‘A disaster for New York’: Trump appeal says civil fraud trial judge rubber-stamped ‘lawless’ Letitia James’ campaign promise to punish violations that ‘do not exist’

Donald Trump slammed New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and his civil fraud trial judge as his family’s persecutors in a long-awaited appellate brief that seeks to reverse his $454 million dollar judgment on seven different grounds, claiming that the jurist who wrote that the “frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience” didn’t even understand “basic banking concepts like a money market account.”

In the Monday filing submitted to the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, First Department, the former president argued that New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron “unaccountably rewarded NYAG’s lawless efforts at every turn” to punish one of the “most visionary and iconic real estate developers in American history” for the Trump Organization’s “complex, highly successful transactions” with “sophisticated Wall Street banks that left all parties deeply satisfied and had no impact on the public interest.”

 

The brief went so far as to claim that James sought to punish him for violations that “do not exist at all.”

 

Claiming that Engoron was “overruled with alarming frequency, including multiple times in this case,” the Trump team said the judge’s “erroneous” decisions amounted to a rubber stamping of James’ “limitless power to target anyone she desires, including her self-described political opponents,” with economic implications that are “a disaster for New York.”

On that front, a footnote included three hyperlinks to videos of James’ 2018 remarks when on the campaign trail for attorney general, when she vowed to “use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.”

 

“In fact, NYAG campaigned on the promise that she would ‘get Trump’ and made this promise the single greatest point of her campaign. No statute authorizes this power grab, so NYAG had to invent that power by applying Executive Law § 63(12) in a way never seen before,” the brief said. “Yet, Supreme Court unaccountably rewarded NYAG’s lawless efforts at every turn.”