That New York Fraud Ruling Was Not Nearly the Trump Victory It’s Being Billed As

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This week, major news outlets blasted out “Breaking News” banners to announce an apparently major victory for Donald Trump. As one outlet, the Wall Street Journal, reported: “N.Y. Appeals Court Throws Out $500 Million Civil Fraud Penalty Against Trump.” If you just read these initial headlines and saw the top-of-the-page placement these publications gave them, you might think that Trump had notched a spectacular victory in his New York civil fraud case and was now in the clear. For his part, the president wasted no time touting the decision as a “TOTAL VICTORY.” If you look a little closer at the details of the court’s opinion, though, it’s clear that the ruling was far from the “total victory” Trump and some news outlets initially portrayed it as.

In a 323-page opinion, a five-judge panel of New York’s appellate court cobbled together a 2–2–1 majority out of three disparate opinions that essentially amounted to no substantive decision about last year’s fraud judgment against Trump. While the ruling is emblematic of the fraught road this case has been on ever since New York Attorney General Letitia James announced it three years ago, it is by no means a clean victory for Trump. A dramatic 11-week trial, which had no jury, ensued while Trump was actively running for president, and included a faceoff with disgraced former attorney and personal fixer Michael Cohen. In the end, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled the Trump family did indeed commit fraud when they overinflated their assets to secure favorable loans, slapping their business with a $355 million penalty, plus a 9 percent interest rate.

Trump’s legal team immediately appealed Engoran’s ruling, and after holding oral arguments, New York’s appellate court considered the case for nearly a year before announcing its decision this week. All five judges ruled that Trump’s financial penalty should be vacated, but they could not all agree to whether the civil fraud case should be tossed out completely or face a retrial. In order to move this case forward, four of the judges came together “with great reluctance and with acknowledgment of the incongruity of the act,” to get this case off their docket and on to the next step: New York’s Court of Appeals. Basically, the court was in a stalemate, and in order to move the case to the next appellate level in New York, they needed to decide something. That something was to vacate a half-a-billion-dollar judgment that many experts felt was unlikely to stand.

This is how the 2–2–1 ruling shook out: Justices Peter Moulton and Dianne Renwick concluded they would only vacate Trump’s financial penalty, Justices John Higgitt and Llinét Rosado would vacate the penalty and send the case back down for a retrial, and Justice David Friedman, alone, would have thrown this case out in its entirety and banned New York state from retrying the president on this issue. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted, “Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals,” the state’s highest court. Ultimately, New York’s high court will decide whether the fraud verdict stands and if Trump is actually off the hook. For now, it seems like the price tag for wrongdoing will shrink, but that’s as much as we can say.

Meanwhile, James’ office has promised to appeal the appellate court’s decision, while also reminding us that only Trump’s financial penalty has been vacated. Other limitations on the Trump Organization’s ability to do business in New York remain in place, including a ban on Trump serving in top-level positions at his own company for three years while his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are banned for at least two years.

Trump has already evaded three criminal indictments and cruised to the presidency for the second time despite sexual abuse charges, so this certainly feels like him again showcasing a vexing skill of manipulating the legal system in such a way as to evade any real consequences. Despite how the headlines read, that real consequence might still arrive in this case, though, even if not in the form of a half-a-billion-dollar penalty.

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