‘The Person in This Room Hates Trump’

President Trump’s closing statement in his financial fraud case will be remembered as a kind of primal scream for due process. The case has been chaotic, but also somewhat drained of drama. Before the proceedings began, after all, the presiding judge, Arthur Engoron, ruled that Mr. Trump was liable. Damages are at stake, and Mr. Trump’s New York concerns could face dissolution. No wonder the 45th president was fit to be tied. Mr. Trump decried the “vicious” statute under which he was found liable, New York Executive Law 63(12). That law ordains that anyone who demonstrates “persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business” can be enjoined “in the name of the people of the state of New York,” at the request of the attorney general, Letitia James. Mr. Trump adds that he was deprived of a jury, though that appears a self-inflicted wound.The most memorable line of Mr. Trump’s soliloquy was his reflection — straight outta Queens— that “the person in the room right now hates Trump and uses Trump to get elected.” The reference appears to have been to General James, who, on the campaign trail, announced that she was “closing in on” Mr. Trump. She called him an “illegitimate” president who could not “go a day without threatening our fundamental rights.”Even the Times, we’ve observed, questioned how this manner of rhetoric — Ms. James alleged that he “should be charged with obstructing justice” without having adduced any evidence — could coexist with the impartiality required to bring a case “against Mr. Trump, his family members or their business interests.” In other words, the exact case that she just tried.The case has been marked by ugliness, much of it coming from Mr. Trump. That kind of rhetoric, like Ms. James’, gets no defending from us. A bomb threat at the suburban home of Judge Engoron underscores the dangerousness of the storm of law and politics in which the trial took place. Mr. Trump’s bluster, however obnoxious, does not relieve the state of the constitutional burden of due process before it can deprive “any person” of property.New York’s attorney generals have long wielded broad powers — witness the Martin Act, an anti-fraud statute that Eliot Spitzer used to bring Wall Street to heel. One lawyer told Legal Affairs magazine that the law is the “legal equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction” and that the “damage that can be done under the statute is unlimited.” To triumph, prosecutors need not show that anyone was actually defrauded. While Ms. James eschewed the Martin Act when she sued Mr. Trump, the statute he calls “vicious” still has plenty of teeth. Nobody need actually have lost money (and nobody did, so far as anyone can see from Ms. James’ case). Judge Engoron’s power is immense — to not only bleed Mr. Trump’s business, but to seize his life’s work, all on a preponderance of the evidence and with, in our view, something short of due process.

‘The Person in This Room Hates Trump’

‘The Person in This Room Hates Trump’

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