There appears to be an epidemic of mortgage fraud these days, especially among government officials who have tried to hold Donald Trump accountable for his incessant lawlessness. It seems they have all committed the very same crime. Go figure.
Donald Trump is both a projectionist and a liar who has no imagination whatsoever. His quest to destroy his critics involves a classic Trump maneuver: He accuses everyone he hates of committing the same crimes that have been committed, over and over again, by him. So much for thinking outside the box when considering malicious prosecutions of the innocent. He is exactly that stupid.
The big fellow himself has committed real estate, bank, and tax fraud repeatedly. He was found guilty of these crimes in a trial overseen by none other than alleged mortgage fraudster Letitia “Tish” James, who secured a conviction and millions of dollars in fines for his “inventive” bookkeeping. With that conviction, the defendant also acquired a brand-new moniker: Felonious Trump.
In addition, Trump signed a mortgage in 1993 for a house in Palm Beach that he confirmed would be his principal residence. Seven weeks later, he applied for another mortgage on another property in Palm Beach, also attesting that this particular property would be his principal residence. But he appears not to have lived in either of the houses; instead, he rented them out as income properties. His principal residences, the gold-plated palaces where he really lived, were his New York apartment and his golf compounds at Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago.
That certainly sounds like mortgage fraud to me.
Mortgage finance expert Kathleen Engel told nonprofit investigative news outlet ProPublica that given Trump’s own problematic history and his assertion that those committing mortgage fraud should be disqualified from public service, “He should either fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice” for prosecution.
One suspects that current U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi would be happy to ignore that referral, but she seems open for business when it comes to pursuing false and frivolous charges against New York Attorney General Tish James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff from California, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell from California, and Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook.
Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ is in absolutely no rush to indict the real mortgage cheats in Trump’s own cabinet: Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin have each claimed, for the purpose of securing favorable mortgage rates, two homes as their primary residences. But why pursue the actual scammers when it is so much more interesting to pursue the blameless?
One assumes that shortly after leaving office, Ms. Bondi will be disbarred for her repeated violations of the law while serving as attorney general of the United States, but her relentless self-dealing while running the DOJ has been so substantial that she will no longer need to work in order to pay her bills. Government service has been good to Ms. Bondi, just as it has been good to her boss and the rest of his cabinet. They will all leave office even more comfortably situated than when they arrived, and most of them were already filthy rich to begin with.
So, Donald Trump and Pam Bondi have gone on a fishing expedition, hoping to hook Trump’s nemeses like trout on a string. They invented the mortgage fraud cases from whole cloth, then tried to reverse-engineer them to try to make the Trumped-up charges stick.
An early prosecutorial challenge was the fact that no responsible U.S. attorney would consent to bring the charges; unlike Pam Bondi who has blithely enriched herself at the public trough, career prosecutors will never be rich enough to risk disbarment for repeated breaches of professional conduct.
Those U.S. attorneys were, of course, terminated for their lack of loyalty and replaced by a number of Trump’s D-List personal attorneys. One of those attorneys, Lindsey Halligan, had precious little trial experience and had only done work for a real estate insurance firm and Donald Trump’s mediocre defense team prior to becoming a government prosecutor. Thus, a woman with no scruples and no skill (but a nascent Mar-a-Lago face) was invited to bring bogus federal charges against people who hadn’t done anything wrong.
The judge threw out the case against Tish James because, among other things, Halligan’s appointment to her post was illegal. She had no business arguing anything before the court. Halligan simultaneously brought charges against former FBI Director James Comey, one of the few indictments that did not include the specious charge of mortgage fraud, but included different, equally specious charges. That case has also been dismissed.
It hardly taxes one’s skill as a tea leaf reader to predict that the other frivolous prosecutions will fail in time as well. It appears that most judges—apart from the democracy assassins of the Supreme Court—really do care about the rule of law and the fair administration of justice.
So, it turns out that after a long and expensive fishing expedition in which faux government prosecutors agreed to cast their lines repeatedly into a dry pond at the insistence of the felon who lives, when not golfing, at the White House, the effort has been wasted. There will be no trout on the griddle tonight; it seems that the fish were never anything more than a mirage.
The good news for Pam Bondi is that Donald Trump is such an idiot that she may be able to just drive to McDonald’s; purchase four Fillet-O-Fish sandwiches; name them Tish, Adam, Eric, and Lisa; and persuade her boss that they are in the bag.
