RUTHFULLY YOURS

While other prongs of the lawfare campaign against Donald Trump are flailing or encountering timing issues, Letitia James has delivered.

The New York attorney general sought to use the power of the state to target Donald Trump, smash his business, and personally embarrass him.

So far, it’s promises made, promises kept.

While Fani Willis has disgraced herself and is hanging on by her fingernails, Jack Smith is beset by various delays that may keep him from achieving his goal of politically damaging trials before the election, and Alvin Bragg is stuck with a dog of a case, James has gone from strength to strength, gloating all the while.

All it takes, it turns out, to achieve lawfare success is a willingness to make abusive use of a broadly written statute, a pliant judge, and some moxie and determination.

Take note, America — this is how it’s done.

Even if her case somehow goes away tomorrow (and it won’t), she still will have gotten a fraud judgment against Trump and forced him to admit that he’s not liquid enough to produce the more than $450 million bond he needs to prevent her from beginning to collect the judgment. There’s speculation that Trump might resort to declaring Chapter 11 or simply let James take Trump Tower, both of which would be humiliations (and don’t seem likely).

There’s no doubt that in financial terms in this case, the walls really are closing in.

This is a great success for James and a great shame for our system. She has proven that it’s possible to stretch the law to make a dubious case against a political enemy in a major jurisdiction of the United States and impose a punishment with no connection to the underlying offense but with ruinous personal consequences.

We should all hope that this model is never repeated, whether the intended victim is a Republican or a Democrat, someone running for president or for alderman.

The selective prosecution is plain to see. Does anyone believe that this case would have been brought against anyone with a last name other than Trump, or brought if Donald Trump hadn’t become president? Or that James’s oft-stated antipathy toward Trump — a key feature of her election campaign — didn’t provide the extra measure of motivation for her to go down this route?

She took up a case that the Southern District of New York passed on, and that Alvin Bragg and his predecessor also passed on, as too much of a stretch.

James was made of different, sterner stuff and wasn’t going to let the implausibility or unfairness of the case deter her. She deployed the bazooka of §63(12), a sweeping statute meant to target consumer fraud, to go after Trump over his interactions with sophisticated financial players who suffered no losses.

A representative of Deutsche Bank said the institution made its lending decision based on its own independent evaluation. Someone from an outfit called Ladder Capital testified much the same. Obviously such high-flying players don’t simply rely on the representations and promises of potential lendees, or they wouldn’t be high-flying players for long.

And then, based on this victimless crime with no material effect that anyone could discern, she asked for, and got from the elected Democratic judge, Arthur Engoron, a jaw-dropping penalty arrived at through a garbage-in, garbage-out calculation. Never has someone had to disgorge so much for harming so few, or really no one at all.

There is no meaningful connection between Trump’s misrepresentations and the supposed ill-gotten gains that are driving the more than $450 million disgorgement number. This is punishment for its own sake. And James is enjoying it. She likes to post the ever-growing number on Twitter — more than $100,000 in interest is tacked on every day — and she’s said, pointedly, that she looks at 40 Wall Street every day.

Unless Trump prevails in his plea for relief from the disgorgement, James could start the process of seizing his real estate next week. You don’t have to be Ayn Rand to be distressed at the prospect of someone who — whatever have been his sharp practices and exaggerations along the way — has built what are now iconic pieces of the New York City landscape watching the state come and take them away on the flimsiest of grounds.

This is wrong, and anyone who believes in fair play and doesn’t want the powers of the government distorted to harm disfavored political actors should reject it. By and large, though, the Left has reacted with glee. The process doesn’t matter, so long as Letitia James has nailed her man, and, for now, she assuredly has.