The Patriot Post® · NY's Nakedly Partisan AG Sues Trump
It’s a story about a high-profile lawsuit against a high-profile former president, and yet Letitia James has done something remarkable: She’s made it about herself instead.
James, New York’s Trump-deranged attorney general, filed a civil fraud lawsuit Wednesday against former President Donald Trump and his company, as well as his sons Don Jr. and Eric and his daughter Ivanka. The suit alleges that they engaged in a decade-long scheme to falsely value their assets and generated $250 million in ill-gotten gains.
Frankly, we’re stunned. We can’t believe James didn’t also go after Melania and Baron.
As The Wall Street Journal reports: “Letitia James, a Democrat and vocal critic of Mr. Trump, alleged Mr. Trump’s financial statements from 2011 to 2021 included 200 false and misleading valuations across 23 properties and assets, including residential buildings, golf clubs and the family’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The Trump Organization provided these statements to insurers and lenders, reaping favorable terms and other benefits, the lawsuit alleged.”
James’s suit, for example, says that the Trumps valued their Mar-a-Lago Florida property as high as $739 million when it should have been valued at closer to $75 million — a valuation that Eric Trump called “asinine.”
We suppose this was inevitable. James, after all, didn’t run on making New York City great again. Heck, the Big Apple is hardly habitable these days thanks largely to the Criminals First policies of James and former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and current Mayor Eric Adams and current DA Alvin Bragg. But why this lawsuit, and why now? If we didn’t know better, we’d think she was running for reelection. And we’d think she was trailing her Republican opponent. And we’d think she was desperate to rile up her base in this overwhelmingly blue state. And whaddya know? We’d be right.
“Today,” James gleefully tweeted, “I filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump for engaging in years of financial fraud to enrich himself, his family, and the Trump Organization. There aren’t two sets of laws for people in this nation: former presidents must be held to the same standards as everyday Americans.”
She kept on tweeting, too: “With the help of Donald Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and other defendants, Trump variously unlawfully inflated and deflated his net worth by billions to obtain and satisfy loans, get insurance benefits, and pay lower taxes. In short, he lied to gain massive financial benefits for himself.”
For those unfamiliar with her politics or her rank partisanship, get a load of this, and please pardon Don Jr.‘s understandably indecent reference to bovine excrement:
The bullshit Dem witch-hunt continues! pic.twitter.com/FQM0MZt6Wp
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 21, 2022
We have no idea whether there’s any truth to James’s claims and whether they’re legitimately criminal matters and not merely a product of one’s particular financial analyses. But we wonder: With all the rich businesspeople spread across New York state, how many other similar prosecutions has James brought? Surely Trump can’t be the only successful businessman to have “unlawfully inflated and deflated his net worth.” Or is it possible that James targeted Trump because of his politics?
Nah. She’s probably just sore because her guy is Joe Freaking Brandon.
As for James’s claptrap about “two sets of laws,” neither Hunter Biden nor Hillary Clinton nor James Comey could be reached for comment.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, himself a former federal prosecutor and no Trump fanboy, had this commonsense assessment about the allegedly improper valuations of Trump’s many properties: “Even assuming, though, that hyperbole is etched into Trump’s DNA, it is highly unlikely that many businesses could endure scores of federal and state prosecutors crawling through their books for three years and come out unscathed.”
Indeed, the New York Post editorial board called James’s obsession with Trump a “jihad,” which sounds about right. There does seem to be a religious fervor to it. As the board put it:
Trump haters have to be disappointed. After years of screaming that Trump was a “crook,” all that James could even allege, in a civil case, is a real-estate developer lied to bankers — think his voters will care one whit? It’s pretty clear now why Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg didn’t pursue an indictment. This announcement by James, who has a history of performative lawsuits as public advocate, is nakedly political. She ran for office promising to go after Trump, and has been grandstanding during the entire investigation.
And as for any mortal wound James hopes to inflict upon Trump with her patently partisan lawsuit, she’s going to be sorely disappointed. As The New York Times reports: “The American public’s views of former President Donald J. Trump have remained remarkably stable across a number of different measures in recent months, even as he faces multiple investigations and as he remains a central figure in the midterm elections, according to the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll.”
Try as they might to erode Donald Trump’s popularity, they can’t do it. No, the angry, bitter, petty, Trump-deranged Left has emptied its barrels upon him more than once, and by now the list of persuadable voters is down to a handful of closeted Republicans working in Hollywood. The American people have long since made up their minds about Trump, and no amount of political harassment is going to gently persuade them one way or the other at this point.
As the Post’s editors conclude: “The investigation that really worries Trump, and the one that actually has serious import and repercussions for the nation, is the allegations that he mishandled classified documents. That’s the case that just might spell the end of Trump’s political career. Tish James is just theater.”
We think the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was theater, too, and our assessment is supported by the bureau’s disgraceful history of protecting the Biden Crime Family and undermining Donald Trump.