No Presidents Day Discount
New York Attorney General Letitia James was asking for $370 million from Trump in the NY fraud trial. She didn’t get it. But she got close. “Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the former president and the Trump Organization to pay over $364 million in damages, and bars Trump ‘from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years.'” Of course, there will be an appeal. There will also be interest building up on the penalty during that process.
+ Maybe Fani Willis can give Trump a loan. She often keeps six months of cash at her house. That’s just one of the details we’ve learned during the hearing to potentially disqualify her from the Georgia case. It has been at times combative and sordid. It’s looking less and less likely that the court will have a reason to remove her from the case. But several days with the focus on the prosecutor is not a positive turn of events. Slate: “Anyone bringing criminal charges against Trump is bound to face withering scrutiny of their professional and private lives; they must conduct themselves unimpeachably to avoid even a hint of bias or corruption. By failing to disclose her relationship to the court in the first instance, Willis did not live up to that standard. The consequences—for her case, for accountability, for American democracy—are already devastating.” (I’m not sure we’ve hit devastating, but this was a poor set of choices with a hell of a lot on the line.)