In a world of waffling liars, a politician with both wit and the slightest hint of integrity is a rare thing. Thankfully, the Democrats have one such character in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The congresswoman from New York doesn’t just succinctly and ruthlessly attack the wealth of corruption in the Republican Party, but is happy to take aim at her own side in a refreshing show of a lack of tribalism. However, even the most even-handed critic of the messed up American political system can only “both-sides” the current state of D.C to a certain extent before the severity and volume of Republican criminality overwhelms rightly held qualms about their Democratic counterparts.
Nobody typifies this complete lack of morality more than Donald Trump. If you need further proof of this, he is literally facing multiple court battles over a number of different crimes he’s alleged to have committed, from defamation to treason. And, ironically considering his supposed love of “winning,” he seems to be losing pretty much all of them.
The former president is currently embroiled in a business fraud case in the state of New York, brought forward by the Attorney General Letita James. The judge in the case, Arthur Engoron, recently ordered Trump to pay around $360 million in penalties, and has also banned him from operating a business in New York for five years. Trump’s team has already rejected the verdict and will almost certainly appeal.
While this might seem like a natural consequence of Trump’s inability to open his mouth without lying, in reality his downfall in this facet of his life may have been the direct result of AOC’s hard work. We doubt he’ll take this well when it’s pointed out, given his gross (but hilariously failed) history with women who stand up to him.
The pathway from the Latina politician to this recent judgement begins in 2019, when she questioned the repentant former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen about the then president’s financial state. She was following from a line of questioning that had been started by former representative William Lacy Clay, who had also been digging into Trump’s business practices.
The exchanges took place before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Cohen, who had already been sentenced to three years in prison for illegal acts he’d committed while on Trump’s payroll, had been asked to testify and he obliged.
Ocasio-Cortez asked whether Trump had inflated his assets at any time, to which Cohen emphatically replied with one word: “yes.” After more prodding from the representative, he then added that a number of other people knew he did this regularly, including the Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, the executive VP Ron Lieberman, and the company’s COO, Matthew Calamari.
As part of the recent judgement from Engoron, Weisselberg was ordered to pay $1 million in penalties, further proving his culpability.
When asked for his opinion on the case, Cohen told Business Insider:
“I thank Judge Engoron for his acknowledgment of my veracity and hope this helps to expose Trump, Habba, Kise, and Robert’s never-ending lies and attacks about me. Truth always rises!”
Since that fateful day, a lot more has been revealed about Trump’s incredibly dodgy business practices. While it is obvious to anybody with a brain that he is a cheater and a grifter, it’s always good to have thousands of pages of evidence unequivocally proving it. Yet, even with all this extra information it is important to remember how it all came about, something DA James pointed out previously:
“I will remind everyone that this investigation only started after Michael Cohen, the former lawyer, his former lawyer, testified before Congress and shed light on this misconduct.”
If the tactics Trump had used had been relatively inventive or smart, you could have at least given him points for effort. However, like most of his attempts at fraud and manipulation, him trying to gain better interest rates by valuing his assets incorrectly were as clumsy and pathetic as his attempts to convince everyone that he’s more popular than Taylor Swift.
This was proven again by Cohen, who testified in this trial in Oct. 2023 that Trump randomly picked numbers when trying to value his assets, adding:
“And my responsibility, along with Allen Weisselberg, primarily, was to reverse engineer” these values, “to achieve the number that Mr. Trump tasked us.”
Not quite a stable genius move, but then again Trump always has been more of an evil Forrest Gump type than a Will Hunting figure. He attempted to sue Cohen for hundreds of millions recently, too, but much like his ability to run a business in New York, that seems dead in the water.