What I'm reading: Trump's legal trouble

New civil lawsuit, growing criminal jeopardy

While I was enjoying the first half of this week at the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat organized by Julie Gammack, former President Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy was worsening on several fronts.

It feels impossible to follow all the Trump-related legal battles, so I recommend bookmarking the Just Security website’s Litigation Tracker of pending civil and criminal cases against the former president.

Massive state enforcement action in New York

On the civil side, the big news was New York Attorney General Letitia James filing “a monumental civil enforcement action against Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, the Trump Organization and many other Trump affiliates.” This page on the New York Times website links to the September 21 court filing, background on James’ three-year investigation, and analysis of the case.

The core issue in the massive lawsuit is simple: the Trumps massively inflated values of their real state assets for insurance and when seeking loans. At Just Security, E. Danya Perry, Joshua Stanton, and Norman Eisen summarized the key allegations and considered whether a “Trump tipping point” has been reached.

Along with today’s announcement of the filing of the civil action, the New York Attorney General also stated that she had referred her office’s findings for criminal prosecution by federal authorities: to the Southern District of New York for possible charges of bank fraud and insurance fraud, and to the IRS for possible charges of tax fraud. Based on the allegations contained in today’s complaint, Trump and his children face a very real risk of indictment, criminal conviction, and imprisonment.

Trump has long been accused of tax evasion by undervaluing his real estate assets. A New York Times investigation published in 2018 won a Pulitzer Prize. Richard Lindgren, a retired accounting professor who taught at Iowa’s Graceland University for many years, explained some of the creative accounting methods that can lead to tax avoidance (sketchy but often legal) and tax evasion (a crime).

Some conservatives have been whining that it’s unfair for investigators to target Trump’s “children.” But these are adults in their late 30s or 40s, and as Adam Davidson explained in this Twitter thread, Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric managed a number of Trump Organization projects.

Incidentally, Davidson is frustrated prosecutors don’t seem to be looking at Trump’s “work with sketchy oligarchs in the Former Soviet Union, the Gulf, and in parts of Asia.” Starting years before he ran for president, Trump “started to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on money-losing golf courses” around the world. In 2017, Davidson reported for The New Yorker on a crooked deal to build a hotel in Azerbaijan.

Court rules against Trump on Mar-a-Lago documents

Things aren’t going well for Trump in the federal investigation related to mishandling of classified materials. Just Security has updated its timeline of the case several times recently.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon tried to give the man who appointed her everything he wanted. Legal experts harshly criticized her order, which hamstrung federal investigators. On September 21, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (including two other Trump appointees) found that Cannon’s order “abused” the court’s discretion over classified documents.

The Washington Post’s Devlin Barrett covered the appeals court ruling, which allows the FBI’s investigators to use classified documents seized last month at Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago. Also at the Post, an analytical piece by Aaron Blake dissected the “thorough rebuke of Judge Aileen Cannon’s pro-Trump order.”

For my money, Marcy Wheeler (who writes as “emptywheel”) continues to provide some of the best coverage of this case. This week alone, emptywheel:

• Covered a Justice Department filing to the 11th Circuit, which raised “the possibility that the government’s law-enforcement efforts will be obstructed (or perhaps further obstructed)”;

• Wrote in detail on the 11th Circuit panel’s decision;

• Highlighted some important passages in Special Master Raymond Dearie’s draft order related to his review of various documents; and

• Provided a “big picture” take to “parse out what an intelligence review might look like” as federal investigators look more closely at what was seized from Mar-a-Lago. Excerpts:

As a legal matter and a political matter, Trump, his lawyers, and his apologists are trying to make the claim that this is just a dispute about documents, like overdue library books. […]

The documents are not really what is being fought over — the battle is over the damage  (hypothetical or actual) done to our intelligence services, our national defense, and our broader foreign policy by Trump’s possession of these documents at Mar-a-Lago. The documents are the first puzzle pieces the intelligence community [IC] has to put together, to fill in the whole picture and plan a way forward. […]

An intelligence review is designed to look at three things: what got exposed, to whom, and what dangers does that pose to intelligence sources, methods, and broader foreign policy objectives? These are all backwards-looking questions, to understand how this could have happened in the first place.

Please share your own reading recommendations with me, or post a comment on this thread.