Trump Takes a Legal Battering

 

I am not a lawyer but it certainly looks to me like Trump took a legal battering yesterday (Sep. 21, 2022). If Trump was a battleship then what happened yesterday would be like taking two torpedoes below the waterline. He might not sink... but he is taking on water.

Torpedo 1

First, the New York Attorney General presented 220 pages of evidence that Trump has fraudulently misreported the values of his assets at least 200 times over a 10-year period. In one egregious case Trump had professionals appraise one of his buildings. They said it was worth just over $200 million. Trump then reported the building was worth over $500 million and even claimed that this figure was from the appraisers!

The New York Attorney General is planning to bring a lawsuit against Trump for these fraudulent reports. She is asking for various penalties including repayment of $250 million.

We don't know how all this will turn out but it is hard to imagine a jury seeing 200 documented cases of false financial statements intended to get loans, or better terms on loans, that would otherwise not have been available, without saying "Guilty!"

Torpedo 2

Then the second torpedo hit.

This one involves the government documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago.

In this case it certainly looked like Judge Cannon was trying to cut Trump some slack as a former president. Yesterday, three judges from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said, "No slack!"

The Department of Justice is clearly working on the assumption that Trump illegally had government documents at Mar-a-Lago. The only obvious defense is to say that Trump had a right to the documents. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday kind of blew that up when they said: “We cannot discern why plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings.”

Trump has been trying several stories lately to explain why he didn't do anything wrong. One of his stories is that he declassified these documents, possibly only in his mind, but declassified nonetheless.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also blew that up by saying it doesn't matter whether the documents were declassified or not: “The declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal,” the panel said. “So even if we assumed that plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them.”

So, two torpedoes yesterday.
Torpedo 1: the New York Attorney General released 220 pages of evidence that Trump committed fraud at least 200 times.
Torpedo 2: the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said those government documents at Mar-a-Lago did NOT belong to Trump, which is going to leave him hard-pressed to explain why he had them.

Trump has proven himself very good at damage control over the years.
He might not sink.
But he took two torpedoes yesterday.
Under the waterline....

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