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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.
This seems untrue for any sense more meaningful than the tautological one where any tool unused 'must' have not be available.
Eric Holder was not impeached nor charged with contempt of congress after the DoJ switched hands, despite his original Congressional contempt vote being widely bipartisan. Despite the fevered wishes of every progressive on the internet from 2003-2008, Dubya never faced criminal charges. Lujan Grisham was not impeached, the calls to censor couldn't even get all Republicans, and she will not be facing a hundred citizen grand juries for clearly unconstitutional executive orders; she has not so far faced a single one.
I'm not proposing people avoided these mistakes out of the goodness of their cold, shriveled hearts. Indeed, there may well have been tactical causes, or even simple ignorance or inability. And yet.
That's an interesting specific example to bring forward! Let's go drink from a tall glass of water and look at some headlines from a little over a year ago.
That's on me, I set the bar too low.
Ok so fair call out, but I'm not sure to what extent we actually disagree on substance. As you say, there may be tactical restraint, or ignorance or inability. But my core position is that political actors will attack their enemies in the most effective ways they can, and the most effective methods available will vary according to the person and situation. And I'm not sure that you even disagree with that.
I think I disagree.
Yes, there's a trivial sense that we aren't going to see DeSantis sued to destroy or dissolve his real estate business operating under New York State laws, given that he doesn't have one. I'm rather hoping that's not the core and central argument for your claim. Political actors have made no small number of attacks, both legal and social, against people who did nothing, or did nothing legally wrong; that fraud case against DeSantis is just the funniest. Federal politicians have been lost their seats and been convicted for allegations that didn't make sense and weren't true.
Political actors are neither unified nor rational nor solely motivated by effectiveness. Their preferred approach will vary according to the person and situation, but they'll also vary based on personal flippery, on the motivations of volunteers and donors, and on the recognition of norms and fear of retribution, among other things. And many of these, most critically, will be more important than the actual guilt or perceived vulnerability of the target.
That's why for Trump -- with all of his clear and tremendous faults -- also got slapped with a wide variety of aggressive lawsuits based on hilariously false claims and/or with no interest in the facts. It's very unclear that this will be different for anyone else; it's not even clear that the trial results would be tremendously different.
Yes, this didn't happen historically. There were a ton of calls among progressives to jail (or try in the Hague) Dubya, but it never happened. But it's been sixteen years since the end of the Dubya presidency. Even ultimately 'unsuccessful' attacks have turned out to work, progressive efforts to take over institutions that would defang or blunt these attacks have been wildly successful, and we've learned the hard way that a small industry can operate solely around building this class of tool.
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