Legal AF by MeidasTouch - PISSED OFF Judge Just DESTROYED Trump’s ENTIRE Life
Episode Date: February 17, 2024In a blockbuster ruling NY Judge Engoron just hit Trump and his Companied and family with an over $500 million judgment (including interest), BANNED Trump and his sons from being a corporate officer; ...BANNED Trump and his companies from taking out NY bank loans, and installed a compliance director to decide whether to DISSOLVE the companies outright. Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on what happened and what happens next on appeal. Go to https://neurohacker.com/legal for up to $100 off Qualia Mind and use code LEGAL at checkout for an additional 15% off any purchase! Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! 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 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Michael Popak, Legal AF, we got breaking news.
Judge Angoran has issued his order, 92 pages
against Donald Trump. Let me give you the highlights. $360 million of Donald Trump, the Trump organizations
and his children's money are going to be discorged, clawed back as a result of the order because the
judge has found persistent fraud again in the operation of the Trump Organization and by Donald Trump in the New York Attorney
General's civil fraud case, this following an 11 week trial. But that's not all. I feel like a
late night pitchman for some sort of infomercial. You like that? You're going to love this. In addition
to the $360 million, which is very close to $370 million that the New York Attorney General, Leticia James, was seeking,
plus pre-judgment interest at various times running for about 9% interest.
So the total here will be probably closer to $500 million.
I know the headlines are going to be $360 million, but when you do 9% compounded interest
on various parts of these assets over different times, it'll be pushing close to $500 million.
In addition, the judge who has tremendous powers
because the New York Attorney General
has tremendous powers under a unique body of law
in New York as a New York lawyer,
we call 63-12 of the executive law.
Probably the most robust set of powers
any New York, any Attorney General has around the country
to shut down persistent fraud happening in New York, any attorney general has around the country to shut down persistent fraud
happening in New York. Why? Because as the judge noted in his order, New York is the financial
capital of the world and having level playing field and having appropriately efficient working
financial markets without fraud is really important to the world economy, making the New York,
New York and therefore the New York Attorney General almost a sovereign in their interest to regulate against
persistent fraud.
Now, the judge in September already found before the trial even started that
there was persistent fraud and gave a summary judgment to the New York
Attorney General on count one of a seven count fraud complaint, that being
for persistent fraud.
The remaining counts, the ones that are now left,
they have to do with fraud in statements
of financial condition and conspiracies around that,
fraud in insurance borrowing,
fraud in financial borrowing and things like that.
All against Donald Trump, Trump Organization,
Allen Weisselberg, former CFO,
chief financial officer of the Trump organization, Felin went to jail, Jeff McConney, former controller
of the company, and the judge in addition to finding persistent fraud, finding materiality,
which is a term of art in the law that has to do with the kind of the size and importance
of the thing that's being lied about.
In this case, the statement of financial conditions, the SFC of Donald Trump, where on seven major
assets, the judge found complete lying and cooking of the books and inflation of assets
of between five and 50 times their actual net worth. That includes Mar-a-Lago, 40 Wall Street,
seven Springs, which is the development of Donald Trump,
a project with the Vornado Group,
Trump Tower, the Triplex apartment, and the like.
And when you add all that up,
that's where the discouragement number comes up with,
because the judge found, based on the evidence
of 11 weeks of trial,
that Donald Trump got loans
he wasn't entitled to, at amounts he wasn't entitled to, on terms he wasn't entitled to,
and the same thing with insurance and insurance coverage, and that he lied to counterparties.
He lied to his accountants and he got caught.
And that is what the persistent fraud law is meant to remediate against and to go after.
The headline here is, of course, the money.
And it's very, very close to the dollar amount
we set on legal AF of about 500 million.
I thought it could even be higher
based on compounded interest,
but the judge cut off some of the interest.
But it's gonna be well over $500 million.
At the end of the hot take,
I'll tell you about the bond
that Donald Trump's gonna have to post in cash
in order to make this judgment be stayed,
which is now the clerk's been ordered to enter. But there's other remedies here. The judge made
a modification of his earlier decision involving the dissolution of the certificates of operation,
the certificates that each company in New York operate under. He had originally ordered them
to be dissolved, subject to an appellate court making a decision on that. Now the judge has modified his order. He says,
I no longer need to dissolve the certificates. I'm going to leave that in the hands of two people.
One, he extended the tenure of the term of the court appointed monitor, who's a former federal
judge, Barbara Jones, who's been a monitor for the last 15 months,
he extended her term three more years.
She will now have complete supervision over all the transactions and assets of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization and his trust,
with new, renewed, more robust powers,
including that there has to be a pre-clearance of any information given to third parties by
Donald Trump,
not that they inform her after the fact.
That's based on a report that came out two weeks ago by Judge Jones,
the monitor, in which she said,
basically there is a complete lack of controls within this company,
even during this case. In other words,
there's still opportunities to commit fraud. She says,
I can't tell you if there's fraud in the company because there's not proper controls in the company. She said in a report, I can't tell you
whether there's improper financial transactions or irregularities because they don't have a proper
compliance program. So as I said in a prior hot take, the judge was going to impose and install
a requirement of proper compliance in this company. And he's done that. He's now created a new role,
a new person or company
to be the independent compliance director reporting
to the independent monitor.
Those two people together will make the decision,
not the judge,
about whether there'll be a dissolution
of the future of the companies
and how and related to their assets.
So that's a change that's maybe missed
in some of the reporting
that the judge has made to
his own order.
In addition to having the independent monitor, which is paid for by the Trump Organization,
the independent compliance director paid for by the Trump Organization is all paid on Donald
Trump's time.
He also banned Donald Trump and Eric and Don Jr., Allen Weisselberg and Jeff McConney from various business
relationships in New York.
Donald Trump is now banned for three years from being a control officer or an officer
of director of any company.
Allen Weisselberg in New York.
Allen Weisselberg, Jeff McConney, banned for life for ever being control officers. Don Jr. and Eric, their banned
for two years ever being an officer director of a New York company. In
addition, the organization cannot apply for any loans to any New York
registered or certified bank, which is basically all the banks in the world, for
the next three years. So they're banks in the world for the next three years.
So they're out of business borrowing for the next three years.
They're going to have to like, I don't know what, they can't set up new entities because
Barbara Jones, the monitor would catch it.
Nobody will let them be an officer, director.
Maybe they have to try to go to Florida, set up a new company with new money and have investment.
I mean, Donald Trump is on the cusp, unfortunately of getting a big payday
from his social media, Truth Social,
going public eventually.
So there'll be some cash there.
I'm sure he's not gonna put it back in New York.
He's gonna put it in a new entity.
I mean, all new money into the Trump Organization
or into Donald Trump is gonna have to go
into a new corporation, not controlled by New York.
And then under the supervision of the monitor.
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Now, the reason it's 92 pages is Judge
Angoran very methodically went through all the major witnesses,
crediting mainly the ones for the New York Attorney General,
including Michael Cohen, I'll talk about him next,
and discrediting the ones for Donald Trump, including Donald Trump himself
and all the experts for Donald Trump, and then piecing together,
then moving on to each of the asset classes and how they were materially mistated by Donald
Trump and fraudulently misstated and why, calculating the numbers related to that to come up with the
discouragement amount. And then we have the other remedies that we've talked about, the banning
from transactions, from leadership, from control positions of Donald Trump and others.
I'm gonna leave the hot take,
well, at the end I'll talk about what happens next,
including the appeal process,
but let me first address some of the observations
by the judge in 92 pages.
Firstly, in the observation of the witnesses,
let me tell you what he said about Michael Cohen,
because I think that's also a headline.
Because the other side was saying,
Michael Cohen can never be believed, Michael Cohen's a liar.
And here's what the judge said about Michael Cohen.
So firstly, he said, look, as a fact finder,
a less forgiving fact finder might take the position
that once a liar, always a liar.
In other words, he's perjured himself in the past.
He's admitted to perjury.
I can't believe a word he says,
but that's not how the judge here assessed as fact finder,
because there was no jury.
This was a bench trial.
He said on page 43 of the decision,
Michael Cohen was an important witness
on behalf of the plaintiff.
Although hardly the lynchpin that defendants have attempted to betray him to be.
His testimony was significantly compromised by his having pled guilty to perjury. However,
carefully parsed, he testified that although Donald Trump did not expressly direct him to
reverse engineer financial statements, that means cook the books. He ordered him to do so
indirectly in his mob voice. Although the animosity between the witness and the defendant is palpable,
providing Cohen with an incentive to lie,
the court found his testimony credible.
Based on the relaxed manner in which he testified,
the general plausibility of his statements,
and most importantly, the way his testimony
was corroborated by other trial evidence.
This fact finder does not believe
that pleading guilty to perjury
means that you can never tell the truth.
Michael Cohen told the truth.
That stands in stark contrast to how he assessed Donald Trump.
When he talked about Donald Trump, he focused in on this misstatement or fraudulent statement by Donald Trump during the testimony.
This is on page 36. When questioned about whether he had ever inflated
the value of 40 Wall Street,
Donald Trump was confronted with a Forbes article,
including a published audio recording
dated September, 2022,
that reported that Trump had told Forbes in 2015
that 40 Wall Street was 72 stories tall
when in fact it was 63,
resulting in an overvaluation of 50 million dollars. The article
also reported that Donald Trump told Forbes that 40 Wall Street had an operating net operating income
of plus 64 million, when in fact it was in the red by 8.7 million for the same 12 month period.
When asked if he was misquoted in the Forbes article, Donald Trump replied,
this is the judge now. I don't know. I don't know what I said. And then the judge concluded about
Donald Trump on page 37. Overall, Donald Trump rarely responded to the questions asked, and he
frequently interjected long, irrelevant speeches on issues far beyond the scope of the trial.
His refusal to answer the questions directly or in some cases at all, severely compromised his credibility.
And that's how the judge saw just two out of dozens
of witnesses all reported in the 92 pages.
What happens next?
Donald Trump's gonna have to post a huge cash bond,
could be upwards of $100 million or more,
plus find a bonding company that's gonna give him on credit,
credit that's been severely compromised
by finding by a judge that he's guilty of six counts of persistent fraud and can't be relied upon related to fraudulent financial
statements. Good luck using your financial statements through the court appointed monitor
to go get a bond, but he'll have to try to do that or this judgment is going to start
being enforced 30 days from now. If you post the bond, it's called a supercedious bond, stop the enforcement
of a judgment when you move for appeal, the chances of appeal are low at the first department
or at the appellate division first department, which is the Manhattan appellate court that
sits over Judge Angoran.
It is unlikely based on their prior rulings that they're going to find that Judge Angoran
did anything wrong.
And nor are they, I don't believe they're going to find
that he misapplied their earlier ruling from the summer about the statute of limitations and which
transactions are outside the statute of limitations and therefore can't be the basis of the judgment
and which are inside of it. I think he did that right and methodically knowing about that judgment
in the 92 pages. If Donald Trump posts the bond, takes the appeal, and loses it, his only stop is the Court of Appeals
in New York, which is also dominated in a blue state
by you can imagine who, and there's no attempt,
no ability to go to the United States Supreme Court
or any federal court.
That ship has sailed, that is done.
He tried that in the past and it failed,
and it was sent back to state court with Judge Angoran.
This has major implications for Donald Trump and his children sent back to state court with judge and Goron.
This has major implications for Donald Trump and his children.
They'll have to stop operating in New York.
They'll have to find new money and put that new money somewhere else and try to transact
business.
But their days are not just numbered.
They're almost virtually over in New York to continue to operate.
Just as a side note, right in the same courthouse, same courtroom, right now the New York Attorney
General is putting on a case, similar case against the National Rifle Association, the NRA,
to put them out, once and for all, give them the corporate death penalty for their lying and their
misuse of funds. So this could be a huge win for the New York Attorney General, like in the same
year, putting out a business, Donald Trump for the New York Attorney General, like in the same year, putting
out a business, Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association, kudos to Letitia James,
the New York Attorney General.
We'll follow it all and break it down on this weekend's edition of the Midas Touch legal
AF.
We do it on Wednesdays and this Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube, two million
strong YouTube channel for Midas Touch.
And then on hot takes like this one,
with the leaders of Legal AF as we get in to the 92 pages,
we look at the witnesses,
the expert witness analysis of the judge,
the discouragement analysis,
the remedial measure analysis.
We'll bring it all to you in separate hot takes right here.
So until my next hot take,
until my next Legal AF,
this is Michael Popak reporting.