Another Day, Another Crazy Trump Lawsuit

His lifelong mission to endlessly abuse the courts with nonsense continues.

Sigh. Here we go again. 

In a court filing, Donald Trump declared that the civil lawsuit against his company was outrageous, full of lies and brought by a prosecutor who was out to get him for publicity. Any honest prosecutor would have admitted that Trump had done nothing wrong, that his business was perfect, and that everyone knew it. For that egregious refusal to acknowledge his greatness as a manager and instead to claim he was a criminal, the government owed him millions of dollars and an apology.

“The government has no facts to support these charges,’’ Trump alleged in a court filing. “It is evident this is a form of harassment, and the government is merely ‘fishing’ for facts upon which it can base its case. These facts do not exist, and the government knows they do not exist.”

The real reason the civil lawsuit had been filed against Trump, he alleged, was because the prosecutors hated him and wanted to advance their legal careers. “This action was brought to coerce a settlement, and nothing more,” a filing said. So, for filing the suit, Trump stated, the government should pay him $100 million. 

I’m sure you have already heard that Trump sued New York Attorney General Letitia James for having brought a civil fraud action against him. And the words I quote above - aren’t from his suit against her. No, they were filed in 1973 by Trump and his shark of a lawyer, Roy Cohn, when the Trump Organization was sued for racial discrimination by the Justice Department. 

This “sue the government when they come after me” nonsense has been a Trump go-to tactic for decades. In fact, his approach on these cases is so consistent, so predictable, that I’ve been waiting for him to sue James. Although I must admit, I wasn’t expecting him to file the lawsuit for at least two weeks. The fastest he had ever countersued the government was 58 days after the original complaint was filed. Trump has now broken that record by filing his lawsuit against James just 42 days after she brought her action. Whoo-hoo! Another Trump win! He beat his own record for abusing a court!

So, yah, there was every reason to expect his lawsuit against James was coming, and every reason to know ahead of time that it would be ridiculous. And boy-howdy, has Trump exceeded even himself for filing nonsense. Whoo-hoo! Yet another Trump win! He out stupid-ed himself!

Let’s go through Trump’s flapdoodle - I mean lawsuit - now resting in a county clerk’s office in Florida. The basic argument is that the New York Attorney General is trying to obtain records of his revocable trust, which contains his private estate plan on how to divide up the assets it holds. James thinks, reasonably, that Trump has hidden assets in the revocable trust which could have an impact in her fraud case, so she wants to see what’s in there based on discovery rulings. Trump doesn’t want to show her, which in Trump-world means he is hiding something. 

So, Trump sues New York’s chief prosecutor in a Florida state court. Ummm…what? There are things called personal jurisdiction, subject matter jurisdiction, and venue. Each of these are basic to filing a lawsuit in one state against someone in another. No plaintiff can simply say “the Florida courthouse is convenient to me, so I am going to sue this New York defendant here for my convenience.” Instead, for personal jurisdiction, Trump must prove that James solicits business in Florida, or maintains a physical location there, or accepts online orders from customers there - you know, something that means her office is connected to Florida in some meaningful way. (If she ran Trump over with her car while driving past Mar-a-Lago, the court would have personal jurisdiction. But, strangely at least for Trump, he didn’t also claim that.) The fact that the trustee of the trust happens to live in Florida does not give the state personal jurisdiction over the New York Attorney General.

Subject matter jurisdiction is about whether the case belongs in federal or state court, and while it might be a bit of a stretch, I’ll let Trump have that state court is fine. Then comes venue, and the laws Trump cites to justify having the case in Florida are so dishonest and so fundamentally misrepresented that he must be forced ultimately to pay legal fees for New York State and his lawyers should be sanctioned.

Trump gets to venue by turning Florida law on its head. In fact, if Trump’s interpretation of the law is deemed correct, revocable trusts would become the new dark web for criminals, where assets that go into them must remain invisible to all but civil courts in Florida.

First, as a starting justification for the lawsuit, Trump cites Section 23 of Florida’s state constitution. That is about the right to privacy, and reads, “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person's private life except as otherwise provided herein.’’

Start with the fact that Florida Republicans - like Trump - don’t think the right to privacy includes the right to personal autonomy over health decisions, like whether to have an abortion. No, in Trump world, it means the right to hide assets and financial records. If only every corporate scam artist had known the right to privacy covered potential financial fraud! Corporate criminals and drug trafficker only had to shove their ill-gotten gains into a Florida revocable trust, and poof! No more going to jail. But, it doesn’t work that way. So, no, Donald, Florida’s right to privacy does not and has never been interpreted by any state court to mean the right to hide financial records from government investigators.

Then, when he argues why Florida is the right place for the case to be heard, Trump goes all in on nonsense. Any reasonable person unwilling to abuse the courts would file this nonsense lawsuit in New York, where the Attorney General’s case is being heard, where the prosecutors reside, and where the court allowing the document demands is based. But, no, Trump says there are a bunch of Florida laws that make it clear why the state has jurisdiction. And Trump’s citations make it look all official - he names §736.0201(2), Fla. Stat.; § 26.012(2)(c), Fla. Stat., and others. He even quotes excerpts of the laws! He must be right!

Yah, no. Trump long ago discovered the power of ellipses. He brushes right over those parts of the law that show he is misrepresenting them by inserting the magic three-dots, getting rid of pesky words he doesn’t like. Look at §736.0201(2). This is about a court being empowered to intervene in the administration of the trust and can be filed by any interested person. These lawsuits are about beneficiaries of the trust who are upset at the way the named trustee is managing their future money. So, Eric Trump could file a lawsuit against the trust and Donald Sr., as the trust administrator, with a claim that it is being mismanaged. But Donald Trump himself can’t sue a government party who has nothing to do with the trust simply to keep assets and transactions hidden from its investigation.

Moving on to § 26.012(2)(c). This one I had to check and double check and triple check to make sure I was reading a law being cited in this lawsuit. The relevant words of this section says, and I quote, “Circuit courts shall have exclusive original jurisdiction…in all cases in equity including all cases relating to juveniles except traffic offenses.” (My ellipsis is there because the first words are from (2) and after the umlaut is (2)(c).)

The law on cases of equity - you don’t need to bother knowing what that means specifically - is complicated in Florida, because the laws contradict. Be that as it may, there have been cases brought before the circuit courts dealing with enforcement of civil discovery demands by a government, with the governing case involving the Miami-Dade Inspector General (Sirgany International v. Miami Date County, No 3D04-1527) And that was only about whether the inspector general had filed for enforcement of a civil subpoena to the correct court. The court’s reply to the plaintiff trying to dodge the subpoena was essentially, “Oh, shut up. Turn over the documents.” Never - never - has there been a claim that a Florida circuit court, as a court of equity, had the power to block a government’s subpoena without showing some prima facie evidence of the demand being flawed. Trump doesn’t even try to suggest there is a flaw. His “legal” argument boils down to “Woman lawyer bad. She don’t like me. Make her stop!” Pretty much the same argument he made in 1973 to impede the Department of Justice - an effort that was unsuccessful, just as this one will be.

So, for lots of reasons, this case will ultimately be dismissed or thrown to New York (unless Trump finds a state judge who, like Federal Judge Aileen Cannon, operates under the judicial philosophy of “Trump gets whatever he wants.”) But now let’s go to what the case says.

Most of the lawsuit is, basically, that James is mean, has said mean things about Trump, and because she said those mean things, she is bringing the action in bad faith. That last sentence is the kind of thing that might go into a motion to dismiss, filed in the New York court hearing the case. But “black lady mean” will not pass muster in a real courtroom, nor will “Trump great.” There must be actual law and facts cited related to the claims of the action against the Trump Organization. The courtroom is not a Fox News studio.

Once we get past the invective against James, Trump moves on with what must be the dumbest thing he has ever done in any filing ever, and that is saying a lot: He attacks the New York judge hearing the James lawsuit as being a hack.

The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, earlier presided over a special proceeding in James’s investigation to deal with the fact that Trump refused to comply with subpoenas and other discovery demands - another typical Trumpian tactic. Because the civil lawsuit filed in September was related to the issues of the special proceeding, it went to Engoron. This, to Trump, was outrageous. After all, during the special proceeding, Engoron “made not a single ruling in favor of President Trump.” Evidence that either Trump abused the process or that the judge was biased. Trump makes no attempt to prove bias other than to point out that Engoron refused to kowtow to the former president’s refusal to comply with subpoenas. “Suffice it to say,” the lawsuit says, “That this justice has also demonstrated extreme bias against President Trump, fining him $10,000 per day for claimed subpoena non-compliance despite his having produced millions of pages of documents.”

There are a series of other bizarre claims in Trump’s lawsuit - such as essentially arguing that Trump can commit fraud against banks and insurance companies to obtain loans and policies so long as he didn’t default on his obligations to them. Or that he could engage in whatever wild fraud he wanted so long as he included disclaimers on documents riddled with falsehoods. In fact, in one of the finest paragraphs ever to appear in any lawsuit filed by a real person, Trump winds up the vast conspiracy claims against the Attorney General, the “I can commit fraud so long as I pay” argument, and lots of self-congratulations. I must quote it in total, since it pretty much sums up Trump’s entire whiny, dishonest, and soon-to-be-dismissed case: 

“James purportedly brought the suit to protect these sophisticated banks and insurance companies (again represented by the largest, toughest, and finest law firms in the United States and beyond) only to find, late in the process, however, after reviewing more than 10 million pages of documents, that the Trump Organization was highly underleveraged with very low debt, owned some of the finest assets in the world, and that all loans were current without defaults or delinquencies of any kind. This was a disaster for the out-of-control James but she decided out of hatred and scorn of President Trump, and for the simple reason of using the publicity, to proceed anyway.”

So now there will be a back and forth, Trump will lose, he will appeal, yada yada yada. Ultimately, he will be forced to comply and turn over the records from the trust (minus the actual personal things, like who gets what when he dies.) Lots of time will have been burned up, lots of legal bills piled up, lots of Trump rantings heard, and then, just like in every other case against him where he tried this stunt, it will end with the prosecutions of his company moving forward.

God, this man is tiresome.