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Trump ordered to pay $355 million in penalties in New York Fraud case. He's also banned from operating any business in New York for three years, the Trump Organization is banned from borrowing money from any financial institution registered in New York for three years, and Eric and Don Jr each get their own $4 million dollar fines, and the former CFO Alan Wiesselberg owes a million. However the court also reverses its earlier ruling to cancel defendant's business certificates (aka the "corporate death penalty"). Instead an Independent Monitor will continue at the Trump Organisation for three years to ensure that it meets its financial reporting obligations.
All the penalties come with interest, so the defendants collectively owe around $450 million, not counting the $80+ million owed to E Jean Carroll. Even for Trump, that's serious money. Trump has of course said he will appeal, but to do so he will need to put up the full amount in bond first, and it's not clear he has the liquidity to do that - and as mentioned above he's now limited in his ability to borrow. And even if he manages to get the cash together, it doesn't seem to me that his prospects on appeal are at all good. Higher courts typically defer to the trial court's fact-finding, and Judge Engoron is not kind in his assessment of the credibility of Trump and his witnesses.
Farce of a case, the prosecution on the record as targeting Trump for political purposes, the judge a partisan hack, the alleged wrongs being that Trump exaggerated his business assets even though none of his partners were ever apparently harmed. Some of the banks Trump supposedly defrauded testified in his defense. Basic confusion of assessed value and appraised value. And Mar-a-Lago is just worth $18M. Show trial.
This is the kind of stuff that will massively, radially destabilize the country. You don't have a country anymore if hostile partisan judges in one-party states will just sue their political opponents into oblivion. At best, you have slow-boiling political turmoil and lawfare. But it's not really a country or a democracy in any meaningful sense. Critics of Trump who may feel tempted to defend whatever rationalization Engoron and Letitia have established should beware. This puts US down a troubling path.
I agree that politics was a motivation in pursuing the case, but it seems beyond doubt that Trump's organization did, in fact, engage in "creative" (i.e. fraudulent) accounting. I mean, he's a New York ex-Democrat real estate magnate. What were the chances that everything was above-board?
Selective prosecution is a problem, but it's a lot less of one when you aren't guilty. It's like the left-wing pundits who are angry about air time being given to Biden's cognitive decline. DOJ prosecutors can certainly communicate prosecution decisions to the public in a politically-motivated way, and the media can decide how much to cover them, but ultimately the effectiveness of these attacks hinges on Biden actually having declined cognitively. At some level, Democrats are responsible for painting themselves into a corner with this liability. So it is for Republicans who are staking their political future on someone as unreliable as Trump.
It was the sole motivation. If you don't understand that you don't understand the moment.
No one was harmed. New York brought a civil case, not a criminal case, because no laws were broken. The banks involved had all their loans paid back, and testified in Trump's defense. So what creative accounting? That the appraised and assessed values of Trump properties are not the same thing? This is like if I accused you of having child porn on your computer, and someone said: Well, it can't be denied that there's porn on his computer.
You're trying to turn this into a both-sides case. It isn't. Political actors who promised to bring Trump down brought him in court, declared that his assets weren't worth as much as he said they were, then used their own valuations to accuse him of
This is a form of victim-blaming: Democrats prosecute Trump to an unprecedented degree, and the logic says Republicans have to abandon Trump because he's the risky one. Do you think other Republicans will not be subject to these same attacks in future? This is a one-off? The Great Trump Exception?
I think this mistakes the nature of politics. Political actors will virtually always use whatever weapons they can against their opponents. It's not as if we've existed in a state of peace and harmony up until this moment.
Democrats will not sue DeSantis for fraud like they did to Trump for the same reason that Republicans did not impeach Obama for perjury like they did to Clinton. That is, they don't have the weapon available to use.
Trump is indeed the great exception, in that he has handed his enemies a uniquely large array of weapons to use against him.
I would like for you to spell out and defend the idea that Trump is the only president who has committed actions his enemies can call crimes and attempt to prosecute.
I don't claim this. Nixon would also have been prosecuted for crimes if Ford hadn't pardoned him.
"Actions his enemies can call crimes" carries the connotation "action which his enemies would call crimes but other people would not". Nixon's actions wouldn't count under that, even if it is literally true that his enemies call them crimes.
I think that Nixon's actions were both less bad than Trump's and less clearly criminal.
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