| To: Brumar89 who wrote (32006) | 9/22/2022 12:33:19 PM | | From: Brumar89 | | | | @sandibachom
Wow. I produced commercials for Trump casinos in 1986 and he stiffed everybody
@sara4SF
“Trump campaign failed to pay the $12k bill from Gotham (for actors at campaign announcement) until a month after FEC complaint. The delay means that Gotham floated credit to the campaign for those 4 months, potentially making it a campaign contribution.”
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| To: Brumar89 who wrote (32008) | 9/22/2022 5:57:03 PM | | From: Brumar89 | | | | WolfTracker
A few things about the Trump NY civil case:
It is reported Trump tried to settle with James before she announced the lawsuit. Probably tried to lowball a figure and wanted it all to go away quietly with no admission of guilt and no real consequences.
James is trying to get the same judge that ordered Trump and his kids to sit for depositions and has no love for Trump. In a civil case only 2/3rds of jury needed to be found guilty. Low bar.
The $250 million figure is a minimum and actual award would be determined by a jury and judge. Any fraud over $1M is a class C felony in NY and if criminal charges follow that is up to 25 years in prison and 30 years under Fed codes per count. Trump is accused of bank, wire and insurance fraud. The IRS can file civil or criminal lawsuits and so can SDNY Feds. Other states may follow.
DA Bragg getting a guilty plea and conviction of Weisselberg was a tipping point and he must testify against the Trump org as part of his deal. No taking the 5th or taking the fall for Trump.
Mazars and Deutsche bank are cooperating and will testify against Trump. They were complicit in Trump's crimes and could face severe penalties and lose FDIC insurance so they will dump all over Trump.
Trump and his kids pleaded the 5th over 400 times and in a civil case that can be inferred to be an admission of guilt. James and Bragg forced them in to a corner with the threat of criminal charges. That leaves Trump's with no defense and makes the civil case a slam dunk.
Trump's kids are now facing serious criminal charges for daddy. How long before one of them breaks and flips and Ivanka has a lot to lose and has not defended daddy publicly.
WolfTracker
James named Weisselberg and his associate in the civil case so he is on trial and she seeks having both banned from ever working as a financial advisors in any capacity again.
"Under the plea deal, Mr. Weisselberg must pay nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest after accepting lavish off-the-books perks from Mr. Trump and his company, including leased Mercedes-Benzes, an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and private school tuition for his grandchildren.
He also must point the finger at his longtime employer, the Trump Organization, at its trial in October. In exchange, Mr. Weisselberg, who was facing years in prison, is likely to receive a five-month jail sentence, and with time credited for good behavior, he might serve as little as 100 days."
As part of the deal he can't be forced to testify against Trump but that does not exclude testimony against the Trump organization and his kids.
His guilty plea means he can't plead the 5th and he won't be able to be a witness for Trump and that was a major concern that he would take the fall for Trump. |
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 9/23/2022 5:42:54 AM | | | | | | Opinion | Trump Made N.Y. Attorney General’s Fraud Case Virtually Unbeatable
He should have settled early, but he got boxed into taking the Fifth — and that can be used against him now.
Opinion by Renato Mariotti
Politico
09/22/2022 02:19 PM EDT
Renato Mariotti is the Legal Affairs Columnist for POLITICO Magazine. He is a former federal prosecutor and host of the “ On Topic” podcast.
New York Attorney General Tish James raised eyebrows when she refused last-minute settlement overtures from former President Donald Trump. Her 222-page lawsuit filed Wednesday doubles down, asking for wide-ranging penalties against Trump, including $250 million and various bans that would bar Trump and his three oldest children from selling or acquiring real estate or applying for loans in New York for five years — potentially devastating measures for a company that depends on plastering the family name on properties for profit.
It’s not hard to see why James is taking such a hard line. She has a winning hand.
Yes, James’ bold campaign promises leave her open to allegations that she is biased and that her lawsuit is political. And, yes, she lacks the broad investigative and enforcement powers that criminal prosecutors have. But that is part of the reason why she will walk away with a big win here. Trump is fighting on many legal fronts at the same time — a grand jury in Georgia that might lead to an indictment for election interference there, an investigation by the Department of Justice into alleged mishandling of highly sensitive classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and a federal investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. If Trump were facing only the civil suit, his lawyer would almost certainly have permitted him to testify in the deposition with carefully crafted answers. But knowing the risks of his words being used against him elsewhere, he made a decision that will haunt him as James’ suit moves forward.
James’ lawsuit is full of seemingly damning evidence, outlining a wide-ranging scheme to defraud lenders by vastly inflating the value of Trump’s assets. This is a pretty common fraud scheme. Fraud is when you lie to someone to get their money, and a common way to defraud lenders is to lie about the value of the assets used as collateral — or in this case, the assets of the person who personally guaranteed the loan — to make the loan less risky than it seemed to be. James alleges that Trump and his kids did this approximately 200 times between 2011 and 2021, sometimes inflating the value of properties by as much as tenfold, to secure more generous loans and insurance coverage as well as tax benefits.
When I was federal prosecutor, I frequently prosecuted bank fraud that looked similar to what Trump and his company allegedly did. I even put away a rich real estate mogul who defrauded his lender. It’s not an unusual fact pattern to see. What is impressive is the sheer size of the scheme. Trump allegedly obtained $250 million via fraud over a 10-year period, and the various machinations he used to inflate the value of his holdings was extensive. James alleges that Trump exaggerated the square footage of his triplex apartment in Trump Tower, claiming it was 30,000 square feet rather than its actual size of 11,000 square feet, and therefore should be valued at $327 million rather than $80 million. It’s a price, James noted, that no apartment in New York city has ever commanded.
The attorney general’s lawsuit doesn’t contain damning emails or text messages, the kind that prosecutors typically rely on to prove a defendant’s intent. But that might not be necessary under the New York law that James cited which focuses on repeated acts of deception. (And given that his own accounting firm Mazars USA has said it won’t stand by the statements it prepared for a decade, it’s going to be hard for Trump to argue the valuations were proper.)
But perhaps the biggest reason James has such a winning hand is this: Trump dealt her the cards.
In early August he invoked the Fifth Amendment some 440 times during his deposition in this case. It was undoubtedly the right move for him to make because he faces criminal investigations in multiple jurisdictions, and his words, even though they are ostensibly about matters unrelated to election interference could nevertheless be useful to prosecutors seeking to demonstrate his capacity for deception. Prosecutors could also use his words to bring criminal charges based on the alleged scheme that James uncovered.
But taking the Fifth has severe consequences in this case. Unlike in a criminal case, in a civil proceeding like the suit brought by James, the jury will likely be instructed they can infer that when Trump took the Fifth, his answer would have been adverse to him. Trump’s repeated insistence that James’ politically motivated suit left him no choice will not withstand the effect of the jury inferring that Trump broke the law and has no good answer to the questions he was asked.
That essentially screws Trump and his family in this case. It is no coincidence that James put in her lawsuit that when Trump was asked whether he “had an ongoing agreement from at least 2005 to the present with Mr. Weisselberg, Mr. McConney and others to prepare the Statement of Financial Condition in a manner that included false and misleading valuation statements, Mr. Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to answer.”
In a civil case like this one, that’s the ballgame. Trump, his son Eric, and others took the Fifth hundreds of times and they can expect James and her team to throw that back in their faces to prove their case. All of the other evidence is just supporting corroboration. The testimony of Trump and his family — or lack thereof — is the centerpiece.
It is never easy to fight the attorney general of your state when she really wants to go after you. But Trump is overextended here because he is fighting a multi-front war. I frequently represent people and companies that are facing criminal and civil liability in different forums. Fighting on multiple fronts is hard and involves trade-offs.
If I were Trump’s lawyer, I would have settled this case in its infancy. He delayed and dragged it out, just as he delayed and dragged on multiple criminal investigations for years. Trump might think it benefits him politically to claim James’ is part of the vast “witch hunt” (he has certainly fundraised well off of the recent investigations) but he will likely pay a legal price if he attempts to drag this out further. James hasn’t accepted a settlement yet. Eventually she will, and the price she extracts will be a doozy.
politico.com |
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| From: Brumar89 | 9/23/2022 8:01:37 AM | | | | | | The Black Silent Majority
It has largely been discounted or ignored by the broader political class.
by THEODORE R. JOHNSON
SEPTEMBER 22, 2022 5:30 AM
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
It’s a good practice to periodically reassess what we think we know about the people around us, especially those who aren’t in our social circles. It can be all too easy for us to caricature political groups we are not part of—for those on the left to lump all conservatives, Republicans, and anti-democracy MAGA sycophants together without making distinctions among them, or for those on the right to think liberal pragmatists, Democrats, and economic socialists are just bullshit labels to suggest differences that don’t really exist. Likewise, if there are ethnic or racial groups we don’t interact with regularly, our perceptions of those groups might be similarly distorted.
A few years ago, More in Common published a fascinating study analyzing how flawed our perceptions of others are. On a question about racism, Democrats believed only half of Republicans would say that “racism still exists in America,” but approximately 80 percent of Republicans agreed with that statement. Concerning police, less than half of Republicans thought Democrats would disagree with the view that “most police are bad people”; in fact, 85 percent of Democrats disagreed with it. Unsurprisingly, those with most progressive and most conservative views held the most inaccurate opinions of the other party, which is to say they had the largest perception gaps about what their ideological counterparts think. (Disclosure: I’m the board chair of the U.S. chapter of More in Common.)
I had those findings from More in Common in mind when reading the results of a recent Pew Research report on the views of black Americans. Given all the talk over the last couple of years about defunding the police, reparations, Black Lives Matter, and structural racism, one might think that black Americans universally want to abolish police, receive cash payments from white people for slavery, and prefer that the goal of meritocracy be supplanted with equal outcomes—especially if one’s understanding of black people primarily comes from social media hot takes. For those who pay close attention, these lazy impressions of black politics don’t hold an ounce of water.
The study’s insights point to one central observation: There is a version of the “silent majority” within black America. Now, the label “silent majority” is typically associated with white working-class folks who may bite their tongue in public so as not to appear racist or unpatriotic, but it takes on new meaning when applied to a group that believes racism is the primary obstacle to its ability to enjoy democracy and capitalism in full. I’d summarize it this way: The black silent majority, largely discounted or ignored by the broader political class, is characterized by pragmatism and a reliance on extant institutions to deliver the democratic participation and economic self-sufficiency that pave the surest path to equality.
Consider black Americans’ views on law enforcement. According to the Pew report, 60 percent of black adults say police brutality is an extremely big problem for black communities, and approximately half say the prison system, policing, and the courts need to be overhauled for black people to be treated fairly. Yet three-quarters of black adults believe funding for police departments in their communities should increase or stay the same—there’s virtually no difference between black Democrats and black Republicans on this question. Less than a quarter are for defunding, and of those who are, nearly 80 percent prefer the money be redirected to better healthcare, schools, and infrastructure, all of which contribute to lower crime rates.
 Source: Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021, “ Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen.”When asked about remedying the disastrous and lingering effects of slavery, 77 percent of black adults support repayment. But when questioned about preferences for how it should occur, 80 percent suggested educational scholarships, and more than three-quarters said financial assistance to start a business or buy a home would be extremely or very helpful—again, these responses were consistent across political ideology from conservative to liberal. Indeed, concerning cash payments, conservatives were actually more supportive than moderates or liberals. As importantly, four in five black voters believe the federal government and banks that profited from slavery should be on the hook to provide such assistance. In other words, for most black folks, reparations looks like the GI Bill—hardly the province of those looking for the American Dream to be gift-wrapped and dropped on their doorstep.
Members of the black silent majority hold on for dear life to their Americanism and their black identity, incessantly seeking ways to help the country reconcile the former with the latter. They place the inequality they experience at the feet of racism but seek to hold institutions—not white people as a group—accountable for the resulting group disparities. To close the distance between them and the rest of America, they want to access the same types of education, labor, business, and home-buying programs that created the white middle class but were largely withheld from them in the early twentieth century.
In other words, they seek the removal of barriers that prevent the full capitalization on their work and ingenuity. What could be more American than this?
thebulwark.com |
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| To: Brumar89 who wrote (32011) | 9/23/2022 8:02:43 AM | | From: Brumar89 | | | | @RightWingWatch
Steven Hotze, a Texas-based religious-right activist and doctor, says that those who have received COVID-19 vaccines "become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence through maybe 5G."
@TexasTribune
April 20
Breaking: GOP activist Steven Hotze was indicted Wednesday on two felony charges related to his alleged involvement in a repairman being held at gunpoint in 2020 during a search for fraudulent mail ballots that did not exist. bit.ly |
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| To: Brumar89 who wrote (32012) | 9/23/2022 8:05:50 AM | | From: Brumar89 | | | | House Republicans pull ads from Ohio Trump district
 Josh Kraushaar
 Photo: Dustin Franz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
House Republicans have withdrawn their advertising for Ohio Republican J.R. Majewski, a MAGA-aligned candidate who was at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riots, Axios has learned.
What's happening: The National Republican Congressional Committee withdrew about $1 million in ad reservations for the district, according to a GOP source familiar with its strategy, all but surrendering the seat to Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur.
Why it matters: Kaptur's redrawn district — which backed Trump by three points in 2020 — once looked like an easy pickup for House Republicans. The GOP is now at risk of squandering another race because Republican primary voters nominated an extreme candidate.
Details: Majewski, an Air Force veteran, has been under fire for sympathizing with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and saying that every state that backed Trump in 2020 should secede from the United States.
The AP reported this week that Majewski misrepresented his military service, inaccurately claiming he was deployed to Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. In reality, he spent six months loading planes at an air base in Qatar. The AP wrote: "His post-military career has been defined by exaggerations, conspiracy theories, talk of violent action against the U.S. government and occasional financial duress."
Zoom in: Democrats have been relentlessly hammering Majewski on television over his extremist views. "He broke through police barricades at the Capitol, then blamed police for the riot. Now he wants to break our country apart," one Kaptur ad says. "He's not just radical, he's dangerous!"
During his primary campaign, Majewski ran an ad saying: "I’m willing to do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory. And if I’ve got to kick down doors, well, that’s just what patriots do."House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) campaigned for Majewski last month, seeing his race as key to the party's efforts to win back the House majority.Former President Trump didn't endorse Majewski, but praised him at an Ohio rally before the contested primary.
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 9/23/2022 11:33:55 AM | | | | | | As Trump’s Legal Woes Mount, So Do Financial Pressures on Him
The lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general is the latest indication of how an array of investigations is affecting the former president’s business and personal wealth.
By Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess, Matthew Goldstein and Eric Lipton
New York Times
Sept. 22, 2022
The New York attorney general’s fraud lawsuit that was filed on Wednesday against former President Donald J. Trump seeks to recover $250 million from his company and essentially run him out of business in the state.
Next month, Mr. Trump’s company will go on trial in Manhattan on criminal tax charges in a separate case that could cost millions of dollars in penalties and legal fees.
And on the horizon are civil suits from people seeking to hold the former president responsible for injuries and trauma inflicted during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters, a possible wave of litigation that some of his advisers fear could prove extremely costly to him.
Together, the numerous investigations and lawsuits swirling around Mr. Trump are creating new and significant financial pressures on him.
There is no evidence that he faces any immediate crisis. In an interview on Thursday, Eric Trump, his son, said the Trump Organization was in a strong position, noting that it had recently paid off some outstanding debts and seen a windfall from the sale of the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
But when stacked up altogether, the potential costs that the former president faces show that his challenges extend beyond the courtroom and into the maintenance of his wealth even as he continues to signal that he plans another run for the White House.
At a minimum, Mr. Trump’s hopes for new moneymaking ventures are sputtering: The deal that had the potential to reap perhaps the biggest profits for him — a merger involving his upstart social media company — is hanging by a thread, as regulatory and law enforcement scrutiny threatens to unravel it.
Mr. Trump remains a formidable political fund-raising force, but even there his situation is complex. Should he become a presidential candidate, he could face tight new restrictions on the personal use of money he has kept in his main political action committee and used for legal fees, Trump properties and even Melania Trump’s designer.
John A. E. Pottow, a professor of commercial law at University of Michigan, said the sort of legal cases that the Trump Organization faces can hurt any corporation.
“You have a company that has some serious litigation risks,” he said. “They have major liability on the horizon.”
Several experts in real estate and commercial law said that Mr. Trump and his business would be able to weather the storms. The Trump Organization generated hundreds of millions of dollars from the sale of its Washington hotel this year, as well as from other recent deals, and it has either refinanced or paid off a sizable portion of its loans.
The company also continues to collect revenue from some of its commercial real estate projects, while many of Mr. Trump’s hotels have rebounded from deep losses incurred in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s performance.
His golf clubs, many of which saw a surge in business during the pandemic, have begun to attract new tournaments in recent months, including contentious ones like those managed by the Saudi-backed LIV network.
Eric Trump said the family owned most of their real-estate assets “free and clear” and have “low debt relative to the value of our assets.” (The suit filed on Wednesday by Attorney General Letitia James of New York accused Mr. Trump and his family, including Eric Trump, of deliberately and systematically overstating the value of the company’s assets.)
Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for the former president, described the various investigations as “weaponized government” by Democrats whose efforts “lack credibility, they lack the facts, and they lack the law.”
Mr. Trump is no stranger to legal skirmishes and financial pressures. He filed and defended dozens of lawsuits over the years, and in the early 1990s, faced near financial ruin. His current predicaments pale in comparison to those challenges.
Yet Mr. Trump’s mounting legal woes threaten to roll back some of his recent gains and cast a pall over his presidential run.
In suing the former president and three of his children on Wednesday, Ms. James is seeking to bar the Trumps from ever running a business in the state again. She is also seeking to prevent Mr. Trump from acquiring real estate in New York for five years. Although Ms. James stopped short of trying to dissolve the Trump Organization, her office is trying to shut down at least some of his New York operations.
Ms. James’s case, which accuses Mr. Trump and his family business of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars, had no immediate impact on the company.
It could take years for the case to play out in the courts, and even then, a judge would have to grant the punishments Ms. James is seeking. Mr. Trump could also try to settle the case before a trial.
More immediately, the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial will begin in Manhattan next month. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, working with Ms. James’s office, accused the company of conspiring with its longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, to evade taxes in a scheme that doled out off-the-books perks to Mr. Weisselberg and other executives.
Mr. Weisselberg recently pleaded guilty for his role in the scheme, which included receiving a rent-free apartment, leased Mercedes-Benzes and private school tuition for his grandchildren. Although he refused to turn on Mr. Trump, he agreed to testify at the company’s trial, a move that could help prosecutors make their case.
If the company is convicted, a judge could impose a relatively modest penalty: less than $2 million. But it also will incur a significant sum in legal fees and could face trouble with lenders and the local authorities, who might shy from doing business with a company convicted of a felony. (The specific Trump Organization entities that are under indictment are not thought to hold any loans or liquor licenses, so the fallout could be limited.)
At the same time, Mr. Trump is facing a series of investigations and legal costs related to his efforts to hold onto office after he lost the 2020 election, as well as his taking — and then refusing to return — presidential records and more than 300 individual documents marked classified when he left office. He recently paid $3 million from his super PAC to a lawyer he hired to help defend himself in those cases.
And potentially hanging over Mr. Trump is an apparently unresolved dispute with the I.R.S., although its status is unclear.
The former president is also facing no less than seven separate civil lawsuits that are trying to hold him accountable — and seek damages from him — for the role he played in inspiring the chaos and violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. People close to Mr. Trump anticipate other suits are likely to follow.
In February, a federal judge in Washington ruled that three of the suits against Mr. Trump could move forward, brushing aside his arguments that he could not be held liable for riling up the crowd on Jan. 6 under the First Amendment and because he was immune to civil litigation. In his decision, Judge Amit P. Mehta said that the plaintiffs could try to prove their case that Mr. Trump had conspired with the mob that day. The former president has appealed the judge’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington.
Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said that if the Jan. 6 suits against Mr. Trump were successful, calculating the amount that he might have to pay in damages would depend on the individual ordeals suffered by the plaintiffs. They include members of Congress, Capitol Police officers and Washington residents.
“I don’t think that a fine like that — even if they had to pay $250 million — would bring the company down,” said Phillip A. Braun, a finance professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, citing the demand from Ms. James. “It would be painful for the family, but they probably could do it by liquidating some of their properties.”
When Mr. Trump left the White House, money seemed unlikely to be a concern. Despite the shadow of Jan. 6, he appeared poised to cash in on his appeal in conservative media circles, including through his social media venture — the merger of the parent company of Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media platform, with a special purpose acquisition company called Digital World Acquisition Corp.
But the deal has been stymied by dual investigations by the S.E.C. and federal prosecutors. The original Sept. 8 deadline for completing the deal has passed, and Digital World could face the prospect of liquidation in the coming weeks.
The promoters of Digital World are hoping that the company’s shareholders — most of whom are retail investors — will agree to give them until next September to complete the deal. But even with another year, the prospects of the S.E.C.’s approval of the deal between Digital World and Trump Media & Technology Group look grim.
Regulators and federal prosecutors in Manhattan are looking into potentially improper communications between representatives of Digital World and Trump Media before the special purpose acquisition company’s public offering. They are also examining unusual trading in Digital World’s stock before the merger announcement last October.
Digital World not only raised nearly $300 million in cash in its initial public offering last September. It also got dozens of hedge funds to commit to providing an additional $1 billion in financing after the two companies announced the merger in October. Mr. Trump, who stands to receive more than 70 million shares if the merger is completed, got on the phone with some of the big investors willing to commit at least $50 million.
But the inability to complete the merger in time led to the termination of that $1 billion financing deal. It is not clear if Digital World and Trump Media can persuade those investors to sign onto a new agreement, given the legal uncertainty surrounding the merger and Mr. Trump personally. Shares of Digital World have plummeted to $17, from $97.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
nytimes.com |
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