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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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In this claim, the state of New York is filing an Executive Law 63(12) case against Trump, some Trump family members, and the Trump organizations. New York state law permits the attorney general to bring against businesses for a wide variety of reasons but essentially including any "repeated" fraudulent or illegal act, without needing the victims to be present (or, in some cases, for victims in the conventional sense to exist). Used to have a three-year statute of limitations, was bumped to six years recently.

This means that, while the case is about the alleged fraud and falsification, the state's authority to bring the case is not as a victim of the fraud, but as an authority to bring action against unlawful or fraudulent actors. This also makes it less important whether and to what extent any individual victim of the fraud was harmed: the sticker-shocking 250mil claim is about the benefits the Trump organization received, not specific to losses suffered by any bank.

The legal claims are summarized starting at page 205, and can be tl;dr'd as fraud, falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements, insurance fraud, and conspiracy to commit them. Some of them could be considered 'against' the state, in the sense that false business records have broad ramifications, but for the most part there are specific harmed parties (largely insurers or lenders) who are not parties to the suit.

This sort of claim doesn't require size as a statutory prong, and indeed the NYAG has used this approach in the past to go after some pretty small names or faults. See NYAG v. TempurPedic (alleged price-fixing), or NYAG v. Wegmans (cloud security/data privacy), or NYAG v. rando bus companies (city limits on vehicle idling?).

((I think there are due process concerns in this class of statute, given how often it's used as to achieve the sort of penalties that might otherwise fall under criminal law without the relevant evidentiary, burden of proof, or adequate defense standards, and because it's often used as a tool to make later criminal prosecutions, and the complaint does motion about referrals. But like the NYAG's highlighting of Trump's previous use of the Fifth Amendment for the purposes of adverse inference (technically still permitted under Baxter v. Palmigiano!), that's the sort of criticism that only has a lot of backers in very specific discussions and then gets ignored whenever a sufficiently unpopular target.))