"The pattern of fraud...is astounding." Saying the word astounding with special emphasis doesn't actually make something astounding. I find it highly suspicious how everyone engaged in lawfare against Trump can't actually give concrete details regarding the character of his offenses. While my friends on here are an intelligent bunch, if they are not experienced with commercial real estate they may not fully understand just how strange the New York AG's action is.
First, a few observations.
The fact that they aren't leveling criminal charges, but are instead involved in a civil lawsuit, suggests several things:
1) They cannot meet the standard of evidence necessary to get a grand jury to indict him, let alone a jury to convict.
2) This really might just be about discovery---and I have a feeling that a lot of non-responsive stuff will be leaked to the press "by accident."
3) It is being used to put Trump back in the headlines right before the midterms so the democrats can run against Trump "in absentia" so to speak.
I know how real estate appraisal works---including commercial real estate appraisal. You cannot just inflate the value of your properties in order to secure a loan any more than you can just inflate the value of your house to do so. My guess is that this woman is going to use the tax assessed value, compare it to the value used to underwrite the loan, and then yell fraud. Unless he actually paid off the commercial appraiser, it is hard to understand how you would even commit such fraud. People making loans on multi-million dollar properties are not gullible old people falling for an Indian "emergency alert from Microsoft" scam. To allege that such a group of sophisticated investors making use of licensed commercial real estate appraisers could be defrauded by the likes of Trump stretches plausibility, and would suggest a massive regulatory failure on the part of New York if it had occurred. If such fraud did occur, where is the disciplinary action against the commercial appraisers who facilitated it? Of course, there is none.
The New York AG should understand how impossible her accusation really is: Someone in her office ought to have a rudimentary understanding of the regulations involved in underwriting a loan in her state.
Furthermore, if he actually paid his loans off, it is hard to argue that any potential fraud actually produced damages. The absence of damages is going to represent another legal hurdle—unless, of course, this is a sick publicity stunt.
She is probably going to argue "look at how much lower the assessed value is than the value used to underwrite the loan." Ok, but I would ask you to look at your assessed values and then look at the LTV on your own loans---my guess, the assessed values lag behind the values used to underwrite. I have friends at the VA assessor's office whose job it is to argue about commercial property assessments, and the state almost always settles for an assessment somewhat below the true market value as, quite frankly, overassessment can reduce investment and result in unnecessary litigation, so they tend to want to bake in a margin of error.
I guarantee you that the New York AG’s case is going to consist of showing how tax assessed values disagree with the market values commercial real estate appraisers produced. It is a cheap trick that should not work unless she succeeds in confusing a very unsophisticated jury.
One final point, none of the banks Trump did business with are alleging fraud or seeking damages. Now, while a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of people who are too poor to pursue legal action makes sense, banks that finance multi-million dollar super-jumbo loans underwritten by large commercial real estate portfolios do not fall into that class. If Trump did something wrong, why is the AG initiating this action and not the banks themselves?
At Amgreatness today Michael Anton in an otherwise excellent diatribe against phony "conservatives" takes the time to characterize Francis Fukuyama as "agitating for war with Russia":
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/26/what-does-fidelity-to-our-founding-principles-require-today/
In what does Fukuyama's agitation for war with Russia consist? Apparently in the fact that Fukuyama roots for the Ukrainians.
Maybe I'm wrong about this; maybe Anton is targeting Fukuyama's REASON for rooting for the Ukrainians, namely that Fukuyama idiotically sees the Ukrainians as representing "liberal democracy" (as I gather from googling "Francis Fukuyama Ukraine"), i.e. the bureaucratic progressive tyranny that Anton rightly detests. But I believe that it's merely Fukuyama's pro-Ukrainian stance that Anton opposes.
And most of the writers and commenters at Amgreatness (as at Breitbart and CitizenFreePress) are in fact pro-Russian. Trump should make his stance regarding the Ukraine War clear, lest it be assumed that he desires Russian victory, given that so many of his supporters evidently do.
If Trump wants American autarky or a merely Pan-American or even Anglospherian American hegemony leaving the defense of Europe to the continental Europeans, fine -- that would be a coherent policy. But to on the one hand favor American hegemony over all parts of the world other than the Eurasian landmass east of the Baltic and Black Seas and on the other hand look favorably upon Russian conquest of Ukraine -- that's an incoherent and unmanly policy.
There's something disturbing about MAGAN support for Russian -- a kind of sickness, a cancer or parasitical worm eating away at the heart of MAGA. It resembles the pro-Spartan sentiment of Socrates' clique. And it even more closely resembles the pro-Soviet sentiment of American and British Progressives throughout the Twentieth Century.