Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial has ended with a 3-year business ban on the former president.
Judge Arthur Engoron ruled against Trump in favour of a four-year, politically motivated, fault-finding campaign.
Trump and sons are now restricted from directing or being an executive of businesses in New York.
This, for good reason, has NY businesses wondering if they’ll be next.
It’s not so much the $355-million fine, business ban, and continued nanny state monitoring of the Trump family.
It’s the discernible subjectivism behind the Engoron’s judgement.
On page-87 of the briefing, it’s obvious the 74-year-old doesn’t like Trump or his family.
A petty, and enraged Engoron takes issue with Trump’s insistence on innocence.
“To err is human, to forgive is divine,” he said, quoting Alexander Pope.
“Defendants apparently are of a different mind.”
The only ‘error’ Trump admitted to, Engoron complains, was, ‘an “inadvertent,” (of course) tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid [denied].’
Citing Soros activist Attorney General, Letita James’ lengthy “investigation,” Engoron then digs himself in deeper, stating, “[Donald Trump, and his son’s] complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.
“They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again.”
Engoron then says, true, Trump isn’t a murderer or arsonist.
He didn’t commit a bank robbery with a gun, or rip off pensioners, and mum and dad investors like Bernard Madoff did.
Still, Engoron stated, “[These] defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways.
“Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies.”
As bizarre as it sounds, Engoron argued that Trump’s insistence on innocence was a sign that the former president was likely to “offend” again.
So, he said, “judicially restraining Trump,” was the only way to protect the “integrity of the financial marketplace, and the public as a whole.”
Acknowledging that Trump had long since paid off all the loans in question, Engoron dismissed this as irrelevant and accused the defendants of crowing. (p.2)
“Timely and total repayment of loans does not extinguish the harm that false statements inflict on the marketplace,” he claimed (p.4).
To this, Engoron added,
“Indeed, the common excuse that ‘everybody does it’ is all the more reason to strive for honesty, and transparency, and to be vigilant in enforcing the rules.”
Reasons for the fines, ban, and nanny-state surveillance, seem to me to be, by and large because Trump refused to concede to what he’s called a witch hunt.
I don’t think that’s far off the mark.
It’s easy to see why New York businesses are alarmed.
What is being justified as just prosecution, could easily be interpreted as political persecution.
Trump was not tried before a jury.
The outcome is also similar to a recent ruling, whereby the judge decided Trump was guilty of defamation.
He left the compensation amount up to the jury to decide.
This resulted in the judge redistributing a staggering USD $83 million from Trump to an “advice columnist,” after he defended himself against sexual assault accusations.
Then there’s the fact that Engoron’s ruling almost completely aligns with Soros Attorney General, Letitia “Tish” James’ lengthy leftwing, get-Trump-at-all-costs crusade.
On this front, The Guardian’s recent gloating gave the game away.
“Engoron handed her almost everything she had asked for,” they wrote, cheering on James as though she’d just single-handedly liberated Berlin in 1945.
Of importance, James is an alleged beneficiary of “super-donor” George Soros.
So named because of his 2016 far-left quest to “reshape the American justice system.”
Letitia James also appears to have her own shady skeletons hidden away.
A 2017 NY Post editorial accused her of “gaming the system.”
Trump’s chief accuser, the NY Post reported, received USD $750,000 in public money, then “spent USD $500,000 of it on election day,” to avoid having to return leftover funds post-election.
The Engoron ruling against Trump seems to be more about coercion, less about correction.
At Letitia James’ behest, each of Trump’s sons will join the former president in exile.
They will be forced to pay USD $8 million to the city of New York.
This is on top of the USD $347 million in fines Engoron syphoned from Trump, and his executives.
Eric and Don Jr were also slapped with 2-year restrictions, leaving me in doubt Letitia James was playing for left field, with a lot of help from Engoron.
By this, I mean taking directions from her superiors, which potentially goes past Soros, all the way up to Biden’s handlers in the Oval Office.
Booting the Trump family out of New York (p.92), by stopping them from doing business, speaks volumes about motive.
As former federal prosecutor, Joseph Moreno explained, “there were no victims,” and lender testimony backed Trump’s defence.
“Not only did these banks have no complaints about their dealings with the Trump Organization, they made clear they did not rely on Trump’s valuations and were in fact happy to keep doing business with him.”
Moreno’s assessment is that Letitia James, “could [not] produce a party that was damaged by Trump’s actions she had to make it up.”
These, he said, are the actions of a “vindicative politician wielding the law enforcement power of the state to destroy her enemy.”
Responding to the outcome, Donald Trump Jnr remarked, “We’ve reached the point where your political beliefs combined with what venue your case is heard are the primary determinants of the outcome; not the facts of the case!”
I would argue, Engoron’s excuses – alongside Letitia James’ affiliations – raise a ton of red flags about how far the Left is willing to go in weaponizing the judiciary against political opponents.
Under the shadow of all this, the obvious question is, can Democracy survive, the far-left extremists who claim to be “saving it?”
