When justice is weaponized, America ceases to be America.
Letitia James is not wrong in principle: there are hundreds of NYC developers who exaggerate the value of their properties. She is grossly wrong in overtly targeting just one.
The Trump civil fraud trial is the greatest financial injustice perpetrated on an American civilian in my lifetime. First, before any investigation, let alone a finding, there was an explicit targeting of an innocent American by Letitia James in her 2018 campaign for New York district attorney. “I will shine a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, all his dealings,” the TDS-afflicted candidate gleefully campaigned. She falsely labeled Trump “this illegitimate President,” thereby trucking in the DNC-concocted lies of the Steele Dossier and Trump-Russia collusion hoax. For these statements alone, James should have been disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct, or at least prevented from prosecuting the former President, his family, and associates.
Second, during her campaign and since her election, the dangerously obsessed DA has zeroed in on Trump with extreme animus, at the expense of real criminals, including New York's mushrooming number of violent and illegal ones. Doing her best imitation of Lavrentiy Beria—Stalin’s secret police chief and orchestrator of the Communist dictator’s decades-long reign of terror—James followed his dictum: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”
Third, there was the show trial with a transparently biased judge, Arthur Engoron, presiding over a case with no victims, no claims of fraud, no injury, and no loss of money, followed by a verdict based on an absurd interpretation of New York’s stretched and alarming anti-fraud statute, Executive Law 63(12).
Finally, there was the obscene $450 million economic death penalty for the targeted mark, resulting in the evisceration of his life's work, despite no complaint or bona fide crime. The trial did confirm, however, that Trump—ever the salesman—bloviates and exaggerates. Wow, I never knew that.
These actions by James, who has never built a thing in her life outside of a career in left-wing activism, violated Trump’s 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendment rights. That is contrary to the main job of an Attorney General, which is to fairly and dispassionately protect civilians who lack the resources to protect themselves and to protect all civilians from abusive state overreach. Outside of Trump himself, there were no such victims in this case. The “Progressive” DA’s supposed "victim" was, laughably, global finance juggernaut Deutsche Bank, which had more than enough resources to defend itself and perform due diligence. Deutsche went ahead with the Trump loans––which were paid back in full and on time––and made good money to boot. The bank even said it wanted to do “more business” with Trump. Does poor little Deutsche sound like an aggrieved party?
Real estate is a give-and-take game. You aim to bankroll and sell an asset for as much as you can. At its AOC “tippy-top,” lenders, sellers, buyers, and agents are engaged in high-stakes kabuki theatre. It's not the government's job to interfere in their price discovery process, let alone tell large multinational banks how to suck more money out of a psychotically loathed political mark. In a capitalist system, value is determined by the market, not by Woke district attorneys cherry-picking their prey.
Misinformed defenders of the vindictive “Tish” James--who, like VP Kamala Harris and Georgia DA Fani Willis, is another Howard University racialist with a Socialist axe to grind--say this verdict is akin to stopping people for speeding though no accident occurred. The difference with real estate is that there is no clear bright line on what the "correct" speed, née, price, is. I doubt we want the government to dictate to us what that price might be.
Defenders of this decision shout, “Trump had it coming!” as if laws exist to settle political scores or perfect previous attempts to “get” the political target. You may not like Trump’s punk-rock, in-your-face, Libertarian populism, let alone his mean-tweet “grab-‘em-by-the-pussy” bad-boy bravado. Or that he threatens the corrupt status quo Muzak of a Biden, Obama, or Bush. Or that he is a disrupter—Elon without the tech––questioning the forever-war open-border globalist world order that disproportionately harms America’s working class. Or that he will likely end the grinding human carnage in Ukraine. “No military-industrialist wants that! The Ukraine War has been a weapons-testing bonanza!”
You also might not like that Trump exercised his First Amendment rights to question the legitimacy of the heavily gamed 2020 election. Never mind that Democrats used the same free speech rights to deny the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, falsely claiming long past the January certification vote that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election––and then launching a specious special counsel inquiry in delusional hopes of confirming just that!
As evidence of the extreme personal prejudice at play in this outrageous decision, upon the verdict’s disclosure, prominent New York real estate players announced they would exit the New York market. Oh no, cried the banana republic DA, we didn't mean you guys! Notably, “Litigious” James has also gone after the National Rifle Association, but pointedly refuses to investigate her demonstrably corrupt and violence-promoting home-team organizations of Black Lives Matter and Al Sharpton’s National Extortion, er, Action, Network.
You can hate Trump all you want, but if in your blind hatred of the man, you cannot grasp the grotesque perversion of justice here, then you might as well call yourself a Stalinist. This is a bright line for me and our nation. Our Constitution protects the rights of ALL Americans. If you do not get that, if you believe that the law can be used as political warfare to target people you don't like, if you believe we should first find the person and then match him or her to a crime, we need to part ways. Because that's an America I cannot abide.