About Last Week...

354 Million Reasons to Be Suspicious

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A not-at-all partial New York judge ruled that Donald Trump must pay $354 million dollars for the crime of being a typical developer.

Most of the stories about the ruling have called it a “judgement,” implying a similarity to a civil lawsuit loss.  It is not – it is a fine and Trump will be paying the money to, and only to, the State of New York.

To backup, Trump was accused of inflating the value of his assets to secure better financing terms.  No bank or lender or anyone else complained or was forced to seek re-payment through the courts (there was no bankruptcy involved…this time.) In other words, in the deals covered by the fines, no creditor was left unpaid.

As someone who has dealt with developers for years, I can categorically state that every developer inflates values for financing purposes and most simultaneously deflate values for tax purposes. 

This can be done legally (ish, depending upon how far you take it) because “value” in the development world is squishy as so much of it depends upon potential – will this project make a billion or will it go bust? when will the returns start? what is that empty land in the middle of nowhere really worth? is the city going to approve it as is or will it have to be scaled back? These are the questions every lender and/or investor in the big property sphere ask themselves…every day…obsessively.

And if investors and lenders get their money they do not care at all if the initial base valuation for financing purposes may have been a tad off.

In every (I think, but definitely almost every) other state, this is a situation left to the civil courts if and when there is a problem.  But in New York there is a law that says you cannot do it; it is a law almost never enforced but it technically is a law and state Attorney General Letitia James found it and dug it out and blew off the dust and used it. 

By the way, if she put the names of every New York developer in a hat and just started picking them out she would win cases like these almost all the time – neat way for the state to shake down the builders to get even more money, maybe?

Speaking of money and lawyers,

but not guns, another Trump case took an entertaining turn this week when Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis took the stand to extremely vehemently deny she was a crook.

Some on the left actually actually thought she did great, though an LA Times writer found her testimony “inexplicable.”

Really?  I think the words you are looking for are “entirely predictable.”  I know they kind of rhyme, but still…

To the rest of humanity, Willis came off as a lying entitled arrogant batshit crazy with power justice nightmare.

To backup, Willis decided to charge Trump and cohorts with, um, thinking they might have won the election and therefore should be ready with alternate electors?  Obviously, that’s an over-simplification and there may have been some technically legally icky stuff involved but, like the New York case, that would not normally rise to the level of prosecution.

Are you seeing  pattern here?

Anyway, Willis has/had/still has/had then a boyfriend and she hired him as a special prosecutor to oversee the details of the case, raising a serious conflict of interest – and more – potentiality.

So the boyfriend gets paid a bunch of money which he then turns around and spends (some of it) on her. 

Very squirrelly, but she is a girl so she doesn’t know how to pick up a check so maybe not legally be the end of the world.

She testified that they were not going out when she hired him and anything she spent on him out of the $650K or so he got from her office she paid back…in cash and that’s why she can’t prove it.

Um, okay, and his $650K pay just happened to be a half million or so higher than the other contractors she hired because of this thing he does to her toes...wait, check that, because he’s a better/lead/extra special/really good prosecutor.

For a more detailed description of the case, see here  , but it seems the question would come down to some sort of version of chicken/egg.

Did she launch her absurd prosecution (bet those folks who pleaded out already are miiiiffed) of Trump primarily because she’s political hack desperate for headlines or primarily to be able to pay her boyfriend?

There is no question that the case is rotten and she’s a clamoring idiot for filing it and should be drummed out of the legal profession, but it seems she filed it primarily because she is clamoring idiot and not initially to pay her boyfriend a bunch of money.

So I guess that stands in her favor, at least as far as it goes.

Speaking of clamoring – actually bitch ass – idiots, let’s re-acquaint ourselves with Jaavier Bockarhea.

A bitch ass idiot.

While former UN Ambassador and Obama and Biden senior advisor Susan Rice may be grating and a menace and evil and a political hack’s political hack, she may not actually be stupid as she had, reportedly, the ability to point out something those in California have known for years:

That former California Attorney General and current Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Bockarhea is a bitch ass idiot.

Xavier Becerra (proper spelling) is not a bright guy and was brought on by President Biden at HHS to check an identity box and not to actually run the department with intelligence or gusto.

Health and Human Services – you would think that the department and its leader would be front and center in leading the Covid fight? (let’s leave everything else about the egregious pandemic response aside for the moment.)

You recall the stirring speeches, the convincing congressional testimony, the hands-on approach, the credibility and seriousness Becerra brought to effort, right?  Of course you don’t because they never happened because within weeks of being nominated as Secretary the rest of the administration actually had time to talk to Becerra and realized he should be locked in Joe’s sub-basement.

Kind of like Prince Ruprecht from “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels:”

Becerra is literally most well known for having his name botched by Biden when he nominated him:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?507086-1/biden-health-related-nominees-appointees

The gaffe or flub or relatively early warning of Biden’s accelerating mental decline can be seen at about ten minutes in, though Biden’s stirring “if we get everyone masked and vaccinated and the unions agree we might possibly probably maybe open up most-ish schools by April, 2021” is the lead in and is actually an amazing blast from the past so that might be fun to watch, too.

And besides flubbing his name, Biden even got the department wrong.  He nominates “…Bockarhea for Secretary of Health and Education servissesesss.”

Another early warning sign missed – there once was a Department of Health, Education and Welfare that operated from 1953 to 1979 before it was split into two departments,  Education and Health and Human Services.

Biden was in the Senate when that happened.

Back to Bockarhea and Susan Rice. According to reports, she loathed him from the outset, specifically when Xavier – newly installed – demanded that an order she gave him to make more migrant beds available be put in writing and come directly from the president.

In other words, Becerra tried to dodge his first assignment as Secretary  and tell Rice to tone down the power games.  He did this out of instinctual self-preservation as he wanted nothing to do with the issue, but of course he handled it badly.

Couple that with further intransigence/incompetence from Becerra and you get the “bitch ass idiot” epithet from Rice (apparently Biden himself is none too fond of  Becerra – wonder how he’s keeping that job? – but if he had said that it would have come out as “bike path iota.”)  Rice says she didn’t say it and she might not be lying because that sounds waaaay too nice for her  

It is fun, though, to have internal administration confirmation that Becerra is dumb; in fact, no Cabinet member in history has looked – when testifying in front of Congress -  more like a Ficus tree being asked a calculus question than Becerra:

Compare and contrast:

And speaking of potted plants, we turn to Kamala Harris’ favorite thing: Venn diagrams.