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Notes -
Been a hell of a day in Trump world for legal developments.
Yesterday we discussed some aspects of the case in progress in the Southern District of Florida where Trump is seeking to get some of the documents back from the government that were seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid. While proceedings have been in progress there the United States filed an interlocutory appeal to the 11th Circuit. They specifically wanted a stay of the portion of Judge Cannon's order that enjoined them from using the 100-ish documents with classification markings in any criminal investigation. Today the 11th Circuit granted the stay requested by the United States. Frankly I think the logic in the Court's order goes farther and would probably stay all of Judge Cannon's ruling but the United States only asked for those documents with classification markings and so that's what they got. Trump could appeal this to the Supreme Court or (possibly?) the full 11th Circuit but I doubt either would grant relief.
In other news, New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a 200-some page civil complaint detailing extensive fraud perpetrated by Trump, his family members, businesses, and agents. Over 100 pages of the complaint (pages 33 to 154 in the pdf) are dedicated to detailing in substantial detail how they committed fraud in the course of representing the value of various assets they owned. Another 40 or so pages details how they used these fraudulent valuations to secure loans and insurance for the properties in question. The relief requested is quite extensive. It includes an approximately $250million disgorgement penalty, a ban on certain Trump organization officers from serving in a financial director capacity for any New York company and a ban on the Trumps themselves serving as a director or officer for any New York corporation.
So what's the actual takeaway? I see people following each step of the legal process closely, and I can understand how that's interesting for the law-watchers, but it all sounds like a lot of handwavey bullshit to a layman like me. Does anyone have a good sense of what the actual odds of prosecution are?
If I hear "the walls are closing in" based on possessing some document that I don't care about or asking another politician a question one more goddamned time without there being any material payoff, I'm going to lose it.
It's not a prosecution, it's a civil suit. The worst that can happen is that Trump et al. will have to pay a huge award and reincorporate all their businesses in another state (though that may be easier said than done). As for the likelihood of success? It's hard to say until we see the Trump team's response, but there's been a 3 year investigation by the AG and AGs in general don't take these matters lightly, so I'm going to assume the court is going to find at least some fraud. The real question is how much the award will be and whether the fraud was pervasive enough to merit ending Trump's ability to do business in New York.
My priors were:
because of the vagueness of laws, every business that actually does anything can be found to have violated some rule by an aggressive enough official
Trump's businesses seemed especially likely to cross both the letter and the spirit of the law so it would not be that hard to find something
And it took three years of specifically investigating Donald Trump's businesses to come up with something? This is extremely low performance.
It does, however, fit my favorite hilarious conspiracy theory: Trump and Trump Co have always been undercover law enforcement honeypots for mobsters and bad lawyers, designed to look corrupt as hell but never actually crossing into criminality.
This theory would have him originally run by Giuliani to catch NYC mafia concrete mobsters, then shifted over to the NSA to expose vote rigging by the FBI/CIA deep state.
(The rare “good guys are secretly protecting you” conspiracy theory.)
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