Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron ordered in February former President Donald Trump to pay an approximate $450 million penalty in a civil fraud case in which there were no victims. Now, a New York appellate court is raising questions regarding the “troubling” penalty and Attorney General Letitia James’ justification for bringing the case in the first place.
James accused Trump of inflating his personal wealth to get better loan terms. Trump, for example, valued his Mar-a-Lago estate at between $427 million and $612 million, Forbes reported. Engoron, however, cited a one-off local Palm Beach County appraiser who valued the property as low as $18 million. Some experts have reportedly valued the sprawling property in the hundreds of millions.
As my colleague Mark Hemingway explained earlier this year, “Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump’s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.”
Enogoron ultimately ordered Trump to pay $354 million plus an additional $100 million in interest. Trump posted a $175 million bond in April and appealed the ruling.
[READ NEXT: Judge Engoron’s Inflation Of Trump’s ‘Ill-Gotten Gains’ Is The Real Financial Fraud]
Trump’s team argued on Thursday before the New York Appellate Division, First Judicial Department that the case was a “clear-cut violation of the statute of limitations,” and that the statute used to bring charges against the former president ultimately did not justify the action taken.
Throughout the hearing, some of the justices appeared receptive to Trump’s team’s claims regarding the case.
Justice Llinét Rosado questioned how the penalty was calculated. Justice Peter Moulton also asked Vale about the “troubling” penalty.
“The immense penalty in this case is troubling,” Moulton said. “How do you tether the amount that was assessed by the Supreme Court to the harm that was caused here where parties left these transactions happy … ?”
Vale acknowledged the penalty was large but argued “it’s a large number,” in part, “because there was a lot of fraud and illegality.”
Justice David Friedman earlier in the hearing asked Vale whether James had brought any other cases under the same law and circumstances as she brought charges against Trump. He also later contended to Vale that the cited precedence “hardly seems [to] justif[y] bringing an action to protect Deutsche Bank against President Trump, which is what you have here.”
“You’ve got two really sophisticated parties in which no one lost any money, and that was the point of my initial question,” he continued, before claiming “every case” cited as justification instead involved “damage to consumers, damage to the marketplace, [or] a scheme to get unsophisticated consumers to take out home loans.”
Vale argued state statute does not require this, and that “the statute is written broadly because the legislature wants the Attorney General to go in and stop fraud and illegality.”
Moulton jumped in, eventually saying Vale “must address” the underlying question of “mission creep as [the law James used to prosecute Trump] morphed into something that it was not meant to do.”
“[T]here has to be some limitation in what the attorney general can do in interfering in these private transactions … where people don’t claim harm,” he said, asking: “So what is the limiting principle?” (Notably, James campaigned on using lawfare to target Trump, calling him an “illegitimate president.”)
“[T]here are still limits. It is not falsity in the wind,” Vale said. “It has to be related and relevant to the business at hand, and it does have to have a capacity or tendency to deceive.”
Vale continued arguing that the Trump case “does have harm to the public and to the markets.”
But it’s a case that even former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo argued should have never been brought in the first place.
“The Attorney General’s case in New York, frankly, should have never been brought and if his name was not Donald Trump, and he if he wasn’t running for president, I’m the former AG in New York, I’m telling you that case would have never been brought, and that’s what is offensive to people,” Cuomo said during a June appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher: Overtime.”
CNN political commentator Jonah Goldberg made a similar statement in January, saying the “prosecution was a mistake.”
“I think it’s very political,” Goldberg said. “Someone campaigned on an election to do this. It’s an elected judge. It was part of sort of the party machinery.”