Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Haha! Trump Gets BAD NEWS in $500 MILLION Fraud Case

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

In a scathing appeals brief, the New York Attorney General in the $500 million dollar civil fraud judgment against Trump, just told the court that Trump has basically conceded that he committed fraud, and gets the law completely wrong as to his argument that there were no victims of his financial fraud crimes. Michael Popok from his vantage point as a practicing NY lawyer in these courts, breaks it down in his latest hot take. Naked Wines: Join the Naked Wines community and head to https://NakedWines.com/legalaf for 6 bottles of wine for JUST $39.99 with shipping included Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! Join the Legal AF Patreon: https://Patreon.com/LegalAF Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So go ahead, you can afford to hoard because Ikea is priced for student life. Shop everything you need for back to school at Ikea today. This is Michael Popov, Legal AF. It's going to be a very busy and treacherous September for Donald Trump at the intersection of law and politics on the 18th of September. He's going to be sentenced likely for the 34 count felony convictions related to the Stormy Daniels bribery election interference crimes. But on the 26th of September, his lawyers are going to be in

court arguing the appeal of that stubborn little thing called an almost $500 million civil fraud judgment that was obtained against him for discorgment, meaning they're gonna rip all of Donald Trump's assets and monies away from him that were ill-gotten gains that he should not have made by lying to lenders and lying to appraisers and lying to counterparties and all of his business transactions for more than 10 years.

We got a new brief that's in. We love briefs here on Legal AF. It's about 148 pages and I got through it. And let me just tell you what it's all about for a lawyer who practices regularly in these particular courts. The Attorney General, Letitia James, who happens to be at the Democratic National Convention because she's a Democrat, that's how politics

work, that's how you elect the attorney generals of your state if you didn't know it. They're generally not nonpartisan. She's a Democrat and that's okay. She just filed a brief. What I love about the brief is it takes Donald Trump's lawyers and Donald Trump to task right out of the box and says they don't know what they're talking about, They don't understand the law in New York. They're not really New York lawyers. Hold that thought for a minute. They're sort of carpetbaggers that made their way into New York. They don't understand executive law 63-12 which is the power, robust and muscular power of

the Attorney General of New York to go after persistent fraud in the financial capital of the world without too many restrictions. They don't understand that law. They don't understand the procedure. They don't understand the standard that the New York state Supreme Court Justice Judge Angoran had to apply. So wrong on the procedure, wrong on the facts, and wrong on the law. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Alright, let's kick it off. Let's kick it off right away. First, they say the primary focus of the appeal by Donald Trump is that their claim that the New York Attorney General wasn't able to prove that any bank or counterparty, that's the person on the other side of a transaction,

actually relied on the personal financial statement of falsities that Donald Trump made. It's almost like they admit that he did have false statements related to the size of his, wait for it, the size of his bank accounts, the size of his financial condition and his net worth. Donald Trump, as the New York attorney general said, liked to reverse engineer his net worth number, mainly for the Forbes magazine rankings. He liked to say, I'm worth 4 billion, I'm worth 6 billion, and then he'd tell his minions, including Allen Weisselberg, his chief financial officer who didn't have a CPA license, his controller, Jeff McConney or Michael Cohen, his consulieri,

make those numbers work back into 4 billion, 6 billion, whatever the number was. They were like, oh, what are we gonna do? We only have certain amount of assets. Well, just inflate the price of the assets, the value of the assets. Say that the Trump Tower, a triplex that he lives in is worth 10 times what it's worth.

Take restrictions that are already on property from their development, take those restrictions away and act like you can have unlimited unfettered ability to develop property. Sure, the property has a deed restriction that says it has to be used for a private residence like Mar-a-Lago, take that restriction, ignore that restriction and say that you could sell it

as a private residence for a hundred million dollars Even though you can't do that under the deed restriction you signed with the town Say that you could develop a golf course community with hundreds and hundreds of condos and units and shopping when you really can't do that Because the development plan approved by the town says you can't do that. Who cares? Don't let a little thing like facts and law and zoning restrictions stop you from inflating your assets. And that's the point. And the other point that she makes to show that the other side doesn't know what they're talking about. There's an old phrase for that. They're talking through their hat when it comes to New York law. 63-12 of the executive laws, like no other law. I have taught this already on legal AF,

I'll do it again here now. It's like no other law in the country. It's probably the most far reaching set of powers for any attorney general in the country when it comes to financial fraud. And you would expect that, because New York is considered the financial capital of the world.

And so you've got to give the sheriff of Wall Street, the attorney general, a lot of power. The thing that they don't understand is they think this is common law fraud. Under common law fraud, which is a fraud that you and I can sue over if we've been defrauded, you have to show that whatever statement that I made that's allegedly fraudulent, that the other person,

the counterparty, reasonably relied on that statement to their detriment. That's the fundamental elements of regular common law fraud. But 63-12 under the executive law is not common law fraud based. It's not a common law fraud. It is persistent fraud in the operation of a business and it's supposed to allow the attorney general to come in and stop the business operation to allow the attorney general to come in and stop the business operation and its fraud practices from creating victims. So you never get to reliance. There's no requirement under all of the case law, all the precedent that interprets 53-12. There is no court that has ever ruled that there has to be a reliance element, that there

has to be, you have to show a victim. This victim relied. And that's Donald Trump's whole argument. Well, Deutsche Bank got all of its money back. The insurance companies weren't harmed. They all got their money back. They all wanted to do these deals. They all made money on these deals. I paid everything back.

That's not the point of 63-12. It's to stop fraudulent practices before victims are created. And that willful blindness by Donald Trump's lawyers where they bury their head in the sand as to what the law actually says is only going to get them a resounding loss at the appellate level after the oral argument in September. So let me just tell you particularly what she said and I'm reading now from her brief. This is where we are now.

On appeal, this is page two. Defendants tellingly ignore almost all of their deceptions. In other words, she's saying they basically concede that the personal financial statements for Donald Trump that he signed and certified as being accurate, that he provided to banks and lenders and counterparties and insurance companies in order to get loans, in order to take out more money than he was entitled to, in order to get more insurance than he was entitled to, in order to get deals approved that he wasn't entitled to, all those lies they basically ignore. Instead, the attorney general says, they primarily argue

that the office of attorney general failed to prove the defendant's counterparties relied on the misrepresentations to their financial detriment. It's on page two of the brief. But it is well established that neither reliance nor of victims losses, which are elements of common law fraud, is required for 6312 fraud or illegality claims, whereas here the attorney general seeks disgorgement. That's different different. Discouragement is not damages. Damage is what you get from your neighbor for ripping you off. That's money returned to you. Discouragement is you made money or something of value

that you weren't entitled to. That was ill gotten. You obtained it illegally and it gets ripped and discouraged out of you. Like, you know, ripped out, vomited out, pulled out of you, clawed back from you. That's discouragement. That's different.

Indeed, the brief goes on for the attorney general. One of 6312's core remedial purposes is to protect the honesty and integrity of commercial marketplaces in New York by stopping fraudulent and illegal practices before they cause financial losses to market participants or broader harms to the public. So every time they say, but there's no reliance, there's no victim. That's the point. She's allowed to pull the Letitia James is allowed to police this issue even

before there's an actual reliance or victim. It's almost like in Minority Report with Tom Cruise. It's almost like the Thought Police, but, you know, legitimately. The dreaded wall of wine. No, it's not a long lost House of Dragons episode. It's that feeling you get and your eyes glazed over when you see rows and rows of random bottles

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for six bottles of wine for $39.99. So they then go through their brief and reinforcing all the findings that Judge Angoron made after dozens and dozens of witnesses and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and testimony that was basically uncontroverted, including things including Donald Trump testifying and Donald Trump trying to do his closing argument, they said at the end of the day, he properly found as the judge that Donald Trump inflated his assets, that he improperly removed restrictions that were on property for development in order to hyperinflate the number. Let's use Mar-a-Lago as an example. Mar-a-Lago has a set of deed restrictions,

which are zoning and land use restrictions on the development of the property that Donald Trump had assigned with the town of Palm Beach in order to live at Mar-a-Lago because he lives in a hotel. And they were like, yeah, we're not comfortable with that. He said, well, I make certain promises. In return, you'll let me live in the hotel and you'll let me reopen it as a country club. They said, all right, well, what are the restrictions? And the town told him, town told him, you can't, even though it's 15 acres sitting between the inner coastal and the ocean, the Mar and the Lago, if you will, you can't develop it as multiple family homes.

You can't have a number of, you can't have 10 houses on there. You can't sell it as a single family house either. It has to be this Mar-a-Lago thing. So that severely limits the amount of the value of this particular property. Particularly instead of being, I don't know, worth $150 million in Donald Trump's mind, it's probably only worth $30 million because you got to buy it and you got to run it as an existing country club. That's just one example that Letitia James makes in her brief. Besides the hyperinflation that they never explained

about the size of the triple X that Donald Trump lived in. He said it was 30,000 square feet. It was 10,000 square feet, which by the way is quite a large apartment in New York, but not 30,000 square feet. It was 10,000 square feet, which by the way is quite a large apartment in New York, but not 30,000 square feet. So of course, he tripled the size of the value of the Triplex. Now you may be wondering why did he do that? And we're back to the reverse engineering point. He needed to back into a four to six billion dollar number that he had in his head that he wanted his net worth to be and that he had in his head that he wanted his net worth to be and that he would use with counterparties like banks. And so he told his minions, go make that happen. There's only a

couple of ways you can increase your balance sheet. You have to either, your assets have to be worth more than what's on the balance sheet in real legitimate appraisal. You have to acquire new assets, but then again, you probably have to take loans in order to do that. Or you just fudge the numbers, which is what Donald Trump did. I mean, his fraud, his persistent fraud was a pencil eraser. I mean, you think he thinks he's some sort of stable

business genius. It was really just, what's the number say there? Or make that number three times higher. That was the fraud, okay. It wasn't like, it wasn't like an elaborate Bernie Madoff, 20 years, you know, computer generated, you know, hiding algorithms. It was a pencil eraser. That's where we're at. And that's what Letitia James says in her brief. And then goes through why each, she goes through why each of the other people, including Don Jr. and Eric and the others,

are also liable. Remember, she's not only seeking disgorgement of the $450 million, running with interest up to $500 million now, but she's also seeking to bar and ban these people from ever being officers and directors of New York companies again, and seeking to ban them from also taking out bank loans in New York from New York banks, which are all the banks, and also seeking to ban them from doing any real estate transactions in New York. For those that don't know, right now, there is a monitor, a financial monitor sitting on top

of the Trump organization paid for by Donald Trump, supervised by this judge Angoran. That's not moved. The appellate court has kept the monitor in place. And that monitor, Barbara Jones, a former federal judge, has to report all the times about the money flow in and out of the company and whether there's still fraud going on in the company as a report. And I've already done a hot take that said what I picked up from the financial reporting of Donald Trump that he's required to do as part of his presidential campaign is that they haven't done any new business at the Trump Organization in the last two years. Not one new asset, not one new deal, not one new money flow or money supply, right?

No income stream. It's all living off of old assets, old assets which eventually drop off. He's making money from golf courses that he owned in the past, golf course communities, licensing deals in Dubai and Oman, things like that. But he hasn't made any new money. And that's a problem. And that's why you see him straining and struggling for this house of cards, the shambles of finances to sell sneakers and sell Bibles and sell trading cards and give speeches and write books because he's running out of cash and he's running out of cash streams. He's looking at a billion dollars of potential liability and exposure with all the judgments against him. $500 million to the New York Attorney General,

$100 million to E. Gene Carroll. He probably owes a hundred million dollars to the IRS for a phony tax fraud related to the Chicago Tower that he's been doing press conferences from. Right? So it's a lot of money. It's a lot of cash and he's got a burn rate of 30 to 40 million dollars a month of legal expenses. He needs the money and this is going to continue to help bring him low financially and this is a great timing help bring him low financially. And this is a great timing for this new filing right on the cusp of Donald Trump, the campaign, giving further wind at the sale of Kamala Harris

as we move forward to the November election. One last point, you might be wondering when is this going to be decided by the Appellate Division First Department? Court system in New York, Supreme Court, unusually is named, the trial court is called the Supreme Court in New York, not the Superior Court as in most states. The next level, first level appeal in New York, depends on where you're sitting, but it's the Appellate Division and a department. The First Department covers Manhattan, so Appellate Division First Department is hearing this case.

And if you don't like the results there, the loser goes to the Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York, not the Supreme Court. There's a little tutorial. They're not going to decide the Appellate Division First Department for at least four to six months. It'll be well after the election. It may not even be before the inauguration. So right now, there's $ five million dollar bond that Donald Trump posted

In order to secure the ultimate judgment in this case It's not the full amount but the I'm sure the Appellate Division knows that all of his assets are pretty public You see where they are. There's a federal there's a former judge sitting on top of all of his assets as a monitor So they said put up a hundred and seventy five million cash bond. That's a cash bond or a bond which he did So that's good for the people of the state of New York million cash bond. That's a cash bond or a bond, which he did. So that's good for the people of the state of New York. We'll get a ruling. The loser, it'll be Donald Trump. We'll take it up to the Court of Appeals. It probably won't be until 2025 or 2026 when we find out exactly what happens. And yes, the judgment runs with interest at a very high interest rate in New York. By time it gets around to paying it, it could be $550 million or more. We'll continue to follow all

this right here on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF. Join us on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern time. If you like watching your podcasts and participating in live chat, 8 p.m. Eastern time, Monday and Saturdays. Where am I? I'm late watching the convention. That's where I am. Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern time. And then I do hot takes like this at that same intersection right here on the Midas Touch Network. And if you like audio podcasts, just plug in Legal AF and you'll end up with Legal AF and you can take a listen to it. So until my next hot take, until my next Legal AF, this is Michael Popak reporting. Heary, heary. Legal AF Law Breakdown is now in session.

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