By Mike Huckabee
February 19, 2024
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The ruling was hardly surprising because this verdict was cooked in before this farce even started. There was no jury, and the judge found Trump guilty before even looking at the evidence or hearing the witnesses. He relied on property tax valuations of real estate instead of market valuations (infamously finding that the Mar-A-Lago resort was worth less than a small vacant lot near it was selling for.) And he ignored the testimony of an expert who said Trump’s loans were common practice, and one of the alleged “victims,” a banker who okayed a loan and said disagreements about property values are a constant. The bank made the loan anyway because they knew Trump was good for it, and he paid it off on time.
The trial was just to assess punishment, and the only surprise was that the judge didn’t go along with rabid Trump-hating New York Attorney General Letitia James (who campaigned on a promise of getting Trump, with charges to be filled in later) and impose a corporate death sentence by canceling his New York business certificates for life. I guess he realized that putting all those people out of work and losing all of the Trump Corporation’s tax revenue would be going too far. But I wouldn’t blame Trump if he made that happen anyway.
The judge also fined Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., $4 million each and barred them from doing business in New York for two years, despite testimony that they had nothing to do with the loan contracts. But they are guilty of being named “Trump.”
Combined with the equally outrageous New York jury verdict of $83.3 million in damages for allegedly defaming E. Jean Carroll when he denied her unverified claim that he raped her at some unspecified time in the 1990s, this totals nearly half a billion dollars in damages he’s been ordered to pay by biased New York courts for charges that never would’ve gotten within a mile of a courtroom if his name weren’t Trump. At this point, you’d have to watch MSNBC exclusively not to be smart enough to see that. Law professors who don’t appear on MSNBC agreed, with Alan Dershowitz comparing this latest verdict to a banana republic and Jonathan Turley calling the judge’s ruling “confiscatory, extreme, and abusive.”
Of course, Trump is appealing both of these kangaroo court rulings, but he’ll have to put up a bond while it’s on appeal. Since hamstringing his campaign by bankrupting him is one of the four prongs of the left’s lawfare strategy (smear him, distract him, bankrupt him, imprison him), they’ll call that a victory. As usual, the Babylon Bee nailed the truth with satire.
https://babylonbee.com/news/judge-orders-trump-to-pay-whatever-amount-it-takes-to-bankrupt-campaign
An appeal may be tougher because as a state law, it will have to be appealed to New York state courts. On the other hand, they might consider that if they okay using this law as a hostile and confiscatory weapon, it could ignite an even faster exodus of taxpaying businesses to other states. “Getting Trump” would then be a pyrrhic victory indeed.
After the verdict, AG Letitia James piously intoned that it shows that “everyone must play by the same rules.” One problem with that: the A.P. researched 70 years of case law and couldn’t find a single instance other than Trump of an entrepreneur or business being sued for allegedly inflating real estate values when there were no victims who suffered any damages.
This is hardly surprising, since Trump is constantly setting new legal precedents, like being charged with felonies for inciting a riot after he told people to obey the cops and protest peacefully, or having his home raided for possessing his own presidential documents, or being ordered to pay $83 million for defamation for denying that he raped a woman he was never charged with nor convicted of raping, or being removed from the ballot for committing insurrection when he’s never even been charged with insurrection. Law schools will have to build new libraries just to hold all the new and unprecedented cases that involve only Donald Trump.
I think these rigged convictions and outrageous punishments are not only going to be thrown out on appeal when they get to real courts, but this is going to backfire bigly on the Democrats. It already did with the indictments: they thought that simply charging him with nearly a hundred crimes would make his supporters abandon him. All it did was convince even more people that the “justice” system was politically corrupt. So now, they’re hanging their hopes on the idea that hitting him with outrageous fines and punishments will convince people that he’s crooked. I think all it will do is convince even more people of how crooked the justice system has become under them.
I wouldn’t presume to give Trump business advice, but were I he, I would not only move all my businesses to a free state like Florida or Texas (or Arkansas!), I would start a new consulting business to help other businesses arrange their moves out of blue states like New York, where they are punished for their political beliefs and bled dry as cash cows. I think he could easily make more than half a billion dollars in the first year, and I’m sure he would feel satisfaction in knowing that New York lost so much of its tax base that it wouldn’t be able to pay the salaries of its corrupt, power-abusing Democrat officials.
RELATED: If businesses need any more reasons to get the heck out of New York, on the same day Trump was fined $370 million for taking out loans that were paid back in full, another New York judge released an illegal alien accused of brutally beating an NYPD cop on one dollar of bail. Justice is no longer blind, but it is mentally impaired.
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