Donald Trump’s business peers, political allies, former impeachment lawyer and others have flooded New York’s appellate court with support in an attempt to overturn the historic half-billion-dollar judgment against him for bank fraud — with arguments all centering on a basic premise: Maybe he lied, but it doesn’t matter.
The group is a MAGA catchall, with a list ranging from Gun Owners of America to the attorney general of South Carolina, each with a slightly different take on why it was unfair to subject Trump to a 12-week civil trial that documented how he routinely inflated his net worth to snag better bank loans and insurance policies. Justice Arthur F. Engoron, a state judge, wrote a sweeping decision ordering Trump and his co-defendants to pay a whopping $464 million judgment that ticks even higher with interest.
Now that the judgment is on appeal, his allies are treating his civil fraud case like a philosophical battle before the U.S. Supreme Court, filing amicus briefs that question the constitutionality of his punishment and even warn of a total regional economic collapse.
Three real estate investors and one property development firm laid out an apocalyptic view of the current New York market that anticipates a “crushing wall of impending debt maturities, and the vast fresh cash investments that will be required to avert foreclosures” — before claiming that landlords might choose to default on loans and invest elsewhere if the case stands as it is.
“Why make these staggering cash investments — and submit personal financial statements to a lender as part of the loan application process — only to run the risk,” they ask. “Why not, instead, simply invest in another building in another state?”
Their argument rests on the theory that cash will flee New York if state Attorney General Letitia James starts cracking down on others the way she did with Trump, noting that “after all, discrepancies in valuations are routine” and “victimless” and “must not lead to legal exposure and prosecution by the state.” The reasoning is essentially that law enforcement shouldn’t insert itself in the highly contentious business realm where wild numbers fly back and forth until parties agree to strike a deal.
But appellate judges might take note that the high-powered real estate lobby in that amicus brief is made up of two billionaires with close ties to Trump, a businessman whose testimony already failed to convince the judge at trial and an investor with a checkered past. Rubin Schron, known as “Rubie” and dubbed a “low-key” billionaire who owns a sizable chunk of New York City’s residential market, once purchased Trump’s outer-borough portfolio for about $700 million. Haim Chera is the son of the late Stanley Chera, a billionaire Republican donor who was so close to the former president that Trump once said he had “been with me from the beginning.” The firm Witkoff is led by Steven Witkoff, who testified at trial about being a “good friend” of Trump’s but whose “testimony was irrelevant,” according to the judge, because he hadn’t even read the core documents in the case. And Jeffrey H. Supinsky, who manages a commercial real estate company, once lost his security broker’s license after “engaging in a trading scheme designed to defraud his employer,” according to FINRA records.
In a separate amicus brief, South Carolina’s attorney general, arguing on behalf of 15 other Republican-led states that include Alaska, the Dakotas and much of the American South, sidestepped the merits of the case against Trump and focused instead on the whopping size of the punishment.
“Rather than address President Trump’s liability for the claims raised by New York … does the penalty levied against President Trump comply with the Constitution? The answer: it does not,” South Carolina AG Alan Wilson’s office wrote.
“Even if President Trump violated the law … the penalty imposed is so disproportionate,” it added, claiming the half-billion-dollar judgment violates the Eighth Amendment’s “excessive fines” clause.
Instead, the Republican attorneys general say Trump should be treated more like a person who tried to sneak an illegal amount of cash out of the country but doesn’t deserve to have it all confiscated — referencing a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that set limits on financial punishments, one that originated with a man who in 1994 tried to board a flight to Cyprus and had stuffed $357,144 in his bags, wife’s purse and even false bottoms of his luggage.
Trump’s legal arguments also got a dose of support from the American Center for Law and Justice, a group that has previously thrown its support behind the Heritage Foundation’s challenge of a vaccine mandate, defended Trump’s ability to remain on the presidential ballot despite fomenting the insurrection and sided with a police officer who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in support of Trump.
That amicus brief was authored by Jay Sekulow, who led Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment. He framed this as a political crusade, pointing to an Instagram post in which James responds to a social media influencer’s request to “sue” Trump.
“Oh, we’re gonna definitely sue him. We’re gonna be a real pain in the ass. He’s going to
know my name personally,” James said in the video that the influencer posted on Instagram.
“The Attorney General cannot misuse her position to target political opponents. Her explicit purpose was to punish President Trump for his viewpoint. This is a First Amendment violation, regardless of her view of New York law,” Sekulow writes.
But the most sweeping amicus brief came from the conservative group Citizens United, which banded together with several others on the same ideological plane.
“The penalty and interest assessed in this case … is so large that available adjectives fail to fully demonstrate its size: colossal? gargantuan? mammoth? titanic?” they ask, pointing out that the total could fund the entire AG’s office for a year and still have enough left over to cover the governor’s office six times over.
Claiming that the personal fine against Trump would actually become a world record, the brief goes as far as claiming that James and the judge were “following the advice of Stalinist Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky to investigate the man to find the crime.”
While at first glance it might seem odd that Gun Owners of America decided to weigh in on this case alongside Citizens United, the impetus for its involvement became clear when lawyers hinted at the possibility of this case actually making its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court — where justices this spring unanimously called out New York regulators for playing politics and unfairly targeting the National Rifle Association.
“In view of recent events involving New York, it would be a mistake for this court to view the AG’s novel civil enforcement action against former President Trump in isolation. Sadly, the current state government is developing a reputation for engaging in ‘lawfare’ — the use of the legal system to achieve political objectives,” they write.
Meanwhile, the AG’s office filed a corrected brief last week asking appellate judges to stick to the core facts at issue in the case.
“This court should affirm,” state lawyers write, pointing out how the judge who saw the evidence firsthand definitively concluded that Trump, his eldest sons and executives “used a variety of deceptive strategies to vastly misrepresent the values of Mr. Trump’s assets.”
Trump faked the size of his Trump Tower apartment by tripling it on paper. He valued rent-regulated apartments as if they weren’t. He ignored a deed restriction when putting a dollar figure on his South Florida oceanside estate of Mar-a-Lago.
Now it’s up to the appeals court to determine if Justice Engoron went wrong — or if the AG can start seizing his properties.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.