When New York’s mid-level appeals court threw out the nearly half-billion-dollar penalty against Donald Trump last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James quickly vowed to appeal. But now, the president is seeking to appeal the civil fraud ruling despite having claimed “TOTAL VICTORY” last week.
That Trump is appealing might seem curious at first glance, especially if one was the under the impression that the ruling was, as the president claimed, a complete win for him. But as I explained when the ruling came out, it was a messy one that made both James’ and Trump’s celebrations awkward.
To be sure, Trump notched a serious win in wiping out the massive monetary penalty. But the bottom-line result, amid a tangle of three separate opinions spanning 323 pages, led James to craft her own victory statement.
In it, she embraced the Appellate Division’s ruling for affirming that Trump, his company and his sons Eric and Don Jr. “are liable for fraud,” and for upholding limits on the Trumps’ ability to do business in the state. Though James didn’t directly mention the massive money loss, her statement ended by saying her office “will seek appeal to the Court of Appeals and continue to protect the rights and interests of New Yorkers.”
The Court of Appeals is New York’s highest state court.
As James touted, there are aspects of the ruling that Trump and his civil co-defendants did lose. Their notice of appeal, filed Tuesday, makes clear that that’s what they’re challenging: the Appellate Division’s order to the extent that it “affirms in part” James’ trial-court win. Appellate Division justices themselves acknowledged the possibility that their jumble of opinions wouldn’t be the last word. Their three separate decisions each had different rationales, none of them garnering a true majority on the five-justice panel. Two of the justices wrote that they only reluctantly joined two others for the purposes of technically rendering a decision, to allow “the option of further review of this matter by the Court of Appeals.” So it won’t be surprising if the Court of Appeals endeavors to issue a clearer decision in the matter, which carries implications for business dealings throughout the state, not limited to this Trump case. Whatever that high court does, both sides have reason to fight for a different outcome than the one that’s currently on the table. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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