FAIRNESS FOR TRUMP? Former President Donald Trump has just days to come up with a bond, a nearly half-billion-dollar bond, to ensure that he will pay the outrageously excessive judgment against him in the lawsuit filed by New York’s Democratic attorney general, Letitia James. Nailing Trump has been a longtime goal for James — in her campaign for state attorney general, she pledged to “bring him down.” Now, with the help of a compliant judge — in New York, Trump did not have the right to a jury trial — James is threatening to confiscate Trump’s assets before he is even able to appeal the verdict against him.
It’s happening because under New York law, James can force Trump to put up the whole judgment, $454 million, before he can appeal. And if Trump doesn’t produce the cash or secure a bond for the money, James can seize his assets and sell them off. That is all before an appeals court can review the highly questionable proceeding against Trump.
It’s all in a case that was suspiciously weak from the very beginning. James alleged that Trump overstated the values of his various properties for purposes of getting better terms for big real estate loans. One big problem in the case was that the banks involved, the alleged victims of Trump’s alleged fraud, testified that 1) they made the loans based on their own assessments of the properties, not Trump’s; 2) they were paid back on time and in full; 3) they made money on the loans; and 4) they would do business with Trump again.
All that meant James’s case against Trump was uniquely unfair. “An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of civil cases under [New York] law showed that such a penalty has only been imposed a dozen previous times,” the Associated Press reported in January, “and Trump’s case stands apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”
It’s an absolutely crazy situation. But Judge Arthur Engoron, a former cabbie who has served an undistinguished term in New York’s court system, ruled that Trump was guilty of fraud and would have to pay the $454 million. Engoron came up with that figure based on testimony from an “expert” witness that he, Engoron, found convincing. That means now James, who has promised for years to destroy Trump, could be just days away from seizing some of his properties.
Of course, all the usual suspects in the anti-Trump world are cheering them on. But what is interesting is that a few voices on the Left have spoken up to question the fairness of the proceedings. Not to defend Trump — they could never bring themselves to do that — but to ask whether the process being used to go after him is fair.
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, firmly in the liberal camp and firmly anti-Trump, expressed worries about the precedent the Trump case could set. From her column this week: “The essence of Trump’s argument on appeal is that the supposed harm he caused was minimal at best — all his lenders were repaid — and that the penalty levied against him was therefore wildly excessive. The conundrum is that the very size of the judgment, and the consequent size of the bond that Trump is required to post, might make him unable to appeal. Trump could pursue his case, but in the meantime, James would be entitled to seize and sell off the former president’s assets. That can’t be right. It would mean that the more outrageous and disproportionate a damages award is, the harder it is to appeal.”
Progressive commentator Cenk Uygur, also firmly anti-Trump, had a similar view. “To me, putting up all the cash upfront before you appeal the case seems draconian for everyone, not just Trump,” Uygur said on his program The Young Turks. “But what if he wins the appeal? So you made him sell all of his properties to get the collateral, but then he can’t buy them back. … So when his lawyer says ‘irreparable harm,’ in this case, financially speaking, it would be irreparable harm.”
It should be stressed that those are minority views on the Left. There will be no rewards for anyone on that side to express even a modest desire to see fairness for Trump. But the fact is, this is a bad case. It was politically motivated and based on a dubious claim that someone, anyone, suffered as a result of Trump’s overvaluations. Now it seeks to do him grievous damage based on that dubious premise.
But all of that is good for Democrats, or at least most of them think it is good for them. As this newsletter noted, last weekend President Joe Biden, speaking to a large media dinner in Washington, D.C., made a joke about Trump’s possible financial ruin at the hands of his, Biden’s, political allies. “Just yesterday, a defeated-looking man came up to me and said, ‘I’m being crushed by debt. I’m completely wiped out,'” Biden told the Gridiron Dinner attendees. “And I said, ‘Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.’”
It was a big joke. But $454 million is not a joke. Someday, of course, what goes around will come around for Democrats, probably in circumstances that none of them could predict right now. Someday, that is, unless common sense prevails first.
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