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‘Twas the best of mornings, ’twas the worst of mornings for the former president, as two parts of the New York Court system issued rulings in his civil and criminal cases.
It began with Trump likening himself to Jesus.
Happy Holy Week to all the haters and the losers!
And indeed, he did get a giant chocolate bunny from the Appellate Division, where the judges of the First Judicial Department reduced his bond from $464 million to $175 million. Trump claimed last week to be sitting on almost half a billion dollars in cash, but said that he preferred to hang onto it and let the state seize his real estate empire and sell it off at firesale prices. He also screamed bloody murder about the fine and statutory interest, which he bizarrely attributed to Justice Arthur Engoron.
Presumably he’ll be able to get the lower bond underwritten with Chubb, his longtime insurers who covered the $91 million bond in the E. Jean Carroll case. In the meantime, the appeals court also continued the interim stay of most of the enforcement provisions, including those which barred the individual defendants from serving as corporate officers in their own company. But it left intact the enhanced responsibilities of retired Judge Barbara Jones, who has served as special master at the Trump Organization for more than a year. And the company will still be under the supervision of a to-be-named Independent Director of Compliance, to make sure that it don’t do any more major frauding.
Things went less well back at the Supreme Court, where Justice Juan Merchan took an extremely skeptical view of Trump’s argument that the government had engaged in such serious misconduct with respect to discovery that the criminal charges of creating false business records should be dismissed.
In reality, the Manhattan District Attorney asked the US Attorney for documents relating to Michael Cohen a year ago and gave Trump’s lawyers everything produced by the feds in June. Trump waited until January to subpoena the DOJ, and then acceded to multiple delays in production, such that tens of thousands of pages of documents arrived on the eve of the scheduled start of the trial today, March 25. In the ensuing scuffle, Trump’s lawyers blamed the DA, and the DA blamed Trump’s lawyers, and the trial got knocked off the calendar.
But this morning, Justice Merchan clearly sided with the state, noting that the bulk of the new materials were Michael Cohen’s bank records, having nothing to do with the instant case.
Trump’s lawyers tried to argue that SDNY’s failure to turn over documents in a timely fashion could be imputed to DANY, and thus amounted to deliberate misconduct. Which makes perfect sense if you pretend that the DANY and SDNY are one entity, instead of two entirely separate offices which mutually loath each other.
There’s also the minor detail that the information appears to be largely inculpatory, and thus does not constitute Brady or Giglio material.
In any event, Justice Merchan appears to have emerged from the hearing even more pissed off than before at Trump and his attorneys.
After a brief recess, he ruled from the bench. The motion to dismiss or delay this trial further was denied. Jury selection will begin on April 15.
But on the plus side, Trump’s grift platform rose 35 percent today on it’s first day of trading, making the former president billions in paper profits. So, HOSANNAH, the MAGA Lord and Savior is risen.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
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