New York v. Trump: The Bonfire of Property

Someday, when President Trump is in his grave and the drama of his life is handed over to the historians, we would like to think that one of the noble scriveners will take a dispassionate look at the methods used to bring him down. Our guess is, sad to say, that when they do, they will conclude that the wrongs Mr. Trump has allegedly perpetrated are less serious than the breaches of constitutional principle and due process committed against him.Let the scriveners start, we say, with the civil case just won — though it will be appealed — by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. It is a shocking breach of property rights growing from a case that was promised, and the result announced, before Ms. James was in power. She was but a candidate when she declared that she would pursue the president. She’d filed no complaint, offered no evidence, but already had her quarry in mind. Now, it appears as if she could have him. A state judge, Arthur Engoron, has granted her request for partial summary judgment on the most important count, accusing Mr. Trump, his family, and his organization of fraud. Damages will be sorted out at trial, but the die appears to be cast, and it’s come up snake eyes for the former president and the businesses that bear his name. No trial, no witness, and no computing estimates needed, apparently. Judge Arthur Engoron, in handing Ms. James the case, writes that he only had to find that Mr. Trump’s valuations were “false and misleading.” It is, he writes, “essentially a ‘documents’ case” and alleges that those documents “clearly contain fraudulent valuations.” He reports that Mr. Trump is of the position that the court “should not believe its own eyes.” He quotes “Duck Soup,” that classic by the legal sages the Marx Brothers, to make the point. To our eyes, though, the veracity — or better said, plausibility, given the guesswork involved — of Mr. Trump’s valuations is exactly the thing for which a trial, and the accouterments of due process, would be helpful. By many accounts, real estate appraising is more art than science. One prosecutor told our A.R. Hoffman that as practiced in Gotham, it amounts to “fudgework.” Mr. Trump may well have fudged too far, but how does the judge know? Take, say, the worth of Mar-a-Lago. The judge found that an estimation of between $426 million and $612 million was fraudulent because the Palm Beach Assessor pegged the manse as worth between $18 million and $27.6 million. That lower figure is due to its designation as a social club, rather than as a private residence. The true worth could rest waaaaaaay higher than what the assessor reckoned; Forbes valued it at $160 million — in 2018. Pending appellate intervention, Mr. Trump faces the liquidation of his Empire State business in a New York minute. Ten days, to be precise. Judge Engoron sees discrepancy as sufficient to find Mr. Trump liable, when that chasm could equally be figured as the thing which trials — even bench ones like this one — are conceived to clarify. The protections of criminal law do not apply here, but isn’t that all the more reason to preserve what process does?We are talking about American bedrock. The 14th Amendment ordains no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” On what basis can Judge Engoron, whose province is the four corners of the law, not the square footage of skyscrapers, look Americans in the eye and summarily conclude that his own valuations are better than those of Mr. Trump, who has spent a lifetime in real estate?Let us say yet again that it is not our intention to try this case here. The New York Sun is neither lawyer nor judge. In a long newspaper life, though, we have learned the profound nature of the American revolutionary cry “liberty and property.” To seize Mr. Trump’s properties on the basis of a summary judgment is shocking. New York might be sustained on appeal — or not. If a court can do this to a president, though, what chance have the rest of us?

New York v. Trump: The Bonfire of Property

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