NY Case Against Trump Was Pretext To Take Down His Campaign

The sheer number of lawsuits thrown at President Donald Trump leading up to the 2024 election was evidence enough for most voters that he was a victim of politically motivated lawfare.

As Trump started making noise that he was going to run for a second term, lawsuits that likely would have never been brought otherwise started piling up. Each case had some component calculated to damage Trump, but the granddaddy of them all was the New York business case accusing Trump of inflating or deflating the value of his assets to get more favorable loan rates or pay less in taxes.

What made it spectacular was the resulting $454 million fine levied by New York State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron. With interest, the fine had ballooned to $527 million — that is half a billion dollars — payable to the state of New York. But Thursday the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division threw out the fine.

No victim came forward asking for prosecution because there were no victims. The prosecution was the passion project of pit bull New York Attorney General Letitia James, who made a malicious campaign promise to sue Trump “every day.” She started looking into his finances in 2020, combing through documents for two years before officially filing a case.

James filed the case in September 2022, perfectly timed to smear Trump’s campaign for president, which he formally announced on Nov. 15, 2022.

The filing gave the propaganda press something to chew on. The New York Times reported Trump was accused of a “‘staggering’ fraud” and the left-leaning Associated Press quipped, “‘Art of the steal’: Trump accused of vast fraud,” a headline that offers the reader a conclusion before the case was heard.

The trial was held in New York City, the center of the nation’s media landscape. It was probably not a scheduling coincidence that the trial started on Oct. 2, 2023, offering weeks of damning headlines as the 2024 presidential campaign gained momentum. “Trump labels it a ‘witch hunt’” and “Attorney general asks to ban Trump from doing business in New York,” CNN reported on day one. Testimony continued through mid-December, with closing arguments on Jan. 11, 2024.

Conveniently, the trial was barely done in time for Trump to campaign for the Jan. 15 Iowa Caucus. While other Republicans were traversing the Hawkeye State for weeks, the trial gave Trump just four unfettered days, after weeks of dragging his reputation through the mud. This timing alone stinks to high heaven.  

Engoron waited to set Trump’s eye-popping fine until Feb. 16, 2024, and banned him from doing business in New York for three years. It was a gift for the propaganda press — fodder for the Sunday news shows political nerds watch. The timing was again impeccable; the decision came days before the Feb. 24 South Carolina and the Feb. 27 Michigan primary elections.

If there were a shred of doubt remaining that the motivation for this litigation was fully political, look no further than the separate opinion in this case written by Justice David Friedman, who advocates for going further than dismissing the fine to fully dismissing the complaint.

He wrote of Executive Law § 63(12), which empowers the attorney general to act “in the name of the people of the state of New York,”

[S]o far as we know, section 63(12) has never been used in the way it is being used in this case — namely, to attack successful, private, commercial transactions, negotiated at arm’s length between highly sophisticated parties fully capable of monitoring and defending their own interests. All parties to these private transactions profited handsomely from the deals, from which there was no discernable negative effect on the public interest. This action does not serve to protect the consuming public, which, as was previosly noted, was the original intent of section 63(12). This action does not protect the integrity or operation of the public securities market, given that defendants do not issue publicly traded securities. Nor does this action protect small investors or small businesses or serve to vindicate public health standards.

In a damning indictment of James’ anti-Trump lawfare, Friedman further observed,

I am troubled that my colleagues are affirming Supreme Court’s liability finding, notwithstanding that three out of the five members of this panel clearly believe that the judgment should be vacated, as the Attorney General has not yet proven her case. Nonetheless, what emerges from this Court’s vacating the $500 million disgorgement award, with which I concur, is the frustration of what appears to me to have been [Letitia James’] true aim in bringing this action. Plainly, her ultimate goal was not ‘market hygiene,’ as posited by Justice Moulton, but political hygiene, ending with the derailment of President Trump’s political career and the destruction of his real estate business. The voters have obviously rendered a verdict on his political career. This bench today unanimously derails the effort to destroy his business.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.