OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The New York judge who handed down a staggering $355 million fine in a civil fraud case against former President Donald Trump continues to get an outsized share of criticism from attorneys and other legal experts.
In addition to levying the massive fine, Judge Arthur Engoron also barred Trump from running a business in the state for three years while barring his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump for two years. He also fined the two sons $4 million apiece after ruling last fall that the Trump Organization regularly committed fraud by altering the value of assets to get more favorable loans.
In an interview with Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro last week following the ruling, former deputy independent counsel Sol Wisenberg called the ruling “extremely dubious” and the award “completely out of proportion.”
“I certainly don’t see how the part of the decision that imposes a $355 million judgment is supported by the evidence because, as the judge points out in the very first paragraph of his opinion, and as you pointed out, there’s no loss from the bank,” Wisenberg told Pirro who was guest-hosting for Laura Ingraham.
“The loans were repaid. Now, certainly, you can legally engage in fraud of all kinds if the victim doesn’t lose money, but to impose a penalty of $355 million and to bar him for three years and his sons for two years seems to me to be completely out of proportion to the actual loss here, which was zilch,” he said.
“I have a question for everybody, which is where were all of these people during the 35 years before Donald Trump became an announced candidate for president?” Wisenberg asked. “Why weren’t these people investigating this alleged fraud? People, if there is fraud going on, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, it doesn’t seem like they were doing their job at all, it appears there was no effort whatsoever to even look at former President Trump until he became a controversial political figure.”
“It strikes me to be constitutionally extremely dubious to basically impose a $355 million judgment in a case where there is no loss,” Wisenberg added. “That is just mind-boggling to me. I have never seen a case where that happened.”
For her part, Pirro said that a ruling of this kind “has never happened before.”
WATCH:
Trump attorney and spokeswoman Alina Habba fired back at a column by a legal authority that claimed her client’s appeal of a massive and uncharacteristic fine levied by a New York judge in a civil fraud trial earlier this month won’t fully succeed.
Writing in the National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote that he expected that the massive fine would likely be reduced, but that would be it as far as an appeal goes.
“To my mind, it is unlikely that Trump’s appeal will result in a clean win for either side,” he wrote in the Feb. 20 article.
“I anticipate that he will get material relief in terms of the dollar amount, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on the rest of the penalties. And those penalties matter a lot,” he added.
That said, McCarthy also wrote that he thought the case was “nakedly partisan” and that he hoped it would be “overturned on appeal.”
McCarthy’s viewpoint was relayed to Habba by Fox News host Martha MacCallum during a show segment on Thursday, to which Habba responded that she would “welcome him to be part of the legal team if he knows the case better than the team that tried it for 11 weeks.”
“I’ve been on this case for the better of three years, and I can tell you right now there are truly no facts that support any of these decisions, and that, again, I can say will be made very clear in our appeal,” Habba argued.
