There is much to celebrate! Not only the peace breakthrough in the Middle East, but also the indictment of Tish James for mortgage fraud. Latitia James, the Attorney General of New York, is whining that President Trump is “weaponizing” the Department of Justice to go after his enemies – a charge dutifully echoed by the liberal press.
To resort to playground language, which is about what that complaint deserves: James started it. She’s the bully and the instigator in this duel. As she so memorably said, “No one is above the law.”
Even Politico wrote today, “The Democratic New York attorney general made her investigation of the Republican president a centerpiece of her campaign.”
Yes, Latitia James campaigned on a promise to “get Trump”, and to fulfill her promise to TDS-stricken voters, pursued charges against the president that were entirely laughable.
In essence, she accused President Trump (who was out of office at the time) and his organization of civil fraud, and specifically for inflating the value of his real estate holdings by some $2 billion in order to secure a cheaper real estate loan. James contended the fraudulent assessment saved the Trump organization $150 million over the course of a decade. What anyone with a brain understood is that hyping your net worth is par for the course in real estate transactions, and their bankers know it.
Trump’s bankers were well aware of his penchant for exaggeration – they had dealt with him for years. All lenders perform their own due diligence on loans they make, comparing their own valuations of the property put up as collateral against the assets listed by the borrower.
As Trump’s bankers – supposedly, according to James, the aggrieved party — pointed out during the trial, they did not lose a dime because of Trump’s overstated property valuations; nor did anyone else.
Tish James promised to bring down Trump – and all she could come up with was a toothless charge, a victimless crime and one that nearly every builder in the U.S. is guilty of. She put the then-former president through a 10-week trial, at great expense to NYC taxpayers, a trial overseen by the massively biased Judge Engoron. Before the trial even started, Engoron, a Democrat, ruled the financial documents at the core of Tish’s case “clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business”. His mind was made up; the fix was in.
Perhaps the worst aspect of what many of us considered a miscarriage of justice, Trump was fined $454 million by Engoron. That amount was so preposterous that in a 323-page opinion this summer, all five judges in the Appellate Division’s First Department voted to toss it out. One judge even concluded that James should not have brought the case in the first place.
One of the more amusing aspects of the case was that some of the valuations relied on by prosecutors on Team James was that of Mar-al-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach. In his pre-trial ruling, Judge Engoron noted that the Palm Beach County Assessor appraised the value of Mar-a-Lago at between $18 million and $27.6 million; in contrast, Engeron fumed, Trump put a value of between $426.5 million and $612 million on the property, “an overvaluation of at least 2,300%, compared to the assessor’s appraisal.”
Trump was offended by the cheap price put on the former Marjorie Merriweather Post property, one of the crown jewels of the Trump crown. He complained that, “They claimed that Mar-a- Lago was worth only $18,000,000, when it was worth 50 to 100 times that amount”.
Anyone who has spent time in Palm Beach, home to billionaires whose homes are routinely valued in the tens of millions of dollars, would agree with Trump.
The liberal media is aghast that James has been indicted for what they perceive as a minor crime. She is charged with one count each of bank fraud and of making false statements to financial institutions. The prosecution claims that by lying about her use of the house, she received favorable mortgage terms that would have allowed her to save $18,933 over the life of the loan.
Yes, it’s a small amount of money compared to Trump’s alleged “savings.” The difference does not reflect the “fairness” or appropriateness of the indictment, but rather that James is a small-time cheap pol who made a name for herself waging war with a man she considered done, washed up and unable to fight back. Instead, she took on the next president of the United States who is the ultimate fighter.
She is getting exactly what she deserves.
