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So, my debut post. I've been lurking here for some time and I have decided to experiment with some public posting.
The culture war issue on my mind is the federal prosecution of NY State AG Letitia James. A summary, from my perspective:
She more or less campaigned for office with "Get Trump!" as one of her campaign promises.
Upon taking office, she and her team went through some of Trump's deals for the purpose of looking for grounds to pursue a claim against him.
She and her team discovered that in one of his real estate deals, he had supplied arguably exaggerated figures for property he had used as collateral for a loan.
The State of New York sued Trump in the general trial court making use of a consumer fraud statute which, until then, had been mainly used against businesses that take advantage of individual consumers (i.e. not deals between sophisticated businesses). This consumer fraud statute did not require proof of damages, which was helpful to the AG's efforts since Trump and his organization had paid the loan back in full and with interest.
The trial court awarded a judgment against Trump for hundreds of millions of dollars, a judgment which was later reversed on appeal.
This lawsuit had been one of numerous other "Get Trump!" legal activities, civil and criminal, in multiple jurisdictions.
After Trump was re-elected, a Trump loyalist with access to federal home loan files went through Letitia James' files and discovered arguable fraudulent statements in her mortgage applications for certain properties. Letitia James was referred for possible prosecution and ultimately indicted for bank fraud.
Normally in situations like this, the mortgage applicant is not prosecuted. Rather, they are required to pay the higher interest rates which would would have been required had the application been completed accurately.
Personally, my reaction to this series of events is one of satisfaction. I was outraged by the lawfare campaign against Trump and it seemed to me that AG James activities were an abuse of her office. The prosecution of James strikes me as a reasonable tit-for-tat, necessary to deter the Blue Tribe from future abuses. The most charitable interpretation I can think of with respect to these lawsuits is that they are a form of "Nazi punching," i.e. the idea that if you are dealing with genocidal psychopaths, it's reasonable to oppose them By Any Means Necessary. But of course, as others have pointed out here, when you combine (1) it's okay to punch Nazis; and (2) my out-group are, generally speaking, led by Nazis, the net result falls somewhere between "counterproductive" and "civil war."
What's also interesting to me is that for the most part, the media coverage has downplayed points 1-6 from above even to the extent of completely ignoring them in certain cases, giving the impression that Trump is just gratuitously using the justice system to target his political enemies. (Yes, this is the "boo outgroup" part of my post.)
So this brings me to my main question: What will happen next? Given that the Blue Tribe members (apparently) feel that they are the victims of a vicious unprovoked lawfare attack, will they decide to retaliate at the next opportunity? Are we about to enter an era where every outgoing president preemptively pardons himself and all of his associates; conservative businessmen with political aspirations avoid contact with New York and California; and liberal businessmen similarly avoid Florida and Texas? Probably this is an exaggeration, but I would guess that the Blue Tribe is thirsty for revenge and I could easily see this lawfare business escalating.
A secondary question: Perhaps, much like the mainstream media, I am omitting important context from my summary. Are there additional facts I should consider which would (or should) change the way I see this lawfare business? In one article I read (I think it was the New York Times) the point was made that the fraud alleged against Trump was much bigger than that alleged against Letitia James. But to me, this does not seem like an important distinction because the key similarity is that in both cases, it seems that the authorities chose a target for political reasons and then went looking for arguable wrongdoing by that person. (As opposed to starting with the wrongdoing and then looking to see who was responsible.)
It's a bad precedent, but it isn't Trump's precedent. Turnabout is fair play and so far nothing I've seen from Trump rises to the level of what his enemies have already done to him personally.
Yeah, I remember that during his first campaign, he made a suggestion/promise that if he was elected, Hillary Clinton would be prosecuted. At the time, I was a little disappointed that he didn't follow through. But now I see that was the correct move, even assuming for the sake of argument that Hillary Clinton had some skeletons in her closet (which is probably a pretty good assumption).
It's just not good to have a situation where each party, upon getting into power, starts prosecuting the leadership of the other party. It's better for the country as a whole to let politicians get away with crimes than to have this kind of back and forth.
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I think one thing that could prove true is that, after some soul-searching, liberals will realize the legal pursuits against Trump emboldened his movement and gave it the life it needed for his re-election.
For the longest time, Trump claimed that everyone was out to get him and that he was being persecuted. Even after the impeachments and January 6, I never really bought it. Mitch McConnell said that “former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one” (criminal justice system or civil litigation). Biden’s DOJ had the only legitimate path for ‘lawfare’ and totally blew it. They had their big chance for like a year. He was dead in the water in 2022, paying something like $100 million a month in legal bills.
Then the civil suits and various trials all popped up within a year of the election and felt pretty hand-wavy. Even his felony conviction was unprecedented in legal theory, breaking federal election law at the state level by paying Stormy Daniels. Then his company gets put under conservatorship and every other day you’d hear about a 500 million dollar judgement. If not for winning the election, he’d have serious legal troubles to this day.
I was upset enough on the day of his indictment that I—along with a lot of others—contributed to his campaign. I believe Kamala has said something to the effect that some of this was counterproductive.
While there will never be another president quite like Trump, I have to believe they now understand how it all looked. For all the talk about Trump breaking norms, it’s got to be cognitive dissonance to (1) think “lock her up” in 2016 was a dangerous remark, and then (2) nine years later, campaign on throwing the former president in jail for whatever you can get him on.
I think it’ll be a live and let live thing. They tried this gambit and it did NOT work. It did not poll well for Kamala to say over and over how dangerous he was and laud her time as a prosecutor.
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Given that both sides eventually control the government and my assumption that mortgage fraud if this sort is endemic to the system, I suspect this specific method will come back to bite hard. There's a lot of low level functionaries on both sides who aren't paid well enough to not need mortgages. I highly doubt either side has checked finances to this level. This seems like it has substantial leopards ate my face potential.
This is why Letitia James must not only be brought down, but brought down in a sufficiently public and humiliating manner that her supporters and enablers internalize the lesson that running for AG on a platform of "screw the opposition" is going to blow back on you.
Same with Jay Jones of Virginia. A platform of "I want the opposition to die" is even worse.
I share @gattsuru's opinion on that one.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3359/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/381521?context=8#context
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The critical point you are ignoring is that Trump was guilty, but James appears to be innocent. The behaviour she has been indicted for is applying for a mortgage on the basis that the house on Peronne Avenue would be a secondary residence when she was in fact intending to rent it out. James claims that she allowed a family member to live in the house in exchange for a small contribution to utilities and maintenance, and that she accurately described her plans to the bank. If James is telling the truth, then no crime. The evidence that would allow me to determine who is telling the truth here is not public, but we do know that the career AUSAs assigned to prosecute the case declined to do so, and that the Trump-appointed US Attorney resigned rather than overruling them.
AFAIK, no President of the United States has previously ordered the malicious prosecution of someone they should have known was innocent.
As an entirely separate point, this is a problem. Primary residence fraud is not victimless - among other things it defeats the homeownership-promotion mission of Fannie and Freddie. But because it is almost never prosecuted it appears to be common.
Here are some excerpts from the indictment document:
So my first question to you is this: Do you accept that these are substantially accurate descriptions of the documents that James signed?
This raises a couple questions:
So in your view, it doesn't count as "renting" if you allow a family member to live in a property in exchange for a modest, below-market payment?
Do you normally assign a person's self-serving uncorroborated claims regarding their alleged wrongdoing enough credibility to conclude that the person "appears" to be or is "known" to be innocent?
Can you show us the documents that James signed?
Apparently, yes. Because apparently it's a standard form - the FNMA second home rider.
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The other point is that this was economically a second home transaction, not an investment - James's motives for buying the house and allowing her relative to live in it were personal and not commercial, and she was paying the mortgage out of her own resources, not the rent. The business reason for charging a higher interest rate on investment mortgages than second homes is that
The first of these is the key one - in the UK you get "second home" pricing on a mortgage if you can qualify based on non-rental income, regardless of who is occupying the property. This doesn't change the fact that James is guilty if she misrepresented her plans for occupancy, but it is relevant to the plausibility of her story that she was honest about what she was doing with the lender and they agreed to underwrite the loan as a second home anyway.
I tend to disagree with this. The documents apparently includes the following language:
It seems to me that allowing others to be the primary occupants of the house is not consistent with this language.
So if I understand you correctly, your argument is as follows:
A career prosecutor and a Trump appointee declined to pursue the case.
It follows that those officials determined that the case was meritless.
If the case is meritless, it's because there is corroborating evidence for James' claims about the intended use of the property.
Does that pretty much sum up your argument?
Also, I had a couple other questions:
Regarding Trump's alleged wrongdoing in the civil case against him, you said:
Are you able to identify 2 or 3 precedents for similar legal proceedings against ordinary citizens from the last 20 or 30 years?
Also, you said this:
Of these cases, which would you say was the most egregious case with the most unquestionable guilt? I am asking because I would like to look at it more carefully.
I'd suggest a possible alternative reason for why prosecutors might want to avoid prosecuting James regardless of the merit of the case: the standard that it establishes exposes them. James is a prosecutor. You're a prosecutor. James did politically motivated prosecutions of your boss. Your boss asks you to prosecute her in retaliation. What's gonna happen to you in 4-8-12 years when the political pendulum swings? You've just walked directly in front of the crosshairs. In contrast, you know your boss' reputation, if you refuse he'll fire you, he might badmouth you a bit, but if you lay low and shut your mouth afterwards, he's not gonna come after you.
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Note the slight of hand in paragraph 6 of the indictment that you quote, emphasis added:
I assume it is not in dispute that James did not use the property as a timeshare or other shared ownership arrangement. The critical text does not prohibit James from "renting" the property, it prohibits her from entering into an agreement that requires her to rent it (or to give another control over the occupancy or use of the property). James' behavior is only violation of that paragraph if she went beyond renting and entered into an agreement with her family member that required her to to rent to them or gave the that family member control over the occupancy or use of the property.
Of course, it's also not hard to look up the standard Fannie Mae Second Home Rider which provides, in relevant part:
Another way the renting may have been legal is if the lender agreed in writing to permit her renting.
I don't know what the specific rules in New York are like, but my home state draws a clear distinction between the "property owner" and the "legal occupant". The specific phrasing is different but it is very explicitly the legal occupant not the property owner who is considered to "have control over the occupancy or use of the property".
If New York State law follows the same general framework as mine, it is the act of accepting payment that transfers legal occupancy. I've even seen cases where this was a critical point of contention. If the landlord accepts any money goods or services from the tenant after informing the tenant that they were in violation of their lease that provision becomes effectively unenforceable because the tenant is still the legal occupant.
Technically the house in question is in Virginia, but I still see a distinction between the language and your description. I don't think James contests her was the legal occupant of the property, but it's not clear to me that being the legal is the same as having control over the occupancy or use. Like, the legal owner can presumably evict the legal occupant, right? Which would seem to entail control over occupancy. Downstream of that it seems like the property owner could also lawfully restrict the legal occupants use of the property. I've had rental agreements that prohibit using the rented property for commercial purposes, for example.
Not if they have accepted payment from the tenant. The landlord does not "have control over the occupancy or use of the property" the tenant does. Now the landlord can include provisions against X Y and Z, in the text of their contract/leasing agreement and cite a breach of that agreement (including failure to pay rent) as a reason for revoking the tenant's status as a legal occupant but that is hard to do without an agreement to point to.
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What are the squatter's rights laws like in that jurisdiction?
I don't think they apply in a case where the owner is aware of and consents to an individuals occupancy.
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It may or may not align with case law, but my first reaction to this statement is observing that most states have laws on the books controlling when and how landlords renting dwellings can re-establish control of unit occupancy and use. "I have to wait several months to evict my current tenants" seems to imply that someone else has "control over the occupancy or use of the property".
For the purposes of the law in question, the prohibition on giving a third part control over the user's occupancy goes hand in hand with the prohibition on agreements that require the property to be rented out. The big issue with the "second home as investment property" fraud was people buying beach houses and the like and saying that they're second homes when they're really investment properties. One of the surest signs of this is when they contract the business end out to a rental company that markets the property, arranges the rentals, collects the money, provides a cleaning service, and does all the other things that the true owner of a non-investment second home wouldn't do. The second home policy explicitly allows for leases, though, the idea being that an owner who occasionally used the property would also occasionally lease it out when they weren't there. If they're handling this business themselves, it's likely they're doing it in good faith. If they hire a management company to do it and are only guaranteed a week a year in the offseason for personal use, then it's almost certainly an investment property.
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I am also not familiar with the case law but I would be pretty surprised if the existence of tenant protections meant that every act of renting constituted an agreement that the renter had "control over the occupancy or use of the property." That would functionally make it impossible to rent any second homes issued with conforming loans in states with such protections, which I am skeptical is how this language is understood to operate.
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Thanks for pointing this out.
I would assume that as well.
Feel free to correct me, but it doesn't seem that James ever kept the property "primarily as a residence for Borrower's personal use and enjoyment" or ever intended to do so.
Yes, if she can produce such a writing, I would say that the case is on shaky ground at best.
i suspect such a thing is unlikely to appear because the lender is probably repackaging the mortgages to fannie mae (or something similar) and that likely violates the agreement between this third party and the lender. but it might be possible someone trying to bump their numbers gave a wink to James that she could do this.
Apparently, a blogger may have originally raised the problem with James's loan and he has a write up about the ongoing court case here: https://whitecollarfraud.com/2025/11/18/letitia-jamess-motion-to-dismiss-backfires-her-own-exhibit-proves-the-fraud-she-claims-doesnt-exist/
If nothing else, it seems like the sort of thing where the lender is unlikely to want to spend time and energy writing up something like this since it makes life more complicated. Besides, I'm pretty sure that the reality of the situation is that when people plan to rent out the property, they don't bother to seek written permission. Rather they, just sign the paperwork and then do whatever they want and nobody cares. (Eventually, if there is an audit, they might have to pay some extra interest retroactively or something.) Just as I am pretty confident that in Trump's situation, it's pretty normal for people to exaggerate when describing their collateral, the bank does an independent appraisal, and perhaps they adjust the loan terms as a result.
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With regards to your secondary question. The Democrats don't percieve their lawfare as unprovoked, at least not the rank-and-file and the voters. I remember during Trump's first term, there was a very strong sense in their mind that Trump is a criminal, that he was "getting away" with crime. First, he's wealthy; wealthy people are by default sinful, everyone knows that you can't get rich without stepping on poor people, probably with crime, and can only really get absolution by supporting Democrat pet causes. Apart from that, Trump was extra criminal, probably this was because they hadn't had to deal with a really adversarial presidency in a while, but from hearing Democrats talk it felt like them losing was somehow against the rules. That senate refused to go along with the impeachments really cemented that he was getting away with crime. And Jan 6 made them lose their mind in that regard; there must be some crime in there, look what they did! So even if they lacked anything specific to point at, going on fishing expeditions was justified in their mind.
What they really object to is Trump teaching the Republicans to do politics like Democrats. The Republican Party has its first tiny little riot in a hundred years, and the party of all-day-every-day rioting falls about hyperventilating about "insurrection".
Trump does normal, technically gray area stuff like have classified documents or pay off mistresses and it's a hundred felony counts. James gets grilled about mortgage fraud and it's the end of Democracy.
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Letitia James went after more than just Trump in a not-impartial manner, though. Her treatment of the NRA also raised lots of red flags, even if the dems find it hard to feel sorry for the victims.
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Letitia James actually is the one example where you can actually get prominent Democrats to admit that it may have been a bit much. I think because of the business element (not every Democrat is some rich-hating socialist, many actually have skin in the game) and the fact no one wants this to be the precedent set (that and going around talking about "getting" Trump)
I think this is partly hindsight. Anything from NY either didn't harm Trump or actively backfired and they can always tell themselves that the other cases were just, just slow or badly handled.
Fani Willis is corrupt and incompetent in comparison, but I don't think most of the base thinks that Trump is innocent of trying to influence the election.
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Yes. And if they're justified in their minds, won't stop for anything less than being stopped, and see retaliation as just a reason to escalate further, the answer is as FCFromSSC often notes: war to the knife, until one side is totally defeated. Probably (contra FC) the right, which has already lost totally in several states and while it technically holds the elected branches of the Federal government, holds nothing else.
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Yes, now that you have reminded me, I would tend to agree with this. I remember hearing the phrase "our democracy" a lot. The idea was that the Blue Tribe was supposed to be running things; that they had a kind of Mandate of Heaven; and Trump was an usurper of the rightful order.
But any way you slice it, I don't dispute that the Blue Tribe perceived their lawfare attacks against Trump as totally legitimate and justified. I'm not sure if "unprovoked" is quite the right word, since (as far as I know) Trump et al had not engaged in that sort of lawfare previously. So you could say that they saw it as a legitimate and creative way to fight back, sort of like the tax evasion charges against Al Capone.
IIRC, there were two main points of contention.
First was the allegation that Trump was working with Russia, if not formally then in a "friendly nod" sort of way. There was the whole "Russia, if you're listening" comments which he claims was a joke but the left did not take as a joke.
Second was that Trump tried to have Hillary prosecuted but gave up after a drawn-out fight with Sessions that ended in his termination. Source 1. Source 2 (pdf page 319, page 107 of the report).
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From the anti-Trump perspective, the attempts to prosecute Trump were provoked by his committing crimes - they were not intended to be a tit-for-tat lawfare campaign. Letitia James' decision to prioritise bringing that particular civil fraud suit was motivated by animus, but the type of fraud Trump was charged with was something he was in fact guilty of (Trump's successful appeal was about the size of the fine, not guilt), and which you or I would be prosecuted for in the unlikely event that we (a) did it and (b) got caught. The federal and Georgia election-related cases and the documents case were prosecutions for egregious wrongdoing of which Trump was unquestionably guilty - any functioning justice system would have prosecuted in the absence of a clearly established immunity bar. I'm happy to admit that the Stormy Daniels false accounting case was basically pure lawfare - I think Trump was technically guilty, but it wouldn't have been prosecuted against someone who wasn't a political opponent.
I would have to disagree with that one based on my experience. Is anyone able to provide 2 or 3 precedents for similar legal proceedings against ordinary citizens from the last 20 or 30 years?
Of these cases, which would you say was the most egregious case with the most unquestionable guilt? I am asking because I would like to look at it more carefully.
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To be charitable to their position, they percieved Trump as breaking all sorts of norms. Mostly to do with decorum, as he offends what their aesthetic preference for what a president should be like, and they didn't feel like they would be to blame for breaking another norm in retaliation (the one against engaging in lawfare against the outgoing administration, which Trump upheld in his first term despite rhetoric to the contrary during the campaign).
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