Donald Trump is a screw-up loser who has screwed up everything he has ever touched, and he lost again today. A New York appeals court panel has just affirmed a lower court's ruling that Trump and his grown-ass adult children do indeed have to sit for depositions in the civil fraud investigation being conducted against his company by the New York attorney general's office.
The brief ruling can be seen here, and it rejects the Trump clan's arguments that they don't have to be deposed in the civil case because it might provide prosecutors evidence to use against them in a separate criminal case investigating their lifetime of financial screwupperies. In response to the Trump family's concerns, the judges wrote that—short version—if they did criminal stuff they don't want to tell the civil fraud investigators about than they may use their 5th Amendment right to clam up about those particular things—but they still have to sit and be asked about them.
A barrage of news reports premised on revealed Trump financial statements appeared to indicate widespread manipulation of asset prices and other potentially criminal behavior, but those reports were met with Republican indifference and, during a time when Trump was freely purging from government anyone testified about criminal behavior on his part, no apparent federal investigation of any of it. Further evidence of wrongdoing appeared when former Trump Organization lawyer testified that he was personally aware of fraudulent filings by the company.
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But things really took a turn for the worse for the Trumps when the accounting firm responsible for representing the Trump company bailed out of the relationship with a public warning that they could no longer attest to the truthfulness of the company's financial data. That extraordinarily rare move only happens when a company has very good reason to suspect criminal activity has taken place.
Trump has been obstructing every investigation in the manner he has long been accustomed to, simply refusing to comply with court orders while filing spurious claims meant only to cause delay. He was able to block federal investigations completely while in office because All Modern Republicans Are Criminals. Now that he's back lounging around in his for-profit golf resort, however, his powers consist only of whatever shenanigans his lawyers can pull—and the courts appear to be growing impatient.
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