Once an icon of financial success in New York State, former US President Donald Trump is now facing a pair of legal decisions that would force him to pay over $530 million in penalties and be barred from doing business in the state for three years.
The ruling by Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron was a triumph for New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who had launched a fraud investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization in 2019, culminating in a case that was brought against him last year. She claimed that he had inflated the value of some of his properties in order to obtain favorable loans from banks. Trump and his lawyers argued that there were no victims in the case.
In addition to leveling the massive financial penalties, Judge Engoron also barred the former president from holding a top position in any New York company, including parts of the Trump Organization, and he also prohibited his sons Don Jr. and Eric from holding such positions for two years. (Letitia James had sought to have Trump banned from doing business in New York permanently.)
The judge also extended the tenure of an independent monitor, Barbara Jones, who is empowered to oversee the financial transactions of the Trump Organization. The company said that it has already lost $2.5 million due to the monitor.
The effects of the ruling are already being debated. New York Governor Kathy Hochul asserted in an interview with supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis that despite the ruling against Trump, law-abiding businesses have nothing to fear from New York’s regulatory environment. But prominent business leaders have said that this will only further undermine New York’s reputation as a good place to do business.
More immediate, perhaps, is the question of what these rulings will do to Trump. Financially, they seem like a major burden. Even appealing the fraud case requires either a bond with a $35 million non-refundable fee or putting $355 million in an escrow account for the duration of the appeal. Another question is what the judgments will do to Trump politically as he runs for reelection.
For answers, Ami spoke with Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who has done in-depth reporting on Trump’s finances, and with influential pollster Neil Newhouse, founder of the Public Opinion Strategies firm, who worked on both the John McCain and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns.
You’ve spent over 30 years chronicling Donald Trump for The New York Times and other leading newspapers. You also wrote the 2016 New York Times bestseller The Making of Donald Trump. I was wondering what your specialty is.
I’m an investigative reporter, a former president of Investigative Reporters & Editors, which is our professional association, and I was a reporter at The New York Times for 13 years, which is where I won my Pulitzer. At the age of 18, I was recruited by the San Jose Mercury, which is now the sixth-largest newspaper in America. When I was 19 and they had their first opening they hired me, and I solved my first murder case when I was 21. That was one of several murders I solved that either the police failed to solve or I solved before they did.
Then I went to the Detroit Free Press in Lansing, Michigan, where I caused a unique event in American history. A broadcast chain of radio and TV—mostly TV—was forced to shut down and go out of business because of what today we call “fake news” that I exposed. Back then, newspapers rarely wrote about other news organizations. But it’s very common now, and there are people who attribute that shift to me.
From there I went to the Los Angeles Times. I was the first reporter to seriously investigate the Los Angeles Police Department. Then I went to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988 as the Atlantic City bureau chief, which is where I met Donald Trump. I identified him as one of several Americans I’ve followed for decades because I thought they were significant. These include Baron Hilton, the hotelier’s son who died recently; Daryl Gates, the former LA police chief; and Jack Welch, the former head of GE who ruined the company and gave up his retirement perks in response to one of my stories, which by my estimation were worth about $70 million.
The Washington Monthly has called me one of America’s most important journalists, and the Portland Oregonian has said that my work is the equal of the original muckrakers from a century ago.
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