Some of You May be Guilty of Felonies

Welcome to 10-minute law school. I’m about to give you the skills a lawyer needs in order to handle a case.

When you file a lawsuit, you need something called a cause of action. It’s the thing you claim the other person did. For example, negligence is a cause of action.

When you write your complaint, you have to allege facts that, if proven, would be sufficient to ground the cause of action. These facts are called elements.

Nearly everywhere English is spoken, the elements of fraud are a deliberate, material misrepresentation, a victim’s reasonable reliance on the misrepresentation, and harm caused by his reliance.

There are different versions of these elements, but they add up to the same basic thing. Sometimes, the elements are defined in statutes. In some places, they come from common law, which means they derive from centuries of court opinions in the US and England.

Let’s say I sell you a dog, and I tell you the dog lays golden eggs. Can you sue me for fraud? Probably not. I made a misrepresentation, but I would argue that your reliance on my lie was not reasonable.

What if I sell you the dog, and it turns out he lays platinum eggs, not gold? Can you sue? Probably not, because you have not suffered damage.

What if I sell you the dog, you pay no attention to what I say, and you buy him because you’re Korean and want to have a barbecue? Can you sue? No. You didn’t rely on my lie, which was immaterial. And you weren’t harmed.

What if I ask you for a loan, I lie about the value of the collateral, you pay no attention to my valuation, you do your own appraisal, you lend me the cash, and I pay off the loan, making you a lot of money? Can you sue?

Of course not. At least not under the traditional cause of action.

You didn’t rely on my valuation, and you weren’t harmed. You got exactly what you were hoping for.

So why was Donald Trump convicted of fraud? He probably didn’t lie, the lenders did not rely on his representations, and they suffered no harm. In fact, they showed up in court to say they were eager to do more business with him. The conviction was a blow to them as well as him.

There are two problems. First, Letitia James is a corrupt attorney general who violated commonly-accepted Constitutional notions of Equal Protection, and who lied a good deal, in order to unfairly discriminate against three private citizens in order to prevent one of them from winning an election. Second, the New York fraud statute, Executive Law 63(12), was written by imbeciles.

In New York, you can be convicted under 63(12) even if there is no materiality, reliance (justified or not), or harm. The statute redefines the word “fraud” so it no longer has the meaning it has had in most places for centuries. Here’s the definition:

The word “fraud” or “fraudulent” as used herein shall include any device, scheme or artifice to defraud and any deception, misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, false pretense, false promise or unconscionable contractual provisions.

That’s amazing. There is no mention of harm. What is the purpose of a law that doesn’t protect anyone?

If lying is fraud, then Letitia James committed fraud in order to get Trump convicted. She told the all-too-receptive judge Trump’s valuations of his properties were fraudulent because they greatly exceeded the assessed values. Everyone who owns any type of real estate knows assessed value and actual value are different things. If I had a business where I bought things for assessed value and sold them for market value, I would be a trillionaire in a few years.

Market value can be 10 or more times as great as assessed value.

Imagine trying to get a loan based on a home’s assessed value. No one would be able to buy a house. “I want to buy this house that appraised for 1.2 million dollars.” “Sorry; the assessed value is $250,000. And we’re turning you in to the attorney general.”

Market value is what banks care about when they give loans. They want to know if they can get their money back by selling the collateral.

A non-MSM guy who watched the appellate panel grill the state’s attorneys says the panel was very hostile, as it should have been. Under the James standard, nearly anyone who has sold a business property in New York City can be convicted of a felony, and virtually all real estate agents who have rented properties can be convicted.

Everyone makes mistakes when evaluating properties. Everyone guesses. Appraisals are subjective. Under 63(12), any mistake can get you convicted. It does not have to be deliberate.

In New York City, it is an accepted practice to lie about the size of rentals. You can look this up for yourself. It’s normal for an agent to show you a property and tell you the square footage is x when the real square footage is 0.6x. They include things like common areas, which aren’t part of the property you’re paying for.

This is lying. There is no way to dispute it. Lessees, even sophisticated ones, don’t expect it. And they rely on the lies, causing them harm.

A Youtuber named Louis Rossmann had a New York business. He decided to move. He was shown various properties. Square footages were quoted.

When he measured the properties, he found out he had been lied to. Then he found out lying was normal and accepted.

You can find his video if you look.

This is a sophisticated guy who runs a very lucrative business with multiple employees. He’s not stupid. But he was shocked to find out he was expected to pay for square footage he wasn’t going to get.

How many New York City agents have lied to lessees over the years? Many thousands. Conservative lessees should start insisting Letitia James prosecute real estate firms and drive the people who work for them into poverty.

Given the stupidity of the law itself, I’m not sure the appellate judges can find a way to reverse. If they don’t, everyone who works in real estate in New York is going to live in fear from now on. Will they find some kind of imaginary implication in the law in order to require fraud to be harmful and save the real estate industry? Maybe. They must be liberals, since they work in New York, and liberals like to write laws from the bench. They looked at the Constitution and found a right to kill the unborn as well as a right for the state to ban prayer in classrooms.

The judges made James’s legal goons look for similar cases, and they could not find them. Even the far-left Associated Press couldn’t find them. Prosecuting loan recipients in cases where no harm was done is a practice invented by a shameless, unaccountable ghetto attorney general in order to queer a presidential election.

According to the guy who attended the hearing, things were much worse than the MSM says. He claims that instead of defending their case, James’s goons spent the last part of the hearing begging the judges not to sanction them.

They should be sanctioned, and some, including James, should be disbarred. The feds should try to put her in prison. Undoing democracy and nullifying the civil rights of half the country is not a little thing. It’s as bad as anything Sean Combs is accused of.

Trump never posed a threat to democracy. He tried to defend it. Whether he was right or wrong to think the 2020 election was rigged, he was trying to make sure every citizen’s vote counted.

The panel could try looking at Equal Protection in order to undo this unjust result, but it would stir up a hornet’s nest. We ignore Equal Protection. We’re not supposed to treat one suspect or defendant one way and another another way, but it’s done every hour of every day. Some people get arrested while others who do the same things walk. Some get prosecuted, and others don’t.

I guess we decided to forget about Equal Protection because we like flexibility and corruption. We like playing favorites. If we took Equal Protection seriously, there would be chaos. A lot of people who have been convicted would have to be released, and many people who were allowed to slide would have to be tried.

The New York Senate should change the law. As it stands, it’s terrifying. Anyone who works in real estate can be convicted, and Letitia James is free to pursue conservatives, Jews, Asians, and everyone New York’s black power establishment hates and leave everyone else alone.