Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“In a triumph for Donald Trump, a New York state appeals court on Thursday threw out a half-billion-dollar penalty while preserving a fraud case against him… A trial judge had ordered the penalty in February 2024 after finding that Trump fraudulently overstated his wealth and the value of his properties to bolster his family business. Trump denied wrongdoing, and his lawyers argued that any errors in reporting his fortune to his lenders and business partners were irrelevant because none was harmed…
“Four judges on the five-member appeals court voted to let the fraud finding stand, but all found problems in the judge's handling of the case and two would have ordered a new trial. A fifth judge would have dismissed the case altogether, and all five judges would have voided the payout…
“Two judges involved in the decision agreed the defendants ‘engaged in a decade-long pattern of financial fraud and illegality.’ But they said Trump's wrongdoing did not cause ‘cataclysmic harm’ to justify a half-billion-dollar award… Two other judges, John Higgitt and Llinet Rosado, agreed James had authority to sue, but a new trial was necessary because [Judge] Engoron was too quick to find fraud… Justice David Friedman, the only judge on the panel appointed by a Republican governor, said James' case was politically motivated, and voters had rendered their own verdict on Trump's political career.” Reuters
Here’s our coverage of the trial verdict. The Flip Side
The left is disappointed but not surprised by the ruling.
“Clicking into the PDF on the New York court system’s website and seeing that the document spans 323 pages was a hint that it contained something unusual. But that was just the beginning. The oddity grew upon seeing, toward the start of the first of three separate decisions from the five-justice panel, that ‘none of the three decisions garners a majority.’ OK, so how do we get a clear decision out of this? We don’t, really.”
Jordan Rubin, MSNBC
“Ultimately, New York’s high court will decide whether the fraud verdict stands and if Trump is actually off the hook. For now, it seems like the price tag for wrongdoing will shrink, but that’s as much as we can say…
“Other limitations on the Trump Organization’s ability to do business in New York remain in place, including a ban on Trump serving in top-level positions at his own company for three years while his [sons] are banned for at least two years.”
Shirin Ali, Slate
“[The] fragmentation is partly a result of the novelty of the case concocted by [NY AG Letitia James]. In 2018, she made pursuing Trump part of her campaign. This message resonated in a state Trump had lost two years earlier by 22 percentage points. But it also cast a cloud over her motives… Aggressive accounting is common in the real estate business, and banks didn’t sue or lose money on the deals…
“The Thursday decision comes as the Trump administration is launching its own version of show-me-the-man-and-I’ll-show-you-the-crime lawfare. ‘Mortgage fraud’ seems to be the administration’s weapon of choice, and it has referred James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California) and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, for criminal investigation…
“Trump officials would be wise to pay attention to the warning of David Friedman, the New York judge on the appeals panel most sympathetic to Trump’s arguments. Friedman argued that James’s case amounted to ‘selective enforcement’ of a fraud statute ‘in retaliation for President Trump’s exercise of his First Amendment right to participate in the political process.’”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
Some argue, “When a single mother lies about her income to qualify for food stamps, prosecutors call it welfare fraud. The penalties include jail time, criminal records, and lives destroyed. When a working-class man exaggerates his wages on a mortgage application, banks call in the feds. People have been sentenced to years in prison for fraud measured in the tens of thousands of dollars…
“[Trump] inflated his net worth by billions — not once, not twice, but systematically for years — to shave millions off his borrowing costs. That’s not a clerical error. That’s fraud at scale. And yet, instead of handcuffs, he gets an appeals court to say a $500 million penalty is too harsh… When billionaires can cheat and appeal their way out of punishment while ordinary people are jailed for far less, the rule of law becomes a hollow slogan.”
General Azmundus, Substack
The right applauds the ruling as vindication for Trump.
The right applauds the ruling as vindication for Trump.
“Remember, [NY AG Letitia] James campaigned on promises to find something (anything!) to target Trump for — a witch-hunt, that is, that should have disqualified her from the start. These nothingburger civil charges were the best she could find; if they’d wound up before a less-biased judge than Engoron, they would’ve died long ago…
“After all, Trump warned the bankers, etc., that those estimates weren’t audited and assumed they’d do their own due diligence. And indeed, none of them ever complained, let alone sued Trump on their own. Indeed, two of the five appellate judges found serious errors in the trial proceedings and sought a re-do; [a third judge] said the whole case merits immediate dismissal… Meanwhile, the two federal criminal cases against Trump are now kaput; the Georgia state prosecution imploded, too…
“In the one criminal case where Trump was found guilty (in deeply anti-Trump Manhattan), the judge socked him with… no penalties whatsoever — and the prez is appealing that decision, too, on overwhelmingly strong grounds. As Judge Friedman suggested, Democrats thought if they couldn’t stop Trump through normal democratic means, they’d get the courts to stop him (to save ‘democracy’!). They failed on both fronts.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“[Judge David Friedman] detailed how the underlying law ‘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.’ He accused Engoron of participating in an effort clearly directed by James at ‘ending with the derailment of President Trump’s political career and the destruction of his real estate business.’”
Jonathan Turley, Fox News
“So arbitrary was James’s damage claim that (a) she initially valued it at $250 million, and then (b) by the end of the trial, after she’d proved no fraud victims, she nonetheless hiked the damages claim to nearly $400 million…
“Unsurprisingly, then, the appellate division was skeptical from the outset about the astronomical penalty. The patent lack of fit between the wrong and the punishment explains why, in one of its first actions in the case, the appellate court slashed the amount of the bond Trump was required to post… And now, the court has slashed the financial penalty to zero.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
“Between March and August 2023, three Democratic prosecutors filed 91 felony charges against Trump. A Democratic law enforcement official, AG James, pursued a nearly half-billion-dollar lawsuit to destroy his business empire. Other officials went to court to disqualify him from the presidency. Others have still pursued legal action against him for different reasons. Now, Trump is trying to undo some of the immense damage done by that lawfare campaign. So far, he is making progress.”
Byron York, Washington Examiner
“For 10 years, I’ve been hearing that we needed to fight fire with fire, to oppose Trump by becoming him, to protect our supposedly sacred liberal institutions by taking some shortcut that carved a destructive path straight through them: cracking down on speech, abandoning the norms of journalistic objectivity, making unprecedented use of prosecutorial power…
“These were bad ideas in their own right, and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump. The risk of further prosecution arguably made Trump more determined to regain power, and voters more willing to give it to him… The only way to have the rule of law is to have the rule of law. There is no one weird trick where first we abuse the law to prosecute our political enemies and then, somehow, we have the rule of law again.”
Megan McArdle, Washington Post
