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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?
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.
I agree that's a possibility. Another possibility is that the prosecutor simply thinks it's abuse of office to engage in politically-motivated retaliation. Even if the prosecution is in retaliation for something that itself was abusive.
Also, even if the prosecutor is not worried about being brought up on trumped-up charges down the road, he still might worry about damage to his reputation. It's very common for former federal prosecutors to end up with high-paying jobs at fancy law firms. Having been the person who prosecuted Letitia James would probably mean having to write off the possibility of future employment at 70-80% of BigLaw type firms. Perhaps more.
There's also the part where lawfare works better when the target of it actually commits a crime. It's admittedly early to tell, but Comey's trial might not go so well for the administration.
A prosecutor's job is to score a conviction. Imagine you're a prosecutor, and your boss tells you you're required to stand in front of a judge being berated because the point was just to harass a guy.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you confident that Letitia James has not committed any crimes?
I'm saying attorneys like winning cases because their professional record is the cases they have won. One of the problems with lawfare is by its very nature it's based on going after someone you hate rather than someone who provably committed a crime. If you are a DOJ employee and your boss tells you to find something to stick John Smith with, you may refuse because there's nothing to stick Smith with. Tit-for-tat lawfare is limited by the DOJ's willingness to be put in shitty situations to appease their boss.
With Letitia, I am reading the other thread with interest. I have a bit of passing knowledge of law, but I'm not going to presume to tell the Motte how I think that will go when The Motte includes actual lawyers. Rov_Scam has an interesting analysis. That said, I was pointing out the the Letitia case is not the only example of lawfare going on right now.
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