I understand how litigation proceeds. I also understand that there was no actual fraud committed. And you of all people should understand that a judge's ruling does not constitute proof or fact.
Again, who was defrauded here? What repeated illegal acts took place?
No, actually, you clearly do not.
This is how litigation generally proceeds, in schematic form:
1. Plaintiff has some evidence that would, if true, justify a lawsuit by plaintiff against defendant.
2. Plaintiff sues defendant, and includes allegations as to the factual basis for the claim, and oftentime attaching documents that support the claim.
3. Defendant files a reply to the claim, either agreeing with, or denying, plaintiff's allegations. Defendant will often attach documents supporting its position.
4. Plaintiff or defendant may then make a motion for summary judgment, claiming that as a matter of law, based on the facts adduced so far, the moving party is entitled to judgment because there are no material issues of fact to be decided. Each side briefs the matter and may include additional documents that bear on the matter.
5. Judge reviews the pleadings, including documents introduced as evidence, and arguments presented at oral argument, and decides whether there is a material issue of fact that needs to be decided by a fact-finder or not. Judge rules accordingly.
In this case, it would have gone something like this:
1. AG sues Trump claiming that he has consistently lied on his SFCs about the values of his property, and that those lies constitute acts creating an atmosphere conducive to fraud. AG includes copies of the SFCs and copies of the Assessor's valuations for the years 2011 to 2021.
2. Trump replies to the claim, and either admits or denies each allegation - let's assume he denies each allegation.
3. AG moves for summary judgment, claiming that, as a matter of law, Trump violated Exec. Law 63(12) because the values on the SFCs were substantially higher than the assessor's values.
4. Trump replies to the motion for summary judgment with a brief that is supposed to contest the basis for summary judgment. In this motion, since the crux of the issue is that there is no issue of material fact regarding the difference in the valuations, it would be incumbent upon Trump and his lawyers to include documents that would tend to show that the AG's claim was wrong, or at the least that there was a material issue of fact to try. That might include things like the following: (a) the actual valuation report Trump relied on originally to arrive at the value, even if that report was prepared by him and his staff, (b) evidence tending to show that the assessor's valuations - which clearly are only arrived at as a means of dividing the property tax pie up between all of the various properties within the taxing jurisdiction - are unreliable - for example, if it had been my case, I would have had several junior associates spending several weeks to comb through all of the property sales in and around Mar-a-Lago during the relevant times, focusing particularly on unique properties, to present evidence that there was a wide discrepancy between the assessor's values - which are a matter of public record and easily obtained - and the actual sales values for those properties; I would hope that there would be no consistent pattern or delta to the differences so that I could argue both that there was a significant difference, and that the differences were so different property to property that no simple rule could be derived from them, such as "multiply the assessor's valuations by 5.4 to arrive at the likely sale value" - I would also have them comb the deeds for those properties to see if there are use restrictions on any of the other properties, so that I could gauge the differential effect that would have vis-a-vis the assessor's valuations. With respect to Trump's conscious choice to disregard the effect of the use restrictions on valuation, I would have had an opinion commissioned by an outside lawyer experienced in those matters who could opine on whether or not Trump or a purchaser would have been successful in defeating those restrictions in court, and then argued in my reply brief to the AG's motion that it was correct to weight the effect of those restrictions as something less than 100% due to the chances that overturning them might have been successful - hopefully, my expert would have opined that there was a very good chance (say, 75% or better) of overturning the restrictions, so that it would have been reasonable to have substantially discounted their effect on the value of that property.
To all appearances, Trump and his lawyer did none of these things. Instead, they got off into the woods on arguments about standing and
parens patriae, none of which was very well argued even so.
Clearly, (a) Trump did not hire the best and the brightest, if even a poor sod like me can come up with a better litigation strategy, and (b) it is still the case that Trump did himself in because he didn't have proper valuations done on his properties when he prepared the SFCs. To all appearances, he didn't even go to a few of his friends in the business and get BPOs from commercial real estate brokers.
As a result, the judge was left with very few options. He could have, as he did, accept the value propounded by the AG as being the only competent, objective evidence of value entered into the case. In a civil litigation, the judge's job is not to hunt for the TRUTH like some black-robed Diogenes, it is to determine, based on the law and the evidence presented, which party has the better position.
It astounds me that Trump is such a fuckwit that he couldn't even hire lawyers who could diligently attack the AG's case on summary judgment.
