The scandalous behavior of New York State’s legal bureaucracy in the matter of President Trump’s real estate victimless non-crime has attracted widespread derision: You Don’t Have to Love Trump to Laugh at Letitia James’s ‘Fraud’ Case [by John Tamny, Forbes.com, November 9, 2023]. Recently, AP posted a definitive analysis: Dissolving Trump’s business empire would stand apart in history of NY fraud law by Bernard Condon, January 29, 2024].
“Stand apart” is apparently AP-speak for “utterly unprecedented.” Condon’s article piece is a crushing demonstration of this atrocity and its alarming implications:
Trump’s case stands apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.
…some legal experts worry that if the judge goes out of his way to punish the former president with that worst-case scenario, it could make it easier for courts to wipe out companies in the future.
University of Michigan law professor William Thomas says “Those who want to see Donald Trump suffer by any means necessary…risk ignoring the very commitment to a rule of law that they accuse him of flouting.”
Generally speaking, lawyers not afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome seem speechless with shock over this fantastic abuse of the legal system [The Curious Fraud Case Against Trump Just Got ‘Curiouser,’ by Jonathan Turley, jonathanturley.org, December 3, 2023].
Students of history are less surprised. Political Tribunals masquerading as Law Courts were standard under Communist rule. Dreaming up ways to confiscate the property of political opponents was common in cruder times. As illustrated in Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series of novels, it was standard procedure in the last years of the Roman Republic. And, of course, it was in large part to stop this activity by the Crown that the English Barons forced Magna Carta on King John in 1215.
I doubt if any of the ancestors of NYAG James’ legal hit squad were within a thousand miles of England in 1215.
But there may be more behind this legal piracy than Trump Derangement Syndrome.
New York Attorney General James seems to have a thing about real estate. She bought a 4-unit apartment building in Brooklyn as long ago as 2001 [Letitia James Breaks City Rules With Rental Property, Records Show, by James Fanelli, DNAInfo.com, June 9, 2014] after working for just two years as an Assistant N.Y. Attorney General in charge of the Brooklyn regional office. Her activities in the sector have not gone unquestioned: Inflating Home Price: Letitia James Under Fire [Griffin News 5, October 31, 2023].
If Letitia James Net Worth [Forbes] $15 Million Assets [by John Clauser, Caclubindia.com, October 2, 2023] is to be credited (and it does not appear to have been challenged), James has increased her net worth from $1 million in 2010 to $15 million today in part by several property purchases:
Every one of these properties was purchased under special circumstances; some even claim the prices were significantly lower than market rates.
(We have sometimes wondered if James’ envy that VDARE.com bought and is now headquartered in a Castle has triggered her determination to subpoena us to death.)
Note that if the James/Engoron gang do get control of Trump’s real estate holdings, they will have at their disposal some of the finest properties in the world.
A genuine possibility exists that they may sell them for cents on the dollar to associates, possibly including (albeit well disguised) themselves.
The legally sanctioned looting of the Trump Organization has already begun. Retired Clinton-appointed Federal Judge Barbara S. Jones, who snagged the position of “independent monitor” of the operation in December, has already billed $2.6 million: ’This is truly a joke’: Trump lawyer blasts independent monitor’s report ahead of fraud trial ruling [by Peter Charalambous, ABC News, January 29, 2024]. Congratulate Barbara S Jones—Email her. Please be polite.
Unfortunately, there is ample precedent for massive plundering by government appointees.
Judge David L. Bazelon was Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the already infamous D.C. Circuit 1962-78. According to the book The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down, by Geoff Shepard, Bazelon was the mastermind behind the judicial coup which reversed one of the greatest election landslides in Presidential history—arguably a precursor of the Deep State coup against Trump.
In 2019, the intrepid and incredibly industrious Ron Unz posted an essay with the informative sub-headline:
How a Young Syndicate Lawyer from Chicago Earned a Fortune Looting the Property of the Japanese-Americans, then Lived Happily Ever After as America’s Most Respected Civil Libertarian Federal Appellate Court Judge
[The Power of Organized Crime, The Unz Review, July 19, 2019]
For our purposes, the key section is Looting the Property of the Japanese-American Nisei:
…by early 1942 FDR signed an executive order shipping some 120,000 Japanese-Americans off to grim concentration camps…As a result, they lost nearly all the property they had steadily accumulated over two generations, most of which was either seized or otherwise ended up in government hands…
Following the end of the war, all this property needed to be sold off…Chicago’s powerful political machine deployed its considerable political clout to place the sales process in the hands of David L. Bazelon, a young Chicago lawyer and leading Democratic fund-raiser with deep Syndicate ties…he arranged the sale of assets for a fraction of their real value to his circle of Chicago friends and associates, sometimes apparently receiving a secret slice of the lucrative ownership stakes in return.
…As an extreme example, Bazelon almost immediately sold Chicago’s Henry Crown a twenty-six thousand acre California mine site, containing tens of millions of dollars worth of coal, for a mere $150,000
It seems plausible that Bazelon received quiet kickbacks totaling many millions or perhaps even tens of millions in present-day dollars in exchange for his very favorable distribution of billions in government assets to the network of beneficiaries who shared his roots in the Chicago Syndicate.
Unz relies heavily on the 2006 book Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers, by Gus Russo.[PDF]
According to Unz in the section cited above, Bazelon escaped IRS interest by getting himself appointed to the D.C. Appeals Court in 1949. He went on to engage in Leftist sabotage of America for almost 30 years, becoming invulnerable as a Leftist hero.
Letitia James for Supreme Court?
VDARE.com has taken some notice of Bazelon in the past. In Bazelon Dynasty Still Working to Raise the Murder Rate, Steve Sailer commented:
David Bazelon was one of the major architects of the horrific crime wave of the 1960s into the 1990s that destroyed so many once great American cities.
So, in 21st century America, is it possible a gang of legal functionaries could get control of and loot the property of one of the most wildly hated men in American history?
Who would stop them?
Email Patrick Cleburne.
