No. of Recommendations: 6
I ran across a couple of different references that shed some different light on the summary judgement issued by Judge Engoron in the New York State civil case regarding systemic business fraud on the part of The Trump Organization. I then watched an insightful video by Michael Popok who filled in some of the blanks.
The first impression I got was that the judge was put in the position of making the ruling by either a request for summary judgement from the State or from Trump. A request from the State would imply they thought the facts were so obvious it wasn't worth the public's money holding a jury trial to confirm that the color black is indeed black, etc. A request from Trump would reflect his legal team's disconnect from reality and fantasy that they could just claim the facts were so much in THEIR favor that they could convince a judge to drop the case on their say-so.
That's actually not what drove it. According to procedures of civil cases in New York State, when the state brings a civil case against a defendent, the STATE can provide its preference for a jury or bench trial with its original filing. In this case, the state requested a bench trial. If the defendent in the case OBJECTS to the trial format requested by the STATE, the defendent has fifteen days to file paperwork stating their preference for the trial format. Fifteen days. You don't get to see the case start going through the steps, see which judge is selected, see how favorably they react to your pre-trial motions. Just consider the charges, consider the facts and possible outcomes and if you don't like the trial format selected by the prosecution, get your motion filed within fifteen days.
Trump's lawyer handling the case at inception was Alina Habba, noted legal scholar in the field of parking garage law and frequent "analyst" on One America News. Is there anything she can't do? Apparently, getting a motion to OBJECT to the state request for a bench trial and request a JURY trial isn't one of her many talents. She didn't get the paperwork filed on time so the trial proceeds as requested by the state.
When a bench trial format is chosen, the judge can still request a jury for specific decisions in a penalty phase, etc. but decisions about the events involved with the charges are solely those of the judge.
Two other points noted by Michael Popok...
Trump and his attorneys consistently make the claim that none of the lenders relying on his false paperwork and inflated valuations on loan applications actually suffered financial LOSSES on the deals. No loss, no crime, right?
Wrong. When you obtain loans based on false representations of your financial assets and leverage those loans to arrange other deals to produce gains, those GAINS are ill-gotten and are as much of a crime as someone else's LOSS. And of course, it wasn't just banks shortchanged by the manipulated evaluations, since they were also used to minimize tax payments to the city and state (and likely federal) government.
Even more ironically... Some of the very powers the New York State Attorney General has at her disposal to disgorge assets from someone found guilty of large-scale financial fraud stem from prior case law that should be very familiar to Trump. They stem from a case involving another Trump entity (Trump University, I think...) filed in 2013 by prior New York AG Eric Schneiderman. Trump lost the case but an appellate court asked that the state more explicitly define the AG's powers in this section of state law. Those explicitly granted powers could have been used by Leticia James to drastically shorten this case and go nearly directly to a request for summary judgement. Instead, she used the more traditional flow to ensure Trump had time for full discovery and a full trial.
WTH
