Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, came under fire from a veteran federal prosecutor for pursuing former President Donald Trump in a case in which no one was monetarily harmed.
Andrew McCarthy claimed in an opinion piece that James is “inventing losses no one ever suffered” in an effort to “get Trump.”
James sued the former president and the Trump Organisation for $250 million earlier this year, claiming that he committed fraud by inflating the value of his properties to obtain better loan and insurance deals. Trump has retorted that throughout the years, he has done business with banks and other businesses, and none of them have ever experienced financial loss or harm.
McCarthy basically agrees with Trump’s position when he writes in National Review that Tish James and Arthur Engoron are fabricating victims because there aren’t enough in the case against the former president.
The former prosecutor continued by saying that banks would have undoubtedly sought legal action against Trump if he had actually defrauded them out of more than $168 million, but they never did since they had never suffered financial loss.
The state attorney general and her cat’s paw in a judge’s robe, Arthur Engoron, and elected progressive Democrat Letitia James, “are not stopping [Trump] from concocting a mammoth fraud scheme in which we’re to believe the banks lost their shirts… but just forgot to complain about it,” he wrote.
He continued by pointing out that Trump had “no incentive to litigate as if he were in a normal legal proceeding” because Engoron had declared that Trump had committed fraud even before the trial had begun. McCarthy said that Trump has been permitted to argue with the judge and the prosecutors in order to show that the case is nothing more than a politicised one.
Then he mentioned:
The trial that has been going on since Engoron’s decision is focused on determining the appropriate amount of damages for Trump’s violation. There is more to it than that, as I explained here, but the main focus of the trial is whether Engoron will disgorge Trump and his real estate enterprise of at least $250 million in what she claims are “ill-gotten” gains at James’s insistence.
Obviously then, the Trump defense seeks to minimize the damages. Trump is trying to do that by denying that there was any fraud at all, arguing that his assets are worth more than what is claimed in the SFCs. But Engoron keeps cutting Trump and his lawyers off by insisting that he has already decided Trump (a) committed fraud, (b) overvalued his assets, and (c) cannot be insulated by the disclaimer in his SFCs (advising counterparties to do their own due diligence in evaluating asset values).
That has left the former president wondering why even have a trial if the outcome was predetermined, McCarthy said.