When Is $250 Million Not Enough?

That’s easy: When you think you can con your fellow elected Democrat, the judge, into giving you $370 million instead.

Yes, in a fraud case in which there are no fraud victims, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has asked Manhattan judge Arthur Engoron to find that Donald Trump, his adult sons, and his private business conglomerate must pay the state a simply unbelievable $370 million in damages.

At NR, we’ve compared the civil fraud trial to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because Engoron essentially convicted and sentenced Trump before starting the trial — it’s a civil case, so by “convicted” I mean found him liable on the main allegation, and by “sentenced” I mean the judge months ago began the process of putting Trump out of business and made clear that the only reason to hold a trial was to determine how much he would let James run up the financial score.

So now, here’s more Alice in Wonderland for you: James initially estimated that she’d ask for a mere quarter of a billion dollars in “disgorgement”; now, having established that no victims claim to have been harmed by Trump’s alleged scheme to inflate asset values (in order to get favorable loan and insurance terms), James has determined that the damages should be $120 million higher than her pre-trial estimate.

Engoron has been James’s cat’s paw throughout the litigation. It would be surprising if he did not simply rubber-stamp her damages claim. If the former president, his sons, and their business get any relief, it is going to have to be in the appellate process — which also features Democratic judicial appointees across the board, but at least they are unelected ones who are habituated to the need to correct the hijinks of the Empire State’s lower courts.

I’ve argued that New York does not have a legal system. It has a political system that masquerades as a legal system. It grooms club lawyers who serve as good apparatchiks to be judges, eventually convincing the party bosses to give them coveted spots on the unopposed slate of nominees voters elect to the bench. The chief government attorneys are also elected — typical in New York and other progressive hothouses is James, whose campaign pitch was: Elect me and I’ll use the state’s power against our political enemies.

To broaden that point, look around for a moment. Alvin Bragg, the elected Manhattan DA, has brought a preposterous criminal case against Trump; his campaign pitch was the boast that, as a government lawyer, he had sued Trump more than anyone else. Fani Willis, the elected Fulton County DA in Atlanta, made her splash bringing a sprawling RICO case against Trump — one so incoherent and vacant that she is now pleading defendants out to trivial non-RICO charges with no-jail sentences. Shenna Bellows is a failed Democratic Senate candidate in Maine whom the party got elected to the state senate, where the Democratic majority elected her to the secretary of state’s post in 2020; with her eyes on higher office (maybe governor, maybe another try at the U.S. Senate) she just unilaterally knocked Trump off the ballot — no due process, no judicial finding, just her decree that he’s an insurrectionist and, ergo, disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

The thing all these gambits have in common? The outcome does not matter. Who cares if an appellate court reverses the decision a year or two later? In politicized “justice,” winning is not prevailing in the proceeding; it is the political reward for signaling to the tribe that you know who the enemy is and you’re willing to make the legal process your enemy’s penalty.

New York has comfortably elected James twice, and even if the appellate courts pare down whatever crazy penalty Engoron imposes, she’ll wear the lawsuit like a badge of honor in her next race for . . . governor? Senator? Who knows what office Bragg will run for off his Trump platform? Maybe Willis will be Atlanta’s mayor or run for governor of Georgia. Bellows will reap electoral and fundraising success by taking a swing at Trump, even if, as is highly likely, Maine’s top court or the Supreme Court countermands her fiat.

How long do you figure America will have the rule of law and a functioning justice system when using the legal process as a weapon is the surest route to political advancement?