A politicized, grossly unfair lawsuit against Trump
Byron York
A POLITICIZED, GROSSLY UNFAIR LAWSUIT AGAINST TRUMP. Former President Donald Trump testified Monday at the trial of the lawsuit, filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging that Trump inflated the values of his real estate properties to receive lower interest rates on loans. It’s important to note that Trump has already lost the case. The judge, Arthur Engoron, weeks ago pronounced Trump guilty of the actions alleged, and what is going on now in court is the penalty phase, in which Engoron will decide whether to confiscate Trump’s business empire.
The punishment will be extraordinary and unprecedented. This is how Axios has described it: “Former President Donald Trump is at risk of losing the New York real estate empire that the rest of his career was built on. Forcibly dismantling Trump’s company is so unusual that no one is quite certain how it would play out.”
Engoron could decide to cancel the business certificates of all of Trump’s companies. “If the business certificates were canceled,” Axios continued, “the relevant assets — which include Trump Tower, Trump Park Avenue, 40 Wall Street, and Trump National Golf Course Hudson Valley — would be put under the control of a court-appointed receiver, who operates much like an executor of an estate. The receiver would continue to manage the properties, but also could be allowed by the court to sell some — particularly if cash was needed to pay off legal penalties or creditors. Trump, who views himself as a consummate dealmaker, would not be at the negotiating table.”
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That is a punishment so out of line with the behavior alleged in this case that it boggles the mind. It is made possible by two factors: a bad law and a hyperpoliticized attorney general. On the bad law, New York’s Executive Law 65(12), the former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote: “The law doesn’t require a showing of harm. The state need not prove the defendant even intended to defraud anyone, much less actually defrauded someone. It need not be established that any creditor or financial institution even relied on the defendant’s misrepresentations, that those misrepresentations were material, or that anyone was actually fooled by them.” There need be no victim — after all, in this case, no bank or financial institution is suing Trump for cheating them, nor does there need to be any crime involved — in fact, prosecutors looked at the same evidence and declined to charge Trump.
All there needs to be is a partisan and determined prosecutor. And that is Letitia James. James was elected attorney general of New York in 2018 on a campaign promise to go after Trump. Trump’s defenders have put together a video of snippets of James’s speeches and public appearances in which she vowed to bring Trump down. The video begins with James saying, “The president of the United States has complained that I’m engaging in some sort of political witch hunt, that I’ve got some personal vendetta against him, that I campaigned against him. That is not true.” And then the video cuts to a bunch of James’s speeches that prove she did all of that. Here are her quotes:
“This illegitimate president who sits in the White House. … He’s not my president. He’s an illegitimate president. His days are numbered. His days are numbered. … We’ve got to be ready to mobilize, and we’ve got to get ready to agitate and irritate until victory is won or, more importantly, until Trump is defeated. … We will all rise up and resist this man … and ultimately we’ll bring him down. … Illegitimate president. … I’m going to give you [Trump] the same level of respect that you gave President Obama, and that is absolutely no respect at all. … Donald Trump has got to go. Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Donald Trump has got to go. … The days of Trump are numbered.”
The video ends with James doing a call-and-response with a crowd. “Lock him up!” the crowd yells. “What?” James says. “Lock him up!” “What?” James says again. “Lock him up!” And so on.
Put it all together, and James’s vendetta against Trump, enabled by a happily willing Engoron, is a deeply troubling event. “I could find no case anywhere like this,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said recently on Fox News. “A lot of people wouldn’t object if the attorney general was seeking some fine because there were inflated numbers. You know, inflated numbers in the real estate business in New York are a ubiquitous problem. And if you want to fine him, fine. But [James] is going for total annihilation. She is asking to take this iconic figure and effectively ban him from business in New York. And the question is why? The answer is because that’s what she promised to do. To seek his utter destruction if she can.”
Any reasonable observer would find the entire exercise grossly unfair. Yes, there are lots of prosecutions and legal actions against Trump now. But judge each on its own merits or lack of merits. This one is a disaster.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on Radio America and the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found.