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A New York State appellate court recently threw out the massive $527 million settlement against President Trump for lying on a business loan application. The verdict against him still stands; however, many pundits believe the verdict may now also be tossed if there is no punishment behind it. New York Sun associate editor Ari Hoffman is one of the reporters who predicted the judgement would be tossed; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to explain why he saw a favorable ending coming Trump’s way in the case.
Hoffman emphasized the importance of the ruling for host Larry Mendte: “One danger here for Letitia James is that New York’s highest court could say, well, we think the underlying verdict should be thrown out, too. So, there is a kind of downside here for Letitia James appealing. She could lose the baby as well as the bathwater, but no question this is one of Donald Trump’s signature legal victories. I put it right up there with the disqualification of Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago case and the Presidential immunity Supreme Court case on the kind of Mount Rushmore of Donald Trump’s legal achievements.”
Hoffman believes the appellate court easily decided that Donald Trump’s Constitutional rights had been trampled: “It was so excessive that they found it violated the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment, the Eighth Amendment. I mean, to violate the Constitutional prohibition on excessive fines is really to say that this was so far out of whack that no reasonable court could have decided on this.”
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