Getting back to the James Bond civil case against the Trump organization, says NYT:
It is unclear whether these same five judges will also hear Mr. Trump’s appeal, but David B. Saxe, a former judge on the appeals court that ruled on Monday, said that the court’s decision to short-circuit Ms. James’s collection efforts suggests that some of the judges were uncomfortable with Justice Engoron’s ruling.
“My view is that the court indicates it has difficulty with the breadth of the lower court’s decision,” said Mr. Saxe, who retired in 2017 after 36 years on the bench, 19 of them on the appeals court.
“They had other options available to them, and they issued a broad-based stay,” he continued, which he said suggests “that there is a view that they’re going to need to take a hard look at the lower court’s decision.”
“Hard look” is a term of art, and it means finding everything not hard to find. The obvious.
As for the obvious, Engoron found the Trump Organization and some of its companies liable on falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and conspiracy to falsify business records. Eric and Don Jr also owe $4 million, and Weisselberg $1 million for distributions of ill-gotten profits. On the $168 million from defrauding banks, the dispute would center around McCarty’s “rounding errors” or not much in the final analysis.
As for the less obvious, that’s the $126 million for the ill-gotten gains on the sale of the Old Post Office, centering around whether Libor +8% or Libor +4% with Trump’s personal guarantee based on Doral valuation was the right loan pricing, could be too much for some judges. Sure, Doral was wildly overvalued in Trump’s head, but It quickly decays into something like an early discussion of phlogiston theory, a debate about something that never existed. Most judges have no idea how construction projects work. Engoron has done an excellent job trying to nail down that fraud which clearly unraveled. Trump leased the building rights for $375 million to CGI, who defaulted within 2 years choking on their own shit sandwich. Of course the taxpayer eats it in the end, but this project had been kicking around for a long time and CGI seems to have been crazy reckless, which also seems doubtful. Whatever happened with the Old Post Office fraud is still ongoing.
https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2024/02/26/waldorf-astoria-dc-cgi-merchant-group-trump-hotel.html