fraudulent activity occurred” but warned that “absent steps to address the items above, my observations suggest misstatements and errors may continue to occur, which could result in incorrect or inaccurate reporting of financial information to third parties”.

On Monday, Robert hit back with a response from Trump’s team accusing Jones of the “unabashedly self-serving statement”.

The letter “is an obvious, and bad faith, effort to manipulate innocuous accounting items into a narrative favoring her continued receipt of millions in excessive fees,” Robert wrote.

In September, Engoron ruled Trump guilty of fraud and ordered, pending an appellate court decision, the removal of his New York business licenses. The trial is a bench trial, meaning there is no jury, and Engoron is the sole decider of the case.

Engoron is expected to rule on the fraud trial, particularly how much Trump will owe out of the $370m he was sued for, by 31 January.