By Rich Lowry
Friday,
February 23, 2024
Donald Trump has
a $355 million judgment against him, and we’re just getting started.
The
judgment in the civil fraud case, which reaches $450 million including
prejudgment interest, is the handiwork of an elected Democratic judge in a case
brought by an elected Democratic prosecutor who pledged in her election
campaign to pursue Trump.
The
prosecutor, New York attorney general Letitia James, wielded an incredibly
broad statute meant to target consumer fraud. Executive Law 63(12) doesn’t
require any finding of intent to commit fraud or illegality, or require actual
victims. The judge in the case, Arthur Engoron, said it didn’t even matter
whether Trump’s exaggerated valuations of his assets were relied on by anyone.
It
is, in short, the magic bullet of anti-fraud statutes and the perfect weapon in
the hands of a politically motivated prosecutor looking for any reason to nail
one specific person whom she and all her supporters passionately hate.
The
shockingly extravagant judgment against Trump isn’t for damages — since there
were, ahem, no damages — but supposedly to “disgorge” his “ill-gotten gains.”
In
harassing lawsuits or prosecutions, it is often said that the process — in
other words, the time and money spent fighting the case — is the punishment.
That’s certainly true of Trump, whose campaign coffers have been drained by
legal fees and whose schedule has been clogged with court dates. But the
punishment is also the punishment.
On
top of the civil fraud case, Trump has been hit by $5 million and $83.3 million
verdicts in the two E. Jean Carroll cases. My colleague Andy McCarthy notes that the rules in such cases are
that the defendant “has to post the amount of the judgment, plus interest, in
order to assure the court that the appeal is not simply for purposes of delay,
and that the defendant will pay up if he loses.” That means Trump will have to
pony up half a billion dollars merely to appeal.
This
is before Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg comes in with his criminal
case, wherein the elected Democratic prosecutor has bootstrapped what should,
at most, be a misdemeanor involving hush money paid to a porn star into 34
felony counts.
Bragg’s
fraud case, in what’s becoming a theme, doesn’t allege that anyone actually was
defrauded, and was brought only after Bragg was criticized by allies for taking
a pass on charges that, to quote Abraham Lincoln, are “as thin as the
homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had
starved to death.”
“Lock
her up” was an unworthy slogan directed at Hillary Clinton back in 2016. Now,
Trump’s enemies have seen and raised that sentiment. They are moving to destroy
Trump’s business, drain his resources, blacken his reputation, sink his
presidential campaign, and, if they can, lock him up — and literally, not
figuratively.
What’s
happening in New York — and is being replicated at the federal level and
Georgia in the 2020 election cases — is law as bloodlust. It is a rejection of
the Anglo-American legal tradition as it has developed over the centuries to
enshrine neutrality and fair play in favor of something that is more
personalized and illiberal.
These
prosecutors are acting as if they consider the famous speech by then–attorney
general and future Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson not as a warning, but a
road map. He called “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor” that “he will
pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to
be prosecuted.” Given the variety of laws on the books, Jackson explained, “a
prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of
some act on the part of almost anyone.” Then, it becomes “a question of picking
the man and searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin
some offense on him.”
That
Donald Trump is the man in question doesn’t make this phenomenon any less
disgraceful or un-American.
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