Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. Either way, Trump’s handling of the New York State fraud case shows him to be about as ready to step back into the Oval Office as the man in the moon.
Trump had to know that the New York AG, Letitia James, had the goods on him because anyone with half a brain could figure out that because the valuations he placed on his properties to get bank loans were higher than the valuations he used to determine his property tax liability, that the whole thing was a scam.
Trump has a long history of ripping off his customers in very obvious ways and then pretending that he didn’t do anything wrong. So, for example, he created this totally phony program called Trump University, which promised people who enrolled that they would take courses that would teach them how to become rich.
In fact, the courses did nothing except jam a bunch of suckers into a hotel ballroom, which was referred to as the Trump University ‘campus,’ and ultimately Trump had to reimburse every student for a total of $25 million in order for the legal action against him to be settled out of court.
Now, you would think that someone who admitted to stealing millions of dollars in such an obvious, racketeering kind of way wouldn’t even imagine running for political office, never mind for the office of President of the United States. But Trump not only ran for office while this lawsuit was about to go into open court, but he won the 2016 election just two weeks before he settled this case.
If you’re a crook and you manage to avoid both jail time and public humiliation for your misdeeds, there’s simply no way you won’t try to be a crook again. Which is why Trump continued to defraud New York State even while he was President, and God knows what other scams he pulled off during his term of office beginning in 2017.
I have to assume that his decision to load Air Force One with thousands of classified documents which he then stored in a toilet at Mar-a-Lago had something to do with yet another illegal scheme to make a buck instead of actually doing an honest day’s work.
Like the old saying says – the leopard’s spots don’t change.
On the other hand, the federal indictments covering those stolen documents and his alleged involvement on January 6th and the ‘stop the steal’ nonsense aren’t legal actions which can just be bought off by agreeing to pay a fine.
Federal felonies aren’t civil lawsuits heard in some state court. Violations of the federal code are serious, and the Feds don’t have any incentive to make deals. I had a good friend who started out as an investigator for the New York State AG but then switched over to the Southern District federal side.
Why did he make the switch? He said it like this: “Mike, when I was with the state we were given a certain amount of money each year and when we used it up, we had to put off any indictments until the following year. The Southern District, on the other hand, doesn’t have a budget. We get all the money we need.”
Trump may put some cash in his pocket when the merger between those two internet media companies goes down, although the moment a positive vote was announced, the price of the shares dropped by 15%.
And I’ll take the ability of the federal government to print money over Trump’s ability to raise cash every single time.
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