When I google “Letitia James popularity polls” the first thing that comes up is a Breitbart article and the rest that I get are from sites that have names like “citizens freedom press” and crap like that, so it’s obviously right wing sites trying to make it look like she’s desperate.
Anybody who knows anything about attorneys general and prosecutors knows that they don’t usually bring charges that are not going to stick, because it would make them look stupid if they did that a lot. Even with criminal cases, with your local prosecutors, they will try to cut a deal, or they will just drop the charges totally if they don’t think they’re going to win a case. They don’t want huge court cases with all the work and money and then to lose, which counts in statistics against them. Jeannine Pirro was a local prosecutor and a perfect example. She had big wins, lots of wins! Why? Because if she had a doubt about winning, she didn’t go to trial. So there’s that when you talk about Letitia James being desperate. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t but she knows that since this is such a high profile case against Trump, she wouldn’t even go after him if she didn’t think she was going to win.
Here’s what I found from the NY Times in regards to the case:
Source: The New York times: (this is not the entire article):
“While Mr. Trump has often leveraged law enforcement scrutiny to portray himself as a political martyr and to raise money from his supporters, Ms. James’s lawsuit suggests that his success is the product of fraud and chicanery.
There was the Westchester County golf club valued as if it had charged hefty initiation fees that were never actually collected; the “cash” that Mr. Trump counted even though it belonged to one of his business partners; and the pretense that his Mar-a-Lago club and his golf course in Scotland could make money from building homes on the properties, even though the Trumps had agreed to limit such development.
In yet another example cited in the case, the Trump Organization starkly overvalued a group of rent-stabilized apartments in Trump Park, its building on Park Avenue — apartments that Donald Trump Jr. once described as being “the bane” of his existence. The apartments were appraised by an independent expert as being worth $750,000; the Trump Organization, in 2011 and 2012, instead valued them at almost $50 million.
The lawsuit compounds Mr. Trump’s extensive legal woes. He is facing a number of criminal investigations involving his conduct in the final weeks of his presidency. Last month, the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago in an investigation into his removal of sensitive material from the White House; federal prosecutors are investigating his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss; and a Georgia district attorney is conducting a criminal investigation into his potential election interference in the state.
The authorities in New York have been investigating Mr. Trump and his family business since 2018, when the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened an investigation. The following year, Ms. James’s civil inquiry began, and both offices began to zero in on the way that Mr. Trump’s company valued its assets.
As part of its investigation, the Manhattan district attorney pressured the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, to turn on his longtime employer. When Mr. Weisselberg declined to cooperate, the office charged him with a yearslong scheme to avoid paying taxes on lucrative off-the-books perks.
The company was indicted as well and is scheduled to go to trial in October. Mr. Weisselberg, who is also a defendant in Ms. James’s suit, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies and agreed to testify at the trial, putting the company at a significant disadvantage. His lawyer, Mary E. Mulligan, declined to comment.
The Manhattan criminal investigation has not resulted in charges.. Early this year, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, instructed prosecutors to halt their effort to seek to indict Mr. Trump after he and some of his aides developed concerns about proving a criminal case. Such cases require a higher burden of proof than a civil case like the one Ms. James has filed.
While Ms. James does not have the authority to indict Mr. Trump, a footnote in the lawsuit said she provided her findings to the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. It notes that the conduct detailed in the complaint appears to amount to bank fraud and false statements to a bank.
The lawsuit also argued that the financial statements violated “a host of state laws.” Asked about the possibility of state charges, Mr. Bragg said in a statement that the investigation into Mr. Trump and his company is “active and ongoing.
Ms. James’s lawsuit represents the culmination of a contentious yearslong civil investigation that Mr. Trump and his lawyers sought to thwart and delay at nearly every turn.
In April, a New York State judge held Mr. Trump in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena from Ms. James seeking some of his personal records. The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, eventually lifted the contempt order, but only after Mr. Trump paid a $110,000 penalty.
Justice Engoron also ordered Mr. Trump, as well as Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., to face questioning under oath from Ms. James’s investigators. (Eric Trump was previously questioned for the investigation, during which he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.)
Early this year, Ms. James disclosed in court papers that Mr. Trump’s longtime accounting firm cut ties with the former president and essentially retracted a decade’s worth of his financial statements. The firm, Mazars USA, compiled the financial statements based on information from Mr. Trump and his company, which “intended to mislead Mazars” by “concealing important information,” the lawsuit contends.
Mr. Trump’s lead accountant testified under oath in a deposition that he was “shocked by the size of the discrepancy” between the value for the rent-stabilized units at Trump Park listed in a 2010 outside appraisal and the value the Trump Organization assigned to the units.
In fighting the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers are expected to highlight the disclaimer in his financial statements saying that Mazars had not audited the valuations. They also might argue that the Trump Organization submitted the statements to large financial institutions that conducted their own due diligence.
Addressing the defense that the Trump Organization’s practices were commonplace in the real estate world, Ms. James, at a news conference on Wednesday, argued that “this conduct cannot be brushed aside and dismissed as some sort of good-faith mistake.” The financial statements, she said, were “grossly inflated, objectively false and therefore fraudulent.”
Mr. Trump, his company and his family, she added, “should all be held accountable.”
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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