Legal Lightning Round, Schadenfriday Version

Happy end of the week! There are multiple stories to cover today, but it’s also Friday so I will try and pull the delicious schadenfreude out of each to make it a true Schadenfriday fest. Start the clock: Let’s play a legal lightning round!

Nuclear Wessels (in my best Ensign Chekov voice)

ABC News reported Thursday that Trump was not only a hoarder of our top secret national defense information, he was also a blabbermouth. No surprise there, but what he blabbed was a doozy. Trump reportedly told his buddy, Anthony Pratt, an Australian billionaire who made his fortune packaging cardboard (not to be confused with that other Australian billionaire who made his fortune packaging B.S.), about U.S. nuclear submarine capabilities, including how many warheads they could carry and how close they could get to Russian subs without being detected.

Trump apparently did this just to show off. There’s no evidence anyone profited from this information, though Pratt promptly turned around and shared it with several others, including foreign officials, so the safety of our nuclear fleet was compromised, though how much remains unclear. Pratt isn’t mentioned in the indictment in Florida, nor is Trump charged based on this incident. But Pratt is now among 80 witnesses who could be called to testify. And this conversation would go to show that Trump was cavalier and reckless in his handling of state secrets and was motivated by a desire to seem important by casually tossing around top secret information he obtained from intelligence briefings. This kind of thing will stick in a jury’s head, just like the images of classified documents in boxes in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms.

This also undercuts the argument that Trump did not harm the U.S. in any way through his mishandling of state secrets. To the contrary, it demonstrates that Trump very casually put others in grave danger, including U.S. service members; that he could not be trusted with top secret intelligence; that he ignored the pleas of government officials to treat it seriously; and that this incredibly valuable knowledge belonged not to him but to the nation.

Trump files a motion claiming he’s above the law

Judge Tanya Chutkan had asked all motions to dismiss be filed by early October, so we got a doozy from Trump. He is claiming that the principle of “Presidential Immunity” means that nothing he did while he was in office that was ever remotely within the ambit of his official role can serve as a basis to criminally charge him. In short, he, as president, was above the law.

This is a Hail Mary pass, but it speaks volumes about where Trump’s head is on this case. And it aligns with where it is on the other case down in Florida, or when he was blabbing our nuclear submarine secrets to a billionaire buddy to impress him. Trump simply and fundamentally does not believe the law applies to him, and that his right of “free speech” includes plotting to overthrow the election and passing around classified military information like candy or waving our military plans to attack Iran in front of strangers.

The motion will be denied, but it will go up on appeal, so Trump is hoping it will cause a significant delay in the trial. My bet is that the D.C. Circuit, which has already shown it has no patience for further delays, will smack him down quickly. Then it will go to SCOTUS, which likely will affirm the ruling without an opinion, at some future moment via its shadow docket. I am hoping that the case is not in any way stayed while the ruling on “presidential immunity” is pending, particularly when it is so clear that delay is precisely what he hopes to achieve.

Once we have both sides of the argument, I’ll do a deeper dive into what he is claiming and why it is dead wrong and can’t be allowed to stand. Until then, put it in your mental junk drawer as another delaying tactic.

Trump’s penthouse in the spotlight

It has gold toilets and was built to look like a cheap version of Versailles, but despite this affront to the eyes and sensibilities, Trump’s home is not what he has claimed it to be. Specifically, his triplex penthouse atop Trump Tower is not 30,000 square feet in size but just under 11,000. Trump inflated the value of that property by claiming it to be far larger in size than it actually is, which he of course has done with crowd sizes and his alleged wealth in general.

Photo by Sam Horine / R29

Why does this matter? Trump is appealing a devastating ruling in which Judge Engoron of New York found, on a motion for summary judgment, that Trump had falsified the values of his properties for decades in order to obtain favorable loans. As part of that ruling, the judge ordered the business licenses of the Trump Organization canceled. Any appellate court will look at whether the trial judge’s ruling is supported by the evidence, and so the example of the penthouse is likely to stand out.

The NY AG’s office submitted statements of financial condition that showed the value of the apartment had somehow jumped from $80 million in 2011 to $327 million in 2015—a 400 percent rise. How did this miraculous increase happen? It turns out that from 2012 to 2016 Trump submitted statements falsely claiming the size of the apartment (not under 11,000 square feet, but over 30,000) resulting in an overvaluation of between $114 million to $207 million.

Wrote the judge,

Perhaps, if the area is rounded or oddly shaped, it is possible measurements of square footage could come to slightly differing results due to user error. Good-faith measurements could vary by as much as 10-20%, not 200%.

The judge found that Attorney General Letitia James had “unquestionably satisfied” her burden of demonstrating fraud, and he used the fact that Trump is a property developer to show why this particular valuation was so absurd: “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the judge remarked.

Defense lawyers tried to argue that there was “no one right way” to value property, saying that was the whole point of the case.

“I think any high school student knows the right way,” Judge Engoron replied, dryly.

Santos treasurer pleads guilty

It’s been some time since we heard from New York’s other famous huckster and con artist, Rep. George Santos aka Anthony Devolder aka fabulous drag queen Kitara Ravache. Santos is under federal indictment and is facing an Ethics Committee investigation that could result in his ouster from Congress.

Photos of George Santos and someone who is not his treasurer, Nancy Marks (but wouldn’t THAT have been amazing), courtesy of the Santa Monica Daily Press

To build its case against him, the Justice Department has leaned on those who helped perpetrate the fraud, including his erstwhile treasurer, Nancy Marks. On Thursday, Marks pled guilty to one felony count, the details of which we don’t yet have. But it’s a sign that the club walls are closing in and the merengue music may soon stop for Kitara.

Marks had resigned from the Santos campaign in January after a series of reports revealed that there was deep corruption and fraud at work in the campaign. I’ve written pretty extensively before about those allegations and the bizarre, interlocking world of George Santos’s finances. But with respect to Nancy Marks, we can add a few quick details.

Marks helped create a fake campaign donor scheme for Santos. In his first run for office, he listed a dozen big but fake donors, including a false $5,800 donation by his relatives. The goal was to inflate the value of the donors to make it seem like he had more support and money than he actually had. Marks apparently helped him pad the amounts so that it would seem like he had met a minimum threshold sought by the Republican National Committee.

Wait, this all sounds really familiar…

Are we sure Marks didn’t work for Trump’s property office? She seems like she’s in the “just tell them it’s more, damn the truth” camp.

Marks knows where a lot of the bodies are buried when it comes to Santos’s creative accounting, including a fake $500K loan that never happened. And yet, as Mother Jones reported, Santos tried to throw Marks under the bus by saying it was all reporting by a “former fiduciary” who “went rogue.” Probably not smart.

Marks’s guilty plea likely has others in Republican fundraising circles nervous. She was the treasurer on numerous campaigns, including Lee Zeldin’s failed gubernatorial bid last year. If she dressed up the books with Kitara, what else has she done? Look for a potential superseding indictment that may yet sweep others as all this gets unwound.

That’s it for the lightning round! And remember, drag isn’t a crime. But bad drag ought to be. Have a great weekend!

Jay

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