George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on Wednesday called out a New York judge and the attorney general for massive penalties levied against former President Donald Trump.
Judge Arthur Engoron ruled Friday that Trump must pay $354 million and barred him from being an officer or director of any company or organization based in New York for three years for overstating the value of real estate holdings to obtain loans. Turley asserted in a Fox & Friends interview that Democratic Attorney General Letitia James and Engoron resorted to drastic measures against Trump. (RELATED: ‘They Are Lunatics’: Trump Blasts Letitia James, Judge After Civil Fraud Case Ruling)
“[Trump] has certainly a good case about the excessiveness of this judgment,” Turley asserted. “Whether it’s under the 8th amendment or due process clause, we’ll have to see … What’s interesting in this case is that James is going to argue this isn’t like punitive damages. This is disgorgement. We are simply taking the money, the ill-gotten gains back from him.”
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“But when you drill down on this opinion, there is nothing there,” Turley added. “You can’t really figure out how he came to this figure based on any real hard numbers. He basically high-balls everything that he’s calculating and then he has a lot of speculation. He says things like, ‘If you had been honest with the banks they would have required higher interest rates and you wouldn’t have as good of a deal.’ Well, the Trump corporation was famous for squeezing banks because they wanted his business. And they said that on the stand in front of this judge. They said, ‘we made money. We wanted more loans with this’ – what they called a whale client.”
James sued Trump in September 2022 after she promised to investigate the former president’s finances during her 2018 campaign for attorney general.
“The argument of the court is that it was still fraud even though you didn’t cost anyone a dollar … Even if you accept that this is fraudulent, the question is, why this nuclear option? This is an effective public execution, and the glee that people are expressing that he might have a fire sale of his properties really shows the discomfort that many of us have with this opinion.”
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