{"id":2206315,"date":"2024-03-26T08:35:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-26T12:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/new-yorks-fraud-judgment-against-trump-is-so-bad-even-his-biggest-critics-arent-defending-it\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T08:35:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T12:35:03","slug":"new-yorks-fraud-judgment-against-trump-is-so-bad-even-his-biggest-critics-arent-defending-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/new-yorks-fraud-judgment-against-trump-is-so-bad-even-his-biggest-critics-arent-defending-it\/","title":{"rendered":"New York\u2019s Fraud Judgment Against Trump Is So Bad, Even His Biggest Critics Aren\u2019t Defending It"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">32<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fnew-yorks-fraud-judgment-against-trump-is-so-bad-even-his-biggest-critics-arent-defending-it%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2206315&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<p><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><\/p>\n<div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>It\u2019s pretty clear at this point that Democrats\u2019 main election strategy against Donald Trump has nothing to do with Joe Biden running a savvy political campaign. Instead, they\u2019re attempting to defeat Trump with a series of obviously politically coordinated lawsuits and criminal charges, hoping this will both drain Trump\u2019s resources and any resulting convictions would tarnish him in the eyes of voters. Suffice it to say, this strategy is not working out well for them \u2014 Biden hasn\u2019t <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpolling.com\/polls\/president\/general\/2024\/trump-vs-biden\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">led in the polls in six months<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And while there\u2019s a lot to be said about the dubious nature of the charges being brought against him, the point has been driven home by the recent decision by a New York appeals court to reduce Trump\u2019s bond in his civil fraud trial from $454 million to $175 million. Or rather, the issue is what no one is saying about this case: It\u2019s such complete bunk that no one among the legion of Trump\u2019s critics in and out of the corporate media is even trying to defend this case on the merits.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-131949190\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-f95433b18625a4b62c371e8fd70ece2d fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-f95433b18625a4b62c371e8fd70ece2d\"><\/div>\n<p>To recap: Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump\u2019s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.<\/p>\n<p>However, the state of New York, where the current Attorney General Letitia James campaigned for office on the insane premise of convicting Trump without even saying what he was guilty of, combed through the paperwork of these loans and charged Trump with fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to get favorable loan terms. They did this in spite of the fact that no bank has accused Trump of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n<p>The case was decided by a judge who is personally bizarre and professionally incompetent and adversarial. In a case where Trump was accused of inflating the value of his assets, in Judge Engoron\u2019s\u00a0ruling he concluded that Mar-a-Lago, Trump\u2019s historic estate on oceanfront acres in the heart of the most exclusive neighborhood in America, was worth between \u201c$18 million and $27.6 million.\u201d Even CNN was incredulous about Engoron\u2019s low valuation of Trump\u2019s assets: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2023\/10\/03\/business\/trump-fraud-judge-mar-a-lago\/index.html\">Real estate insiders question how Trump fraud judge valued Mar-a-Lago<\/a>.\u201d For those who believe that Trump inflated the value of his assets to get a loan \u2014 this would not exactly make him a unique figure in the business world \u2014 Engoron\u2019s judgment is still unreliable.<\/p>\n<p>The ruling against Trump is, in the words of former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, \u201ca fraud case in which there are no fraud victims.\u201d McCarthy\u2019s National Review colleague Dan McLaughlin, who has decades of experience litigating business fraud in New York, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/baseballcrank\/status\/1772246644882387289\">notes<\/a>, \u201cThe idea that Trump caused half a billion in damages to his lenders doesn\u2019t pass the straight face test. A tenuous-at-best theory of illegality should not be a springboard for draconian punishment.\u201d (It should also be noted that though McCarthy and McLaughlin are on the right, neither man has much affinity for Trump.)<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-56ef887867845dcd24818f6a0cc5674b fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-56ef887867845dcd24818f6a0cc5674b\"><\/div>\n<p>This case is so obviously politically motivated, and even America\u2019s corrupt media are at <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/trump-fraud-business-law-courts-banks-lending-punishment-1355c3b48cdefa2894ce623ec59748bd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a loss to defend this<\/a>: \u201cAn Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of similar cases showed Trump\u2019s case stands apart: It\u2019s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For months now, I have been on the lookout for any notable journalist or pundit who is willing to write an actual defense of Engoron\u2019s judgment against Trump. Outside of a handful of ill-considered tweets from the #resistance crowd, I haven\u2019t seen anything substantive at all. While I pay attention to this stuff much more closely than most, I\u2019m obviously not omniscient. So I went on X and asked <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Heminator\/status\/1772347171511075266\">if anyone had written anything<\/a> substantive defending Engoron\u2019s decision on the merits. (My question was almost immediately retweeted by Dilbert cartoonist and unorthodox political commentator Scott Adams, who has more than a million followers, giving it wide exposure.)<\/p>\n<p>So far, the closest thing I\u2019ve found was <a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/volokh\/2024\/02\/19\/thoughts-on-judge-engorons-opinion-a-response-to-calabresi\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">this column<\/a> at the libertarian-ish legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy. Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr defends the ruling, taking a strict read on what the state was allowed to do here. However, even he is conflicted about whether the case should have been brought, admirably and transparently states his opinion is contingent on the fact he\u2019s not an expert in New York law, and concludes, \u201cSo if the opinion is wrong, and gets reversed, I certainly don\u2019t mind that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, Monday a New York appeals court did conclude that Engoron\u2019s opinion was substantially wrong and reduced the bond Trump has to present from $454 million to $175 million. (Incredibly, New York law dictates Trump has to post this still obscene amount before he can further appeal the decision.)<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-f4a32af0a7632fa6c866dc7535a85a94 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-f4a32af0a7632fa6c866dc7535a85a94\"><\/div>\n<p>In addition to reducing the size of Trump\u2019s bond, the appeals court also threw out Engoron\u2019s ruling barring Trump from serving as an officer or director of a New York company for three years <em>and<\/em> the order barring Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump from serving as officers and directors of New York companies for two years. The plan was clearly to slap Trump with an egregious fine while simultaneously hamstringing Trump\u2019s business in ways that would make it harder to raise money to pay the penalty.<\/p>\n<p>Even by the very low standards set by the other Trump charges, what\u2019s happening here is appalling. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado may not bar Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment\u2019s provision against insurrectionists. The fact that there was a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, does not mean we automatically get to presume it was a serious insurrection attempt, much less that Trump has been convicted in a court of law for any crime related to it.<\/p>\n<p>From the beginning, this was a desperate and quixotic attempt to stop Trump from participating in a free election and disenfranchise millions of voters. It was so bad it prompted a unanimous SCOTUS ruling. And yet, in the weeks and months leading up to SCOTUS\u2019s ruling there were dozens of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/01\/04\/opinion\/the-case-for-disqualifying-trump-is-strong.html\">op-eds from ostensibly serious and high-profile commentators<\/a> assuring us that the unilateral decision by Colorado\u2019s secretary of state was sound constitutional law. Anti-Trump pundits such as David French and many others eagerly staked out a position on this case to the left of avowedly progressive Supreme Court Justices Kentanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.<\/p>\n<p>As crazy as the Colorado case was, the reaction to it is an instructive comparison. In the Trump civil fraud case, we have an overtly partisan attorney general bringing charges and a solitary judge handing down a verdict so insane that even the regrettably prominent segment of America\u2019s commentariat willing to abase itself at the drop of a hat to stop Cheeto Mussolini is looking at the facts of this case and deciding to steer clear of the blast zone.<\/p>\n<p>While the appeals court\u2019s rebuke of Engoron\u2019s decision is strong confirmation the case is as bad as it seems, it was hardly Solomonic in its wisdom. The reality is that the man leading in the polls to be the next president is still being rung up by the opposition party with an outrageous fine that <a href=\"https:\/\/constitution.congress.gov\/constitution\/amendment-8\/#:~:text=Excessive%20bail%20shall%20not%20be,cruel%20and%20unusual%20punishments%20inflicted.\">reeks of an Eighth Amendment violation<\/a> on a case that never should have been brought. And we should probably throw in a Fifth Amendment due process violation while we\u2019re at it, because the idea that Trump has to pay the state $175 million for the privilege of continuing to appeal in court is something I\u2019m confident the reanimated corpse of James Madison would tell us is <em>exactly<\/em> the kind of injustice the Bill of Rights was trying to prevent, right before he dies a second time upon finding out about the existence of a federal income tax.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, what\u2019s really telling is that while the \u201ccountry over party\u201d crowd won\u2019t defend this decision on the merits, they\u2019re also not speaking out about the perversion of justice here. They\u2019re content to let it happen to Trump even if it erodes the very norms and concerns about \u201crule of law\u201d they insist Trump threatens as president. <\/p>\n<p>Well, people are noticing that this isn\u2019t a very principled position. And based on the polls, voters are coming to the entirely rational conclusion that Trump, for all his considerable flaws, is less of a threat than an establishment that will eagerly distort the law to subvert an election they\u2019re afraid they can\u2019t win on the merits.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-bb126394ca48368ece0354183c7d7003 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-bb126394ca48368ece0354183c7d7003\"><\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">    \t\t\t\t\t   \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s pretty clear at this point that Democrats\u2019 main election strategy against Donald Trump has nothing to do with Joe Biden running a savvy political campaign. Instead, they\u2019re attempting to defeat Trump with a series of obviously politically coordinated lawsuits and criminal charges, hoping this will both drain Trump\u2019s resources and any resulting convictions would<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274,"featured_media":2206316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/TrumpWH.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2206315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/TrumpWH.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2206315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2206316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2206315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2206315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2206315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}