In announcing on Monday that Donald Trump has the funds to provide the $400 million bond required to appeal his fraud case, his attorney Alina Habba said the prosecutors picked on the wrong guy:
What they’re trying to do … is put him out of business.
It’s not going to work, Number One. Number Two, what they’re doing is a scare tactic.
Unfortunately, they picked on the wrong guy … because he’s strong, he’s resilient, and he happens to have a lot of cash.
The judge ruled that Trump inflated his net worth to Deutsche Bank in order to obtain real estate loans. New York Attorney General Letitia James claimed that in doing so he committed fraud. She rejoiced at the verdict, calling it a “massive victory,” adding, “No matter how big, how rich, or how powerful you are, no one is above the law. Not even Donald Trump.”
Her victory lap isn’t likely to last long.
First of all, she couldn’t provide the names of the victims that Trump allegedly defrauded, because there weren’t any. Even Judge Engoron admitted as much:
Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff [convicted of running the largest Ponzi scheme in history in 2009].
The victim, Deutsche Bank, has total assets in excess of $2 trillion, and is fully able to protect itself from fraud. Yet it welcomed Trump as a client. And there was no evidence that Trump or his company ever defrauded the bank, and the loans were paid back in a timely manner.
Second, the law James was using to hammer Trump (as she promised to do when running for office) is one designed to protect innocent and naïve investors from scams, price-gouging, and other predatory business practices. Those cases, according to Reuters, “typically involve many victims who lost large sums of money to businesses that exploited their poor financial savvy.”
As Syracuse University law professor Gregory Germain noted, “The attorney general’s job is to protect people who can’t protect themselves. Here, we’re dealing with very sophisticated lenders who are fully capable of protecting themselves and haven’t asked the attorney general for help.”
That’s the case against Trump in a nutshell: no victims, and crimes charged by an overzealous attorney general stretching her authority in order to “get Trump” as she promised.
Trump’s attorney told Fox News that the entire case is politically motivated “because they can’t beat him in November.”
The appeal is likely to take months, if not years, before justice is served in this monumental political effort to keep Trump out of the White House.
