- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- politics@lemmy.world
A court-ordered financial auditor has caught Donald Trump quietly moving $40 million from the Trump Organization into a personal bank account—seemingly so the former president could pay his whopping $29 million tax bill.
Trump isn’t supposed to be moving any money around without alerting Barbara S. Jones, a former federal judge in New York tasked with babysitting the Trump Organization for its relentlessly shady business practices. But on Wednesday, she notified a New York state court about some major bank transfers that were never brought to her attention by the Trumps.
That last part is important. Courts are bending over backwards to accommodate him, because they don’t want to give him any way to claim his trials were unfair. You can only appeal a ruling on the basis of mistrial. Basically, you have to show the appeals court that your previous trial was unfair in some way. So the lower courts are doing everything they can to avoid giving him ammo for that appeal.
Because the lower courts know that if it successfully gets appealed, the courts get exponentially more conservative as they go up. So his chances of getting away with it dramatically increase with each subsequent appeal. And if it makes it all the way to the SCOTUS, they’ll happily light the constitution on fire to let him walk. So their best chance is to nip it in the bud now, by making the courtroom proceedings as appeals-proof as possible. And the only way to do that is to avoid seeming unfair at every opportunity.