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The latest Trump legal woes comes once again from NY where a judge ordered his business dissolved for fraud. Nobody losts money and it came down to some misstatements. I haven’t read the full case, but the judge on a high profile part of the case is completely off. Not even ballpark off.
He valued Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. I texted a broker in the area and he told me 100 million for an ocean acre and 25 million for a non-ocean acres. Mar is between 17-20 acres depending where you look online. Palm Beach has gone up a lot since COVID so maybe divide those numbers by 2 since Trump made his filling. He listed the property at 450-650 million. Without doing a full underwriting (maybe zoning issues where it couldn’t be worth the raw land price) it still appears Mar is worth a lot of money.
If you are going to do lawfare shouldn’t you avoid obvious mistakes? It’s easy to see a headline and write this whole case off as political. It weakens public perception of all other cases if you make mistakes that are this stupid.
If I am remembering this case correctly he did likely violate the law and include some statement that were obviously false but in a category that no one besides Donald Trump gets prosecuted for. So the case of Mar-a-Lago violates a principle of maintaining plausible deniability.
Edit: @AshLael looked up the prosecutors brief and it appears they did not use the tax assessment for valuation purposes. Which would negate my main point. The judge has a history of making stuff up against real estate developers and being later reversed. It’s quite possible this judge hates developers and just does stupid things.
https://twitter.com/goodguyguaranty/status/1707232241925910944?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/mar-a-lago-judges-developer-hating-past-is-a-big-win-for-donald-trump/
Which would change the ruling and it’s citations to much more of all developer are bastards story (which is culture war) than my why are you lawfaring stupidly story
The whole ruling has a very casual, Reddity tone to it that puts me off quite a bit. I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of heavy legalese, but are Groundhog Day references and phrasings like "We are way beyond the point of 'sophisticated counsel should have known better'..." really where judicial writing is at these days?
I also notice that I'm confused -- is the judge really ordering the dissolution of multiple billion-ish dollar LLCs as a pre-trial judgement? This seems like jumping the gun a bit, no?
To your first question: you can generally tell when a judge is pretty sick of one party or another when you read their rulings. If they feel like the other parties aren't taking the process seriously or taking advantage of the system, their tone will reflect that.
It is not uncommon for judges to joke or use incredible amounts of sarcasm in the court room. The supreme court can get fairly notorious about roasting and escalationary language in their rulings. Whether or not it's justified in the Trump cases, I'm not sure, and haven't been paying much attention, however considering the incentives at play it wouldn't be a surprise.
I'm not talking about the judge being mean to Trump/team -- this is by no means surprising to me.
Just that the language in the ruling seems very casual/bantery -- I love a good legal roast, but part of what makes them great is that they are couched in formal and polite language -- "my learned friend" sort of thing.
I admit I only skimmed the damn thing (it's also yuge) but the bits I read just kept making me cringe -- to drill down, "we are way beyond the point" sounds like something a school guidance counsellor would write; a judge, I'd expect to say something like "It is well past the point where I can compel myself to believe that the Trump lawyers are accidentally coming before this court with the same arguments for the third time" -- arguably even harsher, but not invoking Bill Murray movies nor the royal we.
You must not be familiar with Alex Kozinski, formerly of the Ninth Circuit:
"AIG's lawyers sat around contemplating their navels for two and one half years while the Bank was struggling to build up its good will."
"The only relevant evidence here demonstrates that, had Levolor done every little thing Ada Kern claims it should have, she would still have been laid off. Where, then, is her beef? ..."
"Carter stopped just short of pinning a Boy Scout Merit Badge on Silverman [a key government witness]."
"Miller was a prostitute, heroin user and fugitive from Cana- dian justice; but otherwise she was okay."
""Sex on the Internet?," they all said. "That'll never make any money." But computer-geek-turned-entrepreneur Gary Kremen knew an opportunity when he saw it. The year was 1994; domain names were free for the asking, and it would be several years yet before Henry Blodget and hordes of eager NASDAQ day traders would turn the Internet into the Dutch tulip craze of our times. With a quick e-mail to the domain name registrar Network Solutions, Kremen became the proud owner of sex.com."
"The parties are advised to chill."
And of course Justice Scalia was no stranger to using a similar tone:
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