The judge is so sensitive about the “no victims” hole in the state’s fraud case that, in his pretrial ruling, he fined Trump’s lawyers for repeatedly bringing up this “completely irrelevant” point. But James knows it’s a problem: Her reliance on prior New York precedents for the proposition that she needn’t show harm in order to disgorge profits could be attacked on appeal because she has brought an unprecedented case: The state has never before sued under §63(12) on a theory of overvalued assets (which is hardly unusual behavior) where no counterparty claims to have been defrauded — the first ever such case just happens to be this one, brought against the Democrats’ archnemesis by an elected Democratic AG who campaigned for office in heavily Democratic New York on a vow to get Trump on . . . something — anything.
So James has come up with a theory that Trump’s alleged fraud (which Engoron has decreed is proven fraud) caused stratospheric losses for financial institutions — they just, apparently, failed to notice. …
It’s an amazing thing to watch: Donald Trump, front-runner in the Republican presidential nomination race, is on trial for supposedly inventing wealth that he didn’t have; and in order to nail him, elected Democrats Tish James and Arthur Engoron are inventing losses that no one ever suffered.
[It’s a political circus, and an embarrassment to the New York bar. This case will get thrown out on appeal and never should have been pursued in the first place, as Andy says. The clear conclusion drawn from that is that James wanted to pillory Trump to make good on a campaign promise, which is an affront to the rule of law. — Ed]
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