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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11054 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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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

Here are some excerpts from the indictment document:

The loan was originated by OVM Financial under a signed Second Home Rider, which required JAMES, as the sole borrower to occupy and use the property as her secondary residence, and prohibited its use as a timesharing or other shared ownership arrangement or agreement that requires her to either rent the property or give any other person any control over the occupancy or use of the property.

JAMES' Universal Property application for homeowners' insurance indicated "owner-occupied non-seasonal use," further misrepresenting the intended use of the property.

So my first question to you is this: Do you accept that these are substantially accurate descriptions of the documents that James signed?

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

AFAIK, no President of the United States has previously ordered the malicious prosecution of someone they should have known was innocent.

This raises a couple questions:

  1. 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?

  2. 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?

  1. Given the wording of the rider, the question isn't "does it count as renting?". it is "did James intend to give her relative the rights of a long-term tenant, including the legal right to exclude James from her own home?" If the amount of money is as James said it was (<$5000 over a multi-year period) that is more consistent with "no - James intended to grant her relative a license" than "yes - James intended to grant a legally binding tenancy at a soft rent". The Fannie/Freddie guidance on occupancy types explicitly says that the receipt of rent is not sufficient to disqualify a property from second home status.
  2. I don't consider James' statements to be uncorroborated. There are documents. I haven't seen them, but the career prosecutors and Trump-appointed US Attorney who have think the case is not prosecutable. That strongly suggests that the statements are corroborated, and we will get to see the corroborating evidence if there is a trial.

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

  • investment borrowers are relying on rental income to pay the mortgage (and the way they are underwritten reflects this) and can therefore be forced into a foreclosure situation by a long void period or non-paying tenant.
  • investment borrowers have no non-financial stake in the property and are therefore more likely to walk away from an underwater mortgage even if they could pay.

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.

Given the wording of the rider, the question isn't "does it count as renting?". it is "did James intend to give her relative the rights of a long-term tenant, including the legal right to exclude James from her own home?"

I tend to disagree with this. The documents apparently includes the following language:

Borrower will keep the Property available primarily as a residence for Borrower’s personal use and enjoyment for at least one year after the date of this Security Instrument, unless Lender otherwise agrees in writing

It seems to me that allowing others to be the primary occupants of the house is not consistent with this language.

I don't consider James' statements to be uncorroborated. There are documents. I haven't seen them, but the career prosecutors and Trump-appointed US Attorney who have think the case is not prosecutable. That strongly suggests that the statements are corroborated, and we will get to see the corroborating evidence if there is a trial.

So if I understand you correctly, your argument is as follows:

  1. A career prosecutor and a Trump appointee declined to pursue the case.

  2. It follows that those officials determined that the case was meritless.

  3. 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:

which you or I would be prosecuted for in the unlikely event that we (a) did it and (b) got caught.

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:

The federal and Georgia election-related cases and the documents case were prosecutions for egregious wrongdoing of which Trump was unquestionably guilty

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.

What do you think this is?

Democrats laughed and applauded when Barak Obama "joked" on late nite TV about sicing the FBI and IRS on his critics, and dismissed the scandal as a "nothingburger" when it was revealed that he wasn't joking.

While a lot of Trump's supporters wanted to see Clinton, Comey and a lot of other senior Democrats prosecuted, Trump notably did not do this in his first term.

Democrats subsequently elected Letitia James, in part, on the premise that politically motivated prosecutions are a good thing that America needs more of.

Letitia James and her defenders are like an adult dog that was never house broken. They are never going to learn that what they have done is wrong if you don't grab them by the scruff of the neck and shove their face in it.

The Democrats as a people need to be taught that politically motivated prosecutions are going to blow-back on them in 4-8-12 years when the political pendulum swings, and that is what the Republicans are currently doing.

Yeah, but by asking them to be the instrument to teach this lesson, you're asking a lot personally from Republican-aligned prosecutors, you're asking them to make themselves a named, direct target for the next cycle. You're asking them to stand up to draw enemy fire. James probably felt safe because she thought that Trump would not come back and that the next Republican administration will want to distance themselves from Trump and so they wouldn't retaliate on his behalf. But I don't think any Republican-aligned prosecutor can feel quite so confident that the Democrats are not going to get back into power before this fades from memory, and that they will not be in a revanchist mood.

This does indeed seem to be a plausible description of the thought process of these prosecutors.

If I, as a citizen, believe that this is in fact the calculus being performed by members of the executive branch, what conclusions should I draw?

I think few voters have illusions that their politicians have more loyalty to them than they have class loyalty to one another. The amount of knives buried in Trump's back attests to that.

Let me make the question a bit more explicit.

Within the existing system, what is the proper way to respond to Blue Tribe weaponizing the justice system to partisan ends? Because if the answer is "there isn't one", it behooves us to find alternatives outside the existing system.

People accuse me of being an accelerationist, but what's the alternative? We've seen recently that rifles and rooftops are certianly an option on the sociopolitical conflict menu, with the understanding of course that such actions cannot reasonably be attributed to the tribes from which they might emerge because stochastic terrorism abruptly stopped being a coherent concept. What other options are plausibly available?

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