‘This is HUGE!’ Appeals court kills wild half-billion dollar penalty against President Trump

Posted on by Constitutional Nobody
President Donald J. Trump smiles as he meets with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov Monday, Nov. 25, 2019, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

A panel of appeals court judges, only a day after being accused publicly of “navel-gazing” for their lengthy delay in giving President Donald Trump relief from what has been confirmed as a politicized and biased “fraud” penalty of half a billion dollars, has canceled that threat.

The Washington Examiner confirmed the five-judge panel of the appellate division in New York threw out the judgment delivered by Arthur Engoron, a judge at the entry court level who has been openly derisive of Trump.

The ruling said his judgment was unconstitutional and violated the U.S. Constitution, which bars excessive fines.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who had campaigned for office on the promise to “get” President Trump, without citing any evidence of wrongdoing, then created “fraud” claims against him. She alleged that he was guilty over the valuation of his properties in connection with various loans.

Testimony during the trial showed that the banks that loaned Trump money were happy with the transactions, that all the loans were repaid in full, they made money from the deals and they would like to do them again.

Despite the evidence, Engoron, without a jury, claimed Trump was guilty and owed in excess of $300 million in penalties. That grew to more than half a billion dollars with interest, a threat Engoron made against the president that now has vanished.

Reports confirmed the ruling is a major loss for James, who ironically now is under investigation herself for fraud.

She’s accused of misrepresenting her residences in order to obtain preferential mortgage loan treatments, including once when she allegedly characterized her father as a “spouse” and represented a five-apartment building she owns as having four apartments because that would give her a better interest rate.

“While the injunctive relief ordered by the court is well crafted to curb defendants’ business culture, the court’s disgorgement order, which directs that defendants pay nearly half a billion dollars to the State of New York, is an excessive fine that violates the Eighth Amendment,” Judges Dianne T. Renwick and Peter H. Moulton wrote.

Engoron also had set himself up as the expert on real estate values, insisting that Trump’s exotic Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida would be worth about $20 million, when real real estate experts said it would be worth 25 times that.

The remaining injunctive demands from Engoron now can be appealed by Trump to the New York Court of Appeals.

Trump has charged that the case is a political attack by Democrats, like multiple other lawfare cases he faced, from Democrat prosecutors, in recent years, including wild claims he was engaged in an organized crime operation in Florida. Those other lawfare cases now have gone away.

WND had reported only a day earlier that the appeals court was under fire.

They apparently had become “lost in navel-gazing,” instead of delivering justice, according to new charges from constitutional expert Jonathan Turley.

Legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano at the time Engoron delivered his ruling said that the judge’s agenda no more or less than “government theft.”

He said the case involved no crime or harm.

Engoron openly was antagonistic to Trump during the trial, and he claimed that Trump committed fraud in the way he valued his billions of dollars in property.

Napolitano said Engoron’s decisions violated all the ordinary rules of American jurisprudence.

He found, “The government created a phantom harm by arguing to the court that Mr. Trump’s corporation was not fully accurate in its loan applications and thus was charged a lower interest rate on the loans than it should have been charged had it been accurate, and thus, it earned more income on its use of the money it borrowed than would have been the case had it scrupulously reported the value of its pledged assets. And thus — somehow — the government ought to be able to confiscate the excess income plus interest. This, of course, defies the principles of no damages without breach of a duty and no damages without caused harm, which have been the bedrock of American tort law. It also redefines fraud.”

Engoron’s rulings essentially ignored what should have been a deciding factor in the case, that the banks involved “did their own due diligence on the value of the assets.”

“The government won’t say how it was harmed by Mr. Trump’s commercial loans because it wasn’t harmed by them. The government lawyers made a fanciful argument to the effect that if Mr. Trump had borrowed less because the buildings pledged as security were worth less than he claimed, the banks would have had more reserves available to lend to others. That is nonsense,” Napolitano said.

Now Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and popular commentator for multiple forums, cited a report from the Wall Street Journal that the appellate judges hearing the case have let it drop into “some judicial black hole.”

“This should not be a close case and certainly should not take this long. The case against Trump was raw lawfare, and the entire trial by Justice Arthur Engoron made a mockery of the court system, particularly his ridiculous half-a-billion-dollar judgment,” he explained.

“Yet, weeks turned into months and then into years as the appellate court seemed lost in navel-gazing. There was also a concern over passive-aggressive delays; the long appeal is not only preventing Trump from moving this case toward the Supreme Court but keeps him trapped in an appellate amber.”

Turley had warned, “It is distressing to hear that some of these judges may be striving to preserve this nonsensical opinion where Trump was hit with half a billion dollars in a case where no one lost money and the banks wanted renewed business with his company. Affirming the decision would be the final nail in the coffin for the New York legal system, which was turned into a farce by New York Attorney General Letitia James and Judge Engoron.”

 

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Author: Bob Unruh

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