Some signs coming out this past week that the ex-President’s legal troubles could be catching up to him once and for all.
Yes, I know, we’ve been here many, many times before. But aside from Trump’s Supreme Court appointees “betraying” him by refusing to block disclosure of his Presidential papers to the January 6 committee, The Guardian reports that the New York state investigation into Trump undervaluing his properties to evade taxes - and overvaluing them to attract lenders - might be coming to a head:
He bought the 2,000 acres (809 hectares) site at Menie in 2006 for $12.6m. Within five short years it was valued by the Trump Organization in its financial statements at $161m, an increase of almost 13 times.
By 2014, the windswept Scottish holding was put at $436m.
The hike caught the attention of Letitia James, New York state’s progressive attorney general known for her relentless pursuit of the rich and powerful. How the Scottish property came to rise meteorically in value is one of the matters she is exploring in her continuing investigation into Trump Organization finances.
In a new filing released this week designed to pressure Trump and two of his children – Ivanka and Donald Jr – into facing questioning, James forensically dissects how such strikingly large valuations came about. The 2011 estimate for the Scottish property, her investigators discovered, included an estimated £75m ($121m at 2011 exchange rates) for undeveloped land at the site.
Investigating deeper, they found that the figure had been created for an article in Forbes magazine. The revelation prompted a line in this week’s filing that must be among the tartest in US financial history.
“It thus appears,” James writes, “that the valuation of Trump Aberdeen used for Mr Trump’s financial statement was prepared for purposes of providing information to Forbes magazine in a quote.”
James’s legal document is packed with similarly juicy titbits. The 2014 value of the Scottish golf club was based in part on the projected sale price of 2,500 houses on the land, even though none of the houses actually existed and the company had planning permission for only half that number.
In 1995 the Trump Organization bought a parcel of land in Westchester, New York, known as the Seven Springs Estate, for $7.5m. By 2004 it was valued at $80m and by 2014 at $291m. That 2014 figure, James notes in another exquisitely tart reference, included a valuation of $161m for “seven non-existent mansions”.
The juiciest titbit of all concerns Trump’s former home, the gilded Fifth Avenue temple to his own ego dubbed “Versailles in the sky”, in which he lived before moving into the White House. James’s investigators were puzzled to find the Trump Tower triplex in Manhattan was listed at $327m in 2015, based on the apartment’s size, allegedly 30,000 sq feet.
In fact the property is 11,000 sq feet, which produces a value of $117m. That’s an overstatement in Trump’s official financial statements of more than $200m.
Now, one of the people quoted in the Guardian article is Michael Cohen. Ahem. But Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien, who has a past legal history of his own with Trump, also thinks the walls might be closing in:
James is pursuing her investigation as a civil case, which means that were Trump to be found liable it could cost him heavily in fines and penalties. More seriously, James is working in coordination with the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, a similarly tenacious and relentless prosecutor equipped with a large and highly experienced team of investigators.
Bragg is asking exactly the same questions as James: did the Trump Organization commit accounting, bank, tax or insurance fraud? The critical difference is that Bragg’s investigation is criminal, threatening Trump not with fines but prison time.
“Trump could end up in an orange jumpsuit at the end of that one,” said Timothy O’Brien, a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
O’Brien also has a personal stake in this story. His book TrumpNation, a 2005 biography that raised doubts about Trump’s actual wealth in eerily similar terms to the James and Bragg investigations today, so irked the real estate developer that he sued O’Brien for billions of dollars.
O’Brien’s lawyers deposed Trump as part of his defense. Over two days they managed to do something that has rarely been done before or since – they got the celebrity to acknowledge, no fewer than 30 times, that he had lied.
“My lawyers were so well prepared that when he sat down for the deposition we had documentary evidence at hand that showed the reality of what he had lied about or exaggerated. We simply pushed those over the table at him,” O’Brien recalled.
Many of the misleading elements – the value of his golf clubs, real estate assets in New York – were virtually identical to the details contained in this week’s filing. Which is why O’Brien feels confident in saying that the patterns that James outlines in her court document extend far back.
“This is behaviour that Trump has been engaging with since he was a toddler, frankly,” O’Brien said.
The libel suit was dismissed in 2009. The author was surprised that despite the mass of detail he had exposed in TrumpNation of potential malfeasance, no prosecutor showed interest.
“There was ample fodder in my book for prosecutors to pursue, but nobody picked it up. Law enforcement simply didn’t take Donald Trump seriously until it was too late.”
Times have changed. Trump is no longer a real estate magnate-turned-reality TV star, he is a former US president. The stakes have increased significantly and with them the scrutiny.
Hey, they didn’t seriously go after Epstein first, either.
Meanwhile, David French thinks the election-fraud investigation in Georgia might lead to charges against Trump:
Yesterday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sent a letter to the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court requesting to empanel a special grand jury “for the purpose of investigating the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia.”
The request was triggered by the reluctance of key witnesses, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to cooperate without being subpoenaed to testify. [Et tu, Brad? - DP] The special-purpose grand jury wouldn’t have the power to bring indictments, but it “may make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution as it shall see fit.”
With this letter, Willis brought back to the fore the actions surrounding the 2020 election contest by former President Donald Trump that are most suspect under both state and federal criminal law. The district attorney seeks a special grand jury with good reason, as Trump appears to have crossed the line into outright illegality, and that behavior merits a serious and thorough criminal investigation.
[…]
Of course, the efforts regarding Georgia were elements of a much larger effort to undermine and reverse the entire election. Most notably, we know that both behind the scenes and right out in the open Trump was demanding that Vice President Mike Pence take action to, at the very least, unlawfully delay the counting and certification of the Electoral College votes on January 6.
But the question remains: Were Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome in Georgia (and nationally) criminal? There is compelling evidence that they were, under both Georgia state law and federal criminal statutes.'
Perhaps the best guide to why is a Brookings Institution report, published in October, that assessed Trump’s actions in light of Georgia criminal law. Among the seven lawyers and scholars who wrote the report was Gwen Keyes Fleming, an experienced former Georgia prosecutor and the former DeKalb County district attorney. The report concluded that “Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.” The crimes include “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” and “conspiracy to commit election fraud,” among others.
I highlight those two statutes because they most plainly apply on their face. Georgia’s conspiracy-to-commit-election-fraud statute makes it a crime when one “conspires or agrees with another” to violate Georgia’s election laws and, crucially, states that “the crime shall be complete when the conspiracy or agreement is effected and an overt act in furtherance thereof has been committed, regardless of whether the violation of this chapter is consummated.” In other words, the scheme does not have to succeed to be criminal.
Georgia’s relevant criminal-solicitation statute is also both straightforward and deeply problematic for Trump. …
Of course the burden of proof in a criminal prosecution is much higher than for a civil case, and even if Trump is indicted, one MAGA devotee on the jury can scuttle the whole thing. But many people heard there was only one Black juror presiding over the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers in rural Georgia and assumed there was no way they’d be found guilty.
The Peach State can really surprise you sometimes, for reasons good (voting for Biden and two Democratic Senators in 2020) and bad (Marjorie Taylor Greene, blowing seemingly insurmountable leads in the Super Bowl).
Yes, we’re all frustrated with Trump apparently getting away with everything. But, as I am repeatedly forced to tell clients waiting for their hearing dates, the justice system moves excruciatingly slow. If Trump is sued and/or indicted, we want to be sure the cases against him are tight.
For what it’s worth, when Charlie Brown was in the hospital, Lucy made a solemn vow to not pull the football away if he got better. And she kept her promise:
There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story from the eighties, when the left-wing Sandinistas governing Nicaragua ordered a critical newspaper shut down. When asked about this, a spokesperson replied, “they said we were against freedom of speech. This was a lie and we couldn’t not let them publish it.”
Getting similar vibes from this story. “Antifa doesn’t exist and definitely isn’t a security threat, and if you say otherwise, we will beat the shit out of you.”
Dartmouth College administrators canceled an on-campus appearance by conservative journalist Andy Ngo’s Thursday night after a deluge of online threats from Antifa members.
Ngo, who has built a national reputation covering violent, far-Left protests often given little attention by the mainstream media, was set to appear at an event hosted by the Dartmouth College Republicans and the conservative activists of Turning Point USA.
[…]
Ngo and former Antifa member Gabe Nadales were set to speak about extremism in America at the event. After Dartmouth’s order, Ngo tweeted:
“The admin of @dartmouth College canceled the live speaking event about #Antifa featuring myself & @OGNadales due to security concerns. (Bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in.) This is extremely disappointing but we’re continuing in a virtual capacity.”
News of Ngo’s appearance got members of Antifa organized into planning a counterprotest in the days leading up to the event, with some making threats to stop Ngo at all costs.
“When you enter our home you play by our rules, not yours,” the Northeast Antifa social media account posted. “New England is anti-fascists, and we will hold that line till death.”
The Green Mountain John Brown Gun Club stated online it “called up reserves” of Antifa super soldiers [lol wut - DP] to be on hand for the event. A member of a Portland, Ore. Antifa group, Jonathan Dylan Chase, offered money for anyone who managed to assault Ngo during his Dartmouth appearance.
If the university really did shut down this talk for security reasons, I hope they’ll at least admit it. As with the Mohammed cartoons controversy a few years back, I have more respect for those who will censor out of admitted concerns for their safety instead of hiding behind “sensitivity” standards applied only intermittently.
I’d rather a school just come out and admit that on their campuses, hecklers have a veto and there’s no way to override it. You may have good reasons to dislike Andy Ngo and especially TPUSA, but guess what: it’s a question of if, not when, someone you do agree with and support gets silenced in the same manner.
Remember Jenny’s boyfriend in Forrest Gump, saying he only hit her because he was upset about the war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson? Same energy.
Kind of would have expected better from Reich. Have read The Common Good and a few other things he's penned. Heard him speak on the tube a couple of times. Too much temptation to turn a witty phrase these days, I guess. Mea culpa, btw. But then, I'm no Robert Reich. I'm just another schmoe with a keyboard, an isp and an opinion or two.