New York State Goes After Trump - Again!
If anyone who enjoyed the news about Donald Trump getting slapped with a big lawsuit by the New York AG Letitia James thinks this legal action will cause Trump all kinds of pain, you might want to rethink that one again. Or better yet, let’s take a minute and look back at two other attempts by New York State to go after Trump for conducting his business affairs in a fraudulent way, and you’ll quickly realize that he’s been through this kind of thing again and again and it didn’t really hurt him at all.
Let’s start with Trump University which started doing business in 2005 with a curriculum which offered students a chance to learn the ways in which Trump had made himself very rich. This scam lasted five years and was shut down by New York State because basically it was nothing more than a quick way for Trump to make a buck by getting a bunch of suckers to pony up a few thousand bucks to sit in some overheated hotel room and listen to someone explain how they could earn a gazillion dollars in real estate.
Some of the students then went after Trump in a federal class action lawsuit which Trump settled around the time he announced his Presidential campaign. Of course, he then bragged that he had ‘never lost’ a lawsuit.
Then there was Trump’s so-called non-profit foundation, which operated for ten years until Trump agreed to shut it down in 2018 after New York State charged Trump with using monies donated to the foundation for political purposes, including covering campaign expenses in 2016.
When this story first hit the media, Trump claimed he had done nothing wrong and would go to court, if necessary, to clear his good name. The foundation no longer exists because Trump agreed to shut it down.
The announcement by the New York AG that her office is going after Trump over his misrepresentations of the value of his properties and other business scams is now the fourth time that the AG has made a big deal out of finding all kinds of illegal behavior by an organization registered in New York State.
Want to know what was the fourth such effort along with the three times the AG has gone after Trump? Try the 2020 announcement that charged the National Rifle Association with all kinds of nefarious behavior which was going to result in the dissolution of the NRA.
Talk about glory days in gun-control land. Except there was only one little problem. Yesterday I received my October issue of The American Rifleman magazine, which I have been receiving for more than sixty years. The magazine is still published by the NRA and the NRA is still registered in New York State.
Dollars to doughnuts when Letitia James went in front of the media this week to announce her latest legal assault on Trump, his lawyers had already scheduled a meeting with her office to begin negotiating a deal. Because that’s what lawyers do in civil suits – they make a deal. They shlep and shlep and shlep and sooner or later everyone gets tired and Letitia or whomever is the AG when they get done shlepping will get up and announce that a settlement has been reached that is ‘fair to both sides.’
I love how the AG said that her three-year investigation had uncovered ‘potential’ crimes committed by Trump and his kids. I’m not a lawyer so I have to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t recall anyone ever arrested for committing a potential crime. Either it is or it isn’t a crime. Duhhh….
Every month or so some lamestream media publishes an up-to-date list of how many investigations are being carried out where one of the targets is Trump. And I must say, it’s a pretty impressive list.
What I’d like to see is how much taxpayer money has been spent on all these efforts to uncover some ‘potential’ crimes. That would also be impressive, wouldn’t you agree?
Meanwhile, notice above I used the word ‘lamestream’ when I referred to the mainstream media. Remember who was the first politician to use that word in a public debate?
She lost the election yesterday to represent Alaska in the House.