The Continuing Lawfare

The Epoch Times reported yesterday that the lawfare against President Trump slowed slightly yesterday when the New York state Supreme Court’s First Judicial Department Appellate Division granted a stay of enforcement on the $464 million judgment on former President Donald Trump.

The article reports:

The New York state Supreme Court’s First Judicial Department Appellate Division has granted a stay of enforcement on the $464 million judgment on former President Donald Trump with conditions, allowing The Trump Organization to avert having assets imminently seized by the New York attorney general.

The order came after defense attorneys argued that a $464 million bond was impossible after having contracted four brokers to negotiate with more than 30 companies. Sureties don’t issue bonds that large for private individuals, and even if The Trump Organization were a public conglomerate they could issue such a bond to, it would require some $570 million in cash to cover additional premiums.

The court’s conditions for lowering the bond include President Trump posting $175 million within 10 days and the other orders on the judgment going into effect.

The judgment permanently bars former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and former Comptroller Jeffrey McConney from serving in financial control of any New York business entity; permanently bars President Trump, Mr. Weisselberg, and Mr. McConney from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years; bars President Trump from applying for loans from New York financial institutions for three years; and bars Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump from serving as an officer or director in New York for two years.

There was no stay requested for the continuance of an independent monitor overseeing financial matters in The Trump Organization or the installation of a compliance officer.

Just for the record, there is no Constitutional justification for a government entity placing a monitor or a compliance officer in a private business. This is an affront to the concept of free enterprise that  built America. I would like to see every major business leave New York State until they rescind whatever ‘law’ they are using to justify their actions against President Trump.

A Sad Day For Equal Justice Under The Law

The New York case against President Trump is an insult to the rule of law. There was no jury (not that you could find an unbiased jury in New York) and no one was claiming that President Trump’s actions had a negative impact on anyone. But even putting that aside, the idea that the government can simply accuse someone of a crime, find a like-minded judge, and seize someone’s assets is scary.

On Thursday, The Daily Caller noted the following:

Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James recently took the first step towards seizing former President Donald Trump’s assets, public records show.

James filed judgements against Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization on March 6 with the clerk’s office in Westchester County, where Trump owns a golf resort and private estate called Seven Springs, according to Bloomberg News. Judge Arthur Engoron issued a judgement in February finding that Trump must pay $454 million in James’ lawsuit, which alleged he perpetuated financial fraud by overestimating the value of his assets to obtain loans.

Trump’s legal team wrote in a filing earlier this week that he could not post bond in his appeal, moving to stay the execution of the judgment. Trump has four days to come up with the amount before the March 25 deadline.

“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude…In short, ‘a bond of this size is rarely, if ever, seen,’” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

This is a sad day for America. How many businesses will be leaving New York as a result of this action?

Does The New York Legal System Recognize The Eighth Amendment?

The Eighth Amendment states:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

On February 27th, The American Thinker posted an article explaining how that amendment applies to the New York judgement against President Trump.

The article reports:

On February 16, 2024, a judge in New York State imposed fines totaling just over $360 million on former president Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, and several related Trump companies and trusts in the civil case brought by the New York attorney general.  President Trump’s sons Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump were fined just over $4 million each.  The court imposed additional sanctions, including injunctions against former president Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; and Eric Trump from serving as officers or directors in New York corporations for specified numbers of years, among other sanctions.

The media reporting on the court’s decision has been massive since the decision was rendered.  However, little or no reporting focused on the constitutionality of the fines under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.  President Trump and his co-defendants all have substantial 8th Amendment “excessive fine” challenges to raise.  In fact, a review of the facts and applicable law reveal that this decision is simply more election interference.

The article concludes:

Applying these factors to the New York court’s decision reveals that the fines are clearly excessive.  There are no victims in the Trump case.  No one was harmed.  Each and every financial institution involved was fully repaid and made money on its loans.  Further, a review of case law in New York demonstrates that there simply are no cases ordering a defendant to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in disgorgement without any victim being deprived of anything.  Finally, just how “reprehensible” is it to obtain loans and credit facilities and then pay the lenders back, in full, on time, in compliance with the agreement?  The answer is, not very.

Once again, a court in New York issued yet another political decision masquerading as justice.  The fines imposed by this New York court on former President Trump and his sons and businesses are grossly and unconstitutionally excessive.  While President Trump and his co-defendants undoubtedly have many defenses to the claims to raise on appeal, chief among them should be a constitutional challenge to these grossly excessive fines.

The U.S. Constitution is an amazing document. It is impartial when followed. My hope is that it will be followed in this case.

Will The Jury Listen To The Evidence?

On Thursday, The Epoch Times posted an article about the ongoing trial of President Trump in New York. It seems that the evidence doesn’t fit the charges.

The article reports:

“Financial reporting misconduct is a very important part of any course that I teach,” said Mr. Bartov (Eli Bartov, professor of accounting at NYU’s Stern School of Business and an award-winning researcher,). Being able to detect financial fraud early can be rather profitable, he explained, such as the famous case of Enron.

…Though the judge allowed him to testify as an expert in financial accounting and credit analysis, it came after lengthy objection from the state attorneys, who argued the professor had expertise in valuing publicly traded companies, not Deutsche Bank’s decisions. Mr. Kise commented that the state attorneys have objected to this one witness more than any of the others, “which tells me they’re terrified of this witness.”

Mr. Bartov said that after reviewing the lawsuit against the Trump Organization, “the most important evidence is the credit reports of Deutsche Bank.”

Those reports, rather than the Trump statements of financial condition (SFoCs), “really tell you the whole story,” he explained. “You can spin it any way you want, but everything is there.”

Mr. Bartov, who teaches students how to do credit reports just like the Deutsche Bank credit report on Trump Organization, said the person who prepared this report may well have once been his student.

“I am not going to provide an independent valuation of these because it’s not necessary, not because I can’t do it,” he explained. “My main finding is there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud.”

“The SFoCs over the years were not materially mistaken,” Mr. Bartov said.

The statement prompted the judge to ask if he meant that the attorney general’s “complaint had no merit.”

“This is absolutely my opinion,” he said. “You read the complaint: the complaint has numerous allegations of valuations of GAAP [generally accepted accounting principles]. There is no specific reference to a provision of GAAP that was violated.”

Mr. Bartov concluded:

Mr. Bartov, who teaches students how to do credit reports just like the Deutsche Bank credit report on Trump Organization, said the person who prepared this report may well have once been his student.

“I am not going to provide an independent valuation of these because it’s not necessary, not because I can’t do it,” he explained. “My main finding is there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud.”

“The SFoCs over the years were not materially mistaken,” Mr. Bartov said.

The statement prompted the judge to ask if he meant that the attorney general’s “complaint had no merit.”

“This is absolutely my opinion,” he said. “You read the complaint: the complaint has numerous allegations of valuations of GAAP [generally accepted accounting principles]. There is no specific reference to a provision of GAAP that was violated.”

Is the jury listening? Will the mainstream media report this? The answers to those two questions will tell us (if we don’t know already) whether or not this is a witchhunt.

I Guess That Testimony Did Not Go As Planned

On Friday, Breitbart posted an article about the ongoing trial of President Trump in New York. It is becoming apparent that President Trump is being tried for a crime where there was no victim.

The article reports:

A Deutsche Bank AG executive told a court in New York on Tuesday that it is not unusual for loan clients to overstate their net worth, and that the bank does its own due diligence in determining eligibility for loans.

Another executive testified that the bank had benefited from its business relationship with Trump and had wanted to continue that relationship — all of which runs against Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case against Trump: there was no one harmed by alleged overestimates of his worth.

Trump faces the first case ever brought in New York in which a borrower is being sued for fraud when no one is claiming actual harm. The state is seeking a $250 million fine against Trump, and wants him to be forced to give up control of his businesses.

Judge Arthur Engoron, an elected Democrat, issued a summary judgment that Trump was liable before Trump was ever able to mount a defense. The current phase of the trial is simply about the penalty. But it is undermining the state’s basic allegations.

On December 1st, The Messenger reported:

The evidence shows that banks made money on these loans, which were paid off either early or on time. In fact, none of the banks complained about the Trump organization’s estimations, which were accompanied by a warning that the banks should not rely on those estimates.

Moreover, James is seeking to kill a corporation once viewed as iconic in New York, not just by denying the certificates for the Trumps to do business in the city but by imposing $250 million in penalties for money that no one actually lost.

That all became curiouser this week when two bankers were called by the defense. Rosemary Vrablic and David Williams worked on Deutsche Bank loans to the Trumps for years, and they testified that the banks made millions and viewed Trump as a much-sought-after “whale” client — what Vrablic described as a “very high net-worth individual.”

Williams testified that net worth is “subjective” in such documents as property valuations and are offered as mere “estimates.” It is not uncommon for a bank’s estimates to differ from a client’s.

If nothing else, this illustrates the absurdity of the case.

Pettiness On Parade

Mayor de Blasio will be leaving office soon. His term in office has not been without some pretty major scandals (generally ignored by the media). In March 2019, The Federalist Papers reported that the Mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray, was given $850 million for a mental health program she was spearheading. The second major scandal involved the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.

The article reports:

The program, ThriveNYC, has fallen far behind its goals and appears to be a massive failure for the city.

But even in spite of that the city has decided to increase the budget of the program which is expected to spend $5 billion in the next five years.

The program was set up to screen 78,000 new mothers for post-natal depression. What actually happened between 2016 and 2018 was that slightly more than 28,000 patients were screened and 570 were offered help. Narcan kits were also handed out, but there are no statistics saying how many were used. When an attempt was made to acquire a budget, they received two budgets with very different numbers. No one seems to know exactly how the money was spent.

There was also the matter of the horses in Central Park (article here). In early 2014, Mayor de Blasio announced that he was going to put a high priority on removing the horse-drawn carriages from Central Park. After all, asking horses to pull carriages in a world of automobiles is cruel. Animal rights groups backed him up. Well, not so fast. It seems that Steve Nislick, chief executive officer of a New Jersey-based real-estate development company, Edison Properties, has an interest in removing the horses–Edison Properties owns multiple properties in the area where the stables for the horses are located. New development of those lots could be quite profitable.

Now to today’s scandal. Mayor de Blasio wants to break the Trump organization’s contract to run the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx by Nov. 14 – a move that could cost the city over $30 million. As if the city didn’t have enough financial challenges.

Red State reported yesterday:

Former President Donald Trump got a reprieve from the city’s efforts to evict his company from the Ferry Point golf course.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James granted the Trump Organization a temporary stay from Mayor de Blasio’s effort to break the company’s contract to run the Bronx course by Nov. 14 – a move that could cost the city over $30 million.

After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, de Blasio ended contracts for Trump’s company to operate the Central Park Carousel, the Wollman and Lasker ice rinks in the park, and the Bronx golf course.

The city’s Parks Department quickly picked new operators for the ice rinks and eventually found a new company to run the the carousel. It also awarded a new license for the golf course to a Georgia-based company, Bobby Jones Links.

The Trump Organization sued over the golf contract, maintaining in court papers that the deal was nixed over politics.

Judge James granted a stay…

Stay tuned for more foolishness out of New York City.

 

Who Is Felix Satar?

On September 16th Judicial Watch posted the following:

Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice seeking all records of communications, including FBI 302 interview reports and offer agreements between former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office and Felix Sater, a former Trump organization official who was recently confirmed to be an informant for the FBI and CIA. Sater reportedly pushed a Russian real estate deal in 2016 while working at the Trump organization.

Sater reportedly “began working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998, after he was caught in a stock-fraud scheme.” It was Andrew Weissmann who, as supervising assistant U.S. attorney, signed the agreement that brought Sater on as a government informant. Federal prosecutors wrote a letter to Sater’s sentencing judge on August 27, 2009, in an effort to get him a lighter sentence: “Sater’s cooperation was of a depth and breadth rarely seen.”

Sater also was reportedly a CIA informant in the mid-2000s for the CIA during his undercover work with Russian military and intelligence officers.

The Mueller report mentions Sater more than 100 times but fails to mention that he was an active undercover informant for the FBI/CIA for more than two decades. In 2017, Sater was the subject of two interviews conducted under a proffer agreement with Mueller’s office according to page 69, footnote 304 of Mueller’s report on his Russian collusion investigation.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia after Mueller’s office, a component of the DOJ, failed to respond to a June 12, 2019, FOIA request for FBI “302” interview reports of Sater that are referred to in the Mueller report; any offer agreements between Sater and the U.S. government; and records of communications between Sater and government employees (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-02568)).

In a June 25, 2019 report, Judicial Watch chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison highlighted that:

Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for [Trump attorney Michael] Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization, to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners.

Though his proposal appears to have been rejected by the Trump campaign, Sater persisted. “Into the spring of 2016,” the Mueller Report notes, “Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow.” Sater emails Cohen that he is trying to arrange a meeting between “the 2 big guys,” Putin and Trump.

Sater’s re-emergence “suggests the possibility of a more sinister counter-narrative: that someone may have been trying to lure Trump into a trap—a politically damaging entanglement with Moscow money,” Morrison wrote.

Sater reportedly testified for eight hours in a closed-door session before the Schiff-led intelligence committee on July 9, 2019. Sater previously said he believes the Trump Tower Moscow project was no different from other Trump real estate projects that were also in the works. “I have worked on probably five or six Trump Tower projects in the United States and at least that many internationally….”

“Was a Russian real estate deal being pushed on the Trump Organization part of a set-up by a FBI/CIA informant?” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The new Judicial Watch lawsuit attempts to shed light on what could be another aspect of Deep State abusive Spygate operation targeting President Trump.”

This is just ugly. As more of this information comes out, I hope there is a huge outcry from the public to put the people responsible for misusing government agencies in jail. If that does not happen, we no longer have a justice system in America.

George Washington Didn’t Have These Problems

When George Washington became President, he was a very wealthy man. He had been a successful land surveyor who used his profits to buy land in Virginia. He was a successful farmer, and eventually grew his Mount Vernon farm from 2,000 acres to 8,000 acres. Because America was a very different place then, he was allowed to enjoy the profits of his farm by putting other people in charge of it during his time in the White House. Class warfare had not yet reared its ugly head, and Americans were working together to build their country. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost that spirit.

On Thursday, Townhall.com posted an article about the Senate Confirmation Hearings for Ben Carson as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren spent a large part of her questioning wanting to make sure that no company connected with Donald Trump would be involved in any HUD projects during the time that Donald Trump was President. I agree that no company connected with Donald Trump should be given preferential treatment, but should they be discriminated against if they are the lowest bidder on a project?

The article reports:

Warren repeatedly pressed Carson over whether he could assure the American people that not a single taxpayer dollar would go towards contracts with any real estate companies linked to the president-elect.

“Can you assure me that not a single taxpayer dollar you give out will financially benefit the president-elect or his family?” Warren asked Carson.

The retired neurosurgeon promised he would not “play favorites.”

“I can assure you that the things that I do are driven by a sense of morals and values,” he said.

“It’s not about your good faith,” she replied. “My concern is whether or not, among the billions of dollars you will be responsible for handing out in grants and loans, can you just assure us that not $1 will go to benefit either the president-elect or his family?”

The article concludes:

“The problem is that you can’t assure us that HUD money — not of $10 varieties but of multimillion-dollar varieties — will not end up in the president-elect’s pockets,” Warren responded.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, the lead Democrat on the banking panel, echoed concerns raised by Warren.

Trump has an interest in at least one low-income hosing development — Starrett City — which Brown said posed an inherent conflict for the new leader of HUD.

Starrett City is a massive development in Brooklyn that sends Trump millions in revenue through rent. In his financial disclosures filed as president, Trump lists his 4 percent share in the asset as being worth between $5 million and $25 million. 

Brown pressed Carson to stay in contact with the committee if he — or anyone at HUD — has communications with anyone in the Trump Organization or the White House about development projects.

Carson said he would be happy to set up a process that identifies conflicts.

This is an example of why Ben Carson, as smart and honest as he is, should never be President. He was just too nice to this awful lady. I am not supporting corruption, but if Trump Enterprises can do a job better and cheaper than another company, Trump Enterprises should get the job. All you need is a blind bidding process. This is much ado about nothing.

One thing we all need to remember about having Donald Trump in the White House is that he is very rich. He doesn’t need to cheat to get rich. He doesn’t need to take donations to a foundation from foreign countries that want favors. He doesn’t need to take million dollar vacations on the taxpayers’ money. He doesn’t need to take items out of the White House when he leaves (if you doubt that the Clintons did that, read the GAO report (link and article here). There are also enough Trump resorts around the world to accommodate his vacations.

Senator Warren wasted her time during the confirmation hearings. She should have asked Dr. Carson how he plans to help poor families escape poverty. He is certainly an example of the fact that it can be done. If the government were more concerned about helping people escape poverty rather than simply adding to the bloated bureaucracy that only continues if they remain in poverty, the federal deficit would be considerably lower. It will be refreshing to see a HUD Secretary who wants to decrease the number of people dependent on government rather than grow the government infrastructure that benefits the government more than the poor.