Friday’s bombshell ruling in the New York fraud case fined Donald Trump $355 million and Eric and Donald Trump Jr. $4 million each. The sons were also barred from running any New York business for two years.
Not surprisingly, Eric Trump made his family out to be big victims. “We have never missed a loan payment. We’ve never defaulted,” he told a very sympathetic Jeanine Pirro, on Fox News. “We were called by every single lender a ‘platinum borrower.’”
Pirro, a former Westchester prosecutor, never pointed out that the case was about cheating lenders out of higher interest rates via fraudulently overvaluing properties. It had nothing to do with how well the Trump company paid its bills.
Instead, she let Eric Trump continue distorting the case. “We just didn’t have a chance in New York because it’s a rigged system,” he said. “You could not have a more professional real estate company than ours.”
“When COVID hit and they shut down every single hospitality company in the country, guess who never missed a loan payment? … Guess who employs thousands of New Yorkers every single day, puts food on the table for their families, educates their children,” Trump continued. The glaring omission? He never denied the company fraudulently valued its properties, which is what the case was about.
He was like a guy convicted of robbing a bank but claiming it didn't matter because he donates generously to his church and the bank is insured for the loss.
“My father built the skyline of New York City and this is the thanks he gets for doing absolutely nothing wrong?” Eric whined. “This is not the state that my father grew up in. This is not the state that we grew up in. It is the demise of a politically weaponized system and it's horribly sad, Jeanine, and I promise you, we're gonna fight this and we're gonna win at the appellate division because honestly, it's so egregious.”
Trump also sounded like he might be thinking of throwing his father under the bus: “Every single witness testified [Don Jr. and I] have nothing to do with this,” he said. In reality the ruling cites witnesses as well as documents that said Eric Trump had a lot to do with "this."
But now, with Eric’s wife likely to become cochair of the RNC, and in a position to throw a lot of money into the family coffers, Daddy is probably safe from any bus for the foreseeable future.
