One of the tricks of knowing when a leftist judge is pulling a fast one is if the decision is really, really long. Doing this, as W.S. Gilbert would have said, is intended to \u201clend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative.\u201d In modern English: it hides the dishonesty. The fact that Judge Arthur Engoron, who repeatedly showed his partisan stripes, needed 92 pages to impose an almost $400 million hit-job judgment against Trump is just another phase in the Democrat establishment\u2019s war against America. This won\u2019t harm Trump. It will only make him greater.<\/p>\n
Hiding behind the 92 pages of legal-sounding garbage\u00a0are some simple facts. As you recall, New York Attorney General Letitia James ran on a single platform: I will destroy Trump. She then filed a civil suit against him for fraud, alleging that he lied to banks about the value of his assets to obtain loans. The suit ignored two pertinent points:<\/p>\n
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- None of the banks suffered damages. Indeed, all of them were fully repaid in a timely manner, and they were happy to do business with Trump again.<\/li>\n
- When a corporation comes to a bank seeking a large loan and offering its own valuation of its assets, the bank\u2019s due diligence requires it to confirm those valuations. At this business scale, banks never take the borrower\u2019s valuations without double-checking. When you\u2019re at Trump\u2019s level, you really can\u2019t lie for a loan.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Once in court, there were some other problems. For example, Judge Engoron ruled that the alleged lie at the core of Trump\u2019s efforts to obtain funds fraudulently was his claim about Mar-a-Lago\u2019s worth. According to Engoron, in a region in which\u00a0property values routinely exceed $100 million<\/a>, Mar-a-Lago was worth only $18 million. (In fact, even in that region, Mar-a-Lago is special because it\u2019s ginormous and has two ocean fronts\u2014one on the east and one on the west.) That was a ruling driven either by profound ignorance or partisan fraud.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nTrump fighting the balrog by AI.<\/em><\/p>\n
Engoron also\u00a0has a history<\/a>\u00a0of showing that he believes that the rules don\u2019t apply to him. In 2002, when he was working for a judge, he started to date the secretary who worked for a plaintiff\u2019s lawyer, a gross ethical violation. He\u2019s also\u00a0explicitly said<\/a>\u00a0that rules he doesn\u2019t like don\u2019t apply. (Leftist judges do this a lot. I know. I\u2019ve seen it.)<\/p>\n
And, of course, he\u2019s utterly\u00a0beholden to the Democrat establishment<\/a>\u00a0in New York. That establishment got him onto the bench, and that\u2019s where his loyalties are obviously going to lie.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\nGiven the above factors,\u00a0the judgment against Trump<\/a>\u00a0was inevitable. It\u2019s the amount that\u2019s so staggering.\u00a0Never before in New York\u2019s history<\/a>\u00a0has a court awarded damages in such staggering amounts relative to actual damages\u2014and here,\u00a0no one was actually damaged<\/em><\/strong>. Indeed, generally speaking, in my thirty-five years as an attorney, I\u2019ve never seen an appellate court uphold damages so disproportionate to actual injuries suffered\u2014and again, there were\u00a0no injuries<\/em>\u00a0in this case. The fact that there were no injuries in itself means that the case, from ig to zack, denied Trump due process.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t see the judgment surviving an appeal, that\u2019s for sure. However, from the Democrat perspective, an appeal is irrelevant. As far as Democrats are concerned, the taint is in place now. Surely, Americans will never vote for a businessman kicked out of New York state for three years and told to pay almost $400 million in damages for bank fraud.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not so sure.<\/p>\n
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Second, Americans understand that the Biden administration and its minions in the tech sector have utterly destroyed the First Amendment\u2019s rights of speech and assembly. Thanks to January 6, conservatives know that assembly is barred to them. Tech companies\u2014and we know now that they work with the Deep State\u2014have censored them. And according to a new Tucker interview that I haven\u2019t yet had the chance to watch, the military-industrial complex is censoring Americans in ways that are invisible and catastrophic:<\/p>\n