The “norms and traditions” crowd who tried to bankrupt and imprison Trump using “novel” legal theories and nebulous “facts” is barefoot in the china shop where they broke everything and complaining that their feet are bleeding.
Gosh, I feel terrible about that.
Here’s Chris Cilizza just now waking up from a ten-year-long coma.
I always thought laws and regulations would constrain Trump for his worst impulses in a 2nd term. What I've learned is that there are far fewer laws constraining a president's behavior than I thought. It's mostly norms and traditions. And if you are willing to break those...
It must be exhausting to have to pretend that hard, all day every day. I’m glad I don’t have to do it.
So what do we know? That we don’t have to pretend not to know?
We know that three people, all Democrats, have had their mortgage paperwork come into the public domain and having had a look, the public -- and importantly, lawyers -- have concluded it is, at the very least, sketchy, if not obviously criminal. It appears that all three have claimed two residences as their primary residence (which gets you more favorable terms than if you told the truth that one was, in fact, a second home. It’s a very serious charge.).
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled in the New York Slimes and the Washington Compost that gosh darn golly, nobody actually reads 3,000-page mortgage applications so let’s just all wink-wink-nod-nod and get on with our day, but no. Donald Trump isn’t in a forgiving mood.
Neither are we.
“The result, legal experts say, is an escalation in the way Trump officials seek to penalize, remove or even jail adversaries.”
That’s the subtitle of a piece Tuesday morning in the Washington Post titled “The Trump Administration’s New Weapon Against Foes: Mortgage Filings”
It opens this way:
President Donald Trump’s move to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook on Monday was the latest illustration of his administration’s surprising new weapon against its enemies: their own mortgages.
Trump and other officials raised allegations of mortgage fraud last week against Cook, a prominent economist put on the Fed board by President Joe Biden. The Justice Department is investigating the claims now, and Trump says the allegations alone are enough for him to push her out of her seat. Additionally, the Justice Department also received a criminal referral over real estate records from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has filed multiple lawsuits against both Trump administrations. And in July, Trump publicly accused Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California) -- who led impeachment proceedings against the president as a House member -- of mortgage fraud.
The result, legal experts say, is an escalation in the way Trump officials seek to penalize, remove or even jail adversaries. [Emphasis added.]
Those norms? They broke when Democrats tried to “penalize, remove, or even jail” Donald Trump, a former president, under “novel” legal theories and nebulous “facts.” What’s happening here is objective. You can’t, as has been alleged in all three cases, claim two residences are both your primary residence.
As the father of the bride said to his daughter who was still having second thoughts halfway down the aisle between her fiancé and her newly rekindled ex-husband in the movie Sweet Home Alabama, “You can’t ride two horses with one ass, sugar pea.”
More from the Washington Post:
Before Trump’s move against [Federal Reserve governor Lisa] Cook, Richard Briffault, who focuses on administrative law and public policy at Columbia Law School, said officials are publicizing allegations before any formal charges or indictments.
“They are moving very quickly from saying, ‘There were inaccuracies or mistakes,’ which may or may not be true, to saying, ‘These had fraudulent intent,’” Briffault said.
You don’t say. You mean talking about charges and drawing damning conclusions before they’re filed is… a bad thing?? Because, gosh, that didn’t seem to be the policy when Trump was the target, did it?
Over the weekend, [FHFA Director Bill] Pulte continued to hammer on mortgage fraud on social media. On Friday, he said two more criminal referrals had been made.
Sounds like the norms and traditions crowd better get out of the china shop.
