Posted on 03/12/2022 5:23:15 AM PST by MtnClimber
From time to time on this blog I have had occasion to note the extent to which many of the seemingly “smartest” people in our society time and again fall hook, line and sinker for the most preposterous mass hysterias. When it really counts, the people who have risen to the very top ranks of our social hierarchies prove to have no critical thinking capabilities whatsoever. For some entertaining reading about various self-made billionaires, former cabinet secretaries, and the like, making utter fools of themselves, you might try my posts from February 9, 2017 (“Watch Out For Rule By The ‘Smart’ — Part III”), or June 25, 2014 (“Watch Out For Rule By The ‘Smart’”). Both of those posts dealt with the topic of attempts to alter world temperatures through government taxation and spending.
A recent example of the phenomenon of the smart dopes now comes forth from the District Attorney’s office of New York County — that is, the people here in Manhattan charged with the enforcement of the New York State criminal laws. In this instance the subject of the hysteria was the idea that Donald Trump, President of the United States, needed to be charged with some sort of violations of the New York criminal law arising out of his business dealings.
Although prosecutors don’t publicly announce when they start investigations, it is clear from various court filings along the way (e.g., Trump’s lawyers opposing enforcement of subpoenas) that the DA’s criminal investigation of Trump was well underway as early as 2019, that is, in the middle of Trump’s term as President. The Manhattan DA at the time was Cyrus Vance, Jr. If you are old enough, you will recognize from Vance’s name that he is the son of the Cyrus Vance who was Secretary of State when Jimmy Carter was President, and also at various times Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army, and other such government positions, in between stints as big-time partner of big-time law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
Background on the Trump criminal investigation by Vance Jr.’s office can be found in this New York Times piece from February 18, 2021. That piece, written less than a month after Mr. Trump left office, already described the criminal investigation as “long running.” According to the piece, the investigation was “focused on possible tax and bank-related fraud,” and most particularly on “whether the Trump Organization misled its lenders” as to “the value of his properties to obtain loans.”
Now, you may not be one of the world’s great geniuses, but does the subject of this investigation make any sense to you? I’ll bet that before you finished reading that one little paragraph you had asked yourself at least three critical questions:
1. Since when do banks take the borrower’s word for the value of real estate when they make loans secured by the property? When you took out your mortgage for a lousy one or a few hundred thousand, the bank did an appraisal of the value of the property. Could it really be that banks lent Trump hundreds of millions and just took his word for the value of the property without doing their own appraisal?
2. Did Trump default on any of the loans? If he had, it would have led the news for months on end; so no, that did not happen. Who has ever heard of such a thing as a criminal prosecution for overvaluing the collateral for a loan when the loan has always been and remains current and never in default?
3. Didn’t the real estate market experience tremendous appreciation throughout the U.S. from 2000 through the ensuing decade? Given that, wouldn’t exaggerated valuations early in the period therefore look prescient in hindsight?
So you might think, perhaps this investigation was being conducted by some naive young Assistant DAs with little understanding of how the real world works. Wrong. Instead, Vance had recruited two of the very biggest names from New York’s most prestigious law firms to head the probe. You probably have not heard of these guys, but in the world of big New York law firms, anyone would immediately recognize them as from the true nobility. Or to put it another way, these guys are really, really smart:
- Carey Dunne is a Harvard Law School graduate, and was a long-time senior partner of the Davis Polk law firm. You may recognize the name of John W. Davis as the Democratic nominee for President in both 1920 and 1924 and also, in his spare time, as the personal lawyer to J.P. Morgan. The Davis Polk law firm continues to represent Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase in many matters to this day. Dunne has also served a term as President of the New York City Bar Association, a kind of ultimate recognition of status in the elite New York legal community. In 2016 Dunne left Davis Polk to join Vance’s DA office as General Counsel, and apparently got named to head the investigation of Trump some time thereafter. Here is a picture of Dunne:
- Mark Pomerantz was a long-time partner of the Paul Weiss law firm who joined the investigation of Trump in 2021. Among the very top New York law firms, Paul Weiss is the one most heavily devoted to the litigation practice. In his career Pomerantz had, among other things, been the head of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Here is a picture of Pomerantz. Pomerantz came out of retirement to join the Trump investigation, and according to the New York Times, agreed to do so without pay. Here is a picture of Pomerantz:
As you can see, these guys are the crème de la crème of the New York legal community. On the other hand, like so many other liberal New Yorkers, they are completely blinded by their hatred of Trump. It seems that in their eagerness, the three simple questions above never occurred to them.
In late February, the Manhattan DA’s offices’s investigation of Trump completely unraveled. Vance had decided not to run for re-election, and a new guy, Alvin Bragg, took office on January 1, 2022. Bragg decided he should take his own look at this, his single most high-profile criminal investigation. The New York Times has a big summary on March 5; and CNN also did a long write-up on March 6.
Brief excerpt from the Times piece:
Late last year, three career prosecutors in the district attorney’s office opted to leave the investigation, uncomfortable with the speed at which it was proceeding and with what they maintained were gaps in the evidence. The tension spilled into the new administration, with some career prosecutors raising concerns directly to the new district attorney’s team.
It also seems that Bragg figured out that essentially the only evidence of Trump’s supposed criminal intent in the case was to come from the famous Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney since convicted of multiple charges unrelated to his service for Trump, and now having turned on the ex-boss.
After a series of basically hostile meetings with Bragg, both Dunne and Pomerantz resigned from the office. Although the investigation is still theoretically alive, it is expected to die when the grand jury in question ends its term in April.
Exit quote (from Dunne):
“It’s a righteous case that ought to be brought,” Mr. Dunne told Mr. Bragg.
Dunne thinks that it is “righteous” to single out a guy to investigate endlessly for years because you oppose him politically. His mania blinded him to the most obvious holes in this case. Keep that line in mind any time you find yourself starting to think that the “smartest” people should be trusted with anything.
It seems that there should be crimes committed for using a law enforcement position to go after political opponents with no evidence of a crime. In this case it was just another coup attempt against Trump.
“and with what they maintained were gaps in the evidence.”
New one: “Gaps in the evidence”. LOL!!!!
“It seems that there should be crimes committed for using a law enforcement position to go after political opponents with no evidence of a crime.”
We had to get rid of that crap in Texas. From the beginning, there needed to be an office charged with investigating corruption of state officials, so they chose the DA’s office in Austin. Then, long after, Austin became deep blue, so they made it a point to keep targeting Republicans (along with Democrats they didn’t like, like the ones who used to oppose gun control).
Now it’s a state-level function.
Wealthy wheeler dealers get over appraisals on property etc because of name and contacts. It appears Trump was pretty up right. Same for Trump’s taxes.
These Scumbag Lawyers belong in Prison and they should all be Criminally Charged with Extortion
Excellent easy to understand summmary.
Thanks for posting
There was a point, probably in the timeframe of what we call The Reformation, when a well educated man could have known everything. By that I mean the sum total of what humanity knew to be true could have been held in a medium-sized library and a single man could, with sufficient effort have read it all and known everything there was to know. The problem is, he still wouldn’t have known what’s real and what was false. Most importantly, he wouldn’t have known what it was that he didn’t know. And, it’s what we don’t know that bites us in that big muscle we sit on.
Here’s the problem with those smart people who start out to do something. They don’t know what it is they don’t know. Thus, a set of really smart prosecutors set out to prove Trump did something wrong so they can prosecute him for it. What they didn’t know is, Trump didn’t do anything wrong, so prosecuting him is much more difficult. Not impossible, as much of the time prosecution isn’t about justice. It’s about running the other side out of money so they have to “admit” to having done something and take the punishment for it simply because they have no other choice. (Lots of luck with that in Trump’s case.) So, really smart people, who don’t know what it is they don’t know…fail. (Thank God!) It makes me wonder, what it is that I don’t know that’s waiting to take a chunk out of that muscle I sit on.
Excellent summation.
I was having a hard time understanding what this is all about, so thank you very much for posting this.
I always figured it was BS, however - just because DT has already been so heavily investigated and they bring up every little thing he’s ever done, basically, to try to use against him. If he would have ever changed a toilet paper roll incorrectly, I’m sure we would’ve heard about it by now. So, rule of thumb: The charges are BS.
Exactly, if the banks filed to do their due diligence or the taxing authority failed to do their due diligence in valuations for the property, they should be investigated. Is there evidence that anyone was bribed or threatened? NO.
If these people START OUT compromised and wholly inimical to Trump...then their entire ‘investigation’ is moot.
It’s such an obvious and fundamental point that I don’t know why these really ‘smart guys’ need to be reminded about it.
I’ve always wondered why Trump didn’t start lawsuits over harassment after he left office. Now that we know Russia gate was non existent and false, where crimes were committed to push the impeachment, etc a President has no recourse at all to go after those who falsely accused a sitting President.
The big thing that will blind side a lot of people these days is that the next 10 years are not going to be anything like 2010-2020.
The 2020’s are going to be more like 1970-1980. Gas rising, gold rising, commodities rising, real estate rising. Stock market going nowhere to down.
Differences are that in the 1970’s technology was not changing all that fast. We were in a transition period just before computers started going mainstream in the 1980’s.
Now we are two technology revolutions later and technological change is not only accelerating by pace of the acceleration is accelerating.
One of the revolutions is in healthcare. In the last five years the field of longevity science has made a number of key breakthroughs. If you pay attention to it—you can drop another 10 years of healthy useful life onto your timeline and position yourself for some really miraculous stuff due out in the next 5-10 years.
The downside of this is that you’ll need the funds to pay for the longer life. The fed is making sure that social security will be worth half as much in five years—and likley half as much again in the next five years.
Biden is in the process of deconstructing the democrat party even as the instrument of state grow tighter and more targeted.
This war in the ukraine is the death knell of the dollar as the world’s single reserve currency—that’s an inflation feeder—and a poverty maker for americans.
If you’re alive in 15 years—you’ll be able to take space flight for 5-10k—because prices will fall. Elon Musk is developing the 100 seat rocket to do that now. William Shatner aka Captain Kirk made the flight last fall at the age of 90.
Sometime later this decade imho God will come back to the academy as a paradigm shift away from the current atheists materialist paradigm.
The purpose of these investigations is not to ever bring charges against Trump. Oh, if the investigators stumble across some smidgen of criminality so much the better, but the various prosecutors know there’s no “there” there. The purpose is to smear Trump, to reinforce the belief that Orange Man is not just bad, but criminal. The reason for that is to torpedo any hope of a return to the White House.
This strategy does work. Millions of Americans believe Trump is a bigger crook than John Gotti. Exactly how many remains to be seen.
Why do I get the impression that these “smart professionals” would be ready to espouse the 2004 slogan, “Fake but accurate”? Remember when Dan Rather & his crack[ed] CBS “60 Minutes” crew did the August 2004 hit piece on Bush’43 about his 1970s Texas Air National Guard service? How they relied upon typewriter-produced docs of his unit to prove his failings, only to have some ‘smarter’ people PROVE the docs proffered were anything but genuine, to wit being produced by Microsoft Word?
Of course, as the blame game grew, everyone blamed everyone else and that self-serving CYA slogan, “Fake but accurate”, got created to try to keep the story going in that 2004 campaign season! After all, Dan Rather was a longtime CBS STAR and had not a single bias bone in his body. Ignore the fact that his daughter was a bigwig in the Texas ‘D’onkey Party!
Anyone else smell the similarities here?
They are only able to bleed out Trump and distract him. That is their objective.
Liberal vermin scum.
I’m starting to really like this source. Every article is well reasoned and dead on accurate.
So much truth there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.