By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
Former President Donald Trump found himself at the center of a whirlwind of legal and political controversies as he appeared in a New York courtroom on Monday, Oct. 2, for a civil trial. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, brought the case, and the presiding judge has already found him guilty of extensive fraud involving the hundreds of millions of dollars in overvaluation of his wealth and business properties.
James seeks to prevent Trump from doing business in New York, and she wants the judge to slam the demagogue with crippling fines totaling as much as $250 million. The twice-impeached former president, already four criminal indictments, and a staggering 91 felony counts. Earlier this year, a separate civil jury found him responsible for sexually assaulting a writer. Further adding to his legal woes, the civil case in New York.
“While it may be one thing to exaggerate for Forbes magazine… you cannot do it while conducting business in the state of New York,” asserted Kevin Wallace of the New York Attorneys General’s office. “Year after year, loan after loan, the defendants misrepresented Mr. Trump’s net worth to maintain those favorable interest rates,” Wallace argued. The attorney general’s office said Trump inflated his net worth by as much as $3.6 billion in three separate years between 2011 and 2021. They contend he did so to get favorable loan and insurance rates, and to try and prove he was something he wasn’t.
Meanwhile, Trump’s recent behavior has also raised eyebrows in a stunning turn of events. Over just 48 hours, he made headlines for expressing controversial views, including stating his desire for police to shoot anyone stealing from a store, ranting about reverse racism against white Americans, imprisoning his political adversaries, and even musing about jailing President Joe Biden. Trump has also stated that the outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chaiman Mark Milley should be executed. Furthermore, he continued his long-standing and contentious obsession with former President Obama.
What’s more, the controversy surrounding Trump deepened with the release of a tell-all book by Michael Lewis titled “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.” The book alleges that Trump demanded a jaw-dropping $5 billion from failed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as a payoff for not entering the 2020 presidential election. Despite initially considering not running for reelection, Trump eventually did run and lost to Biden before later cheering on a mob of supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to keep Trump in power.
An excerpt from Lewis’s book revealed that Bankman-Fried was contemplating giving $15 million to $30 million to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell to defeat more “Trumpier” candidates in Senate races. However, the shocking revelation came when Bankman-Fried explored the possibility of paying Trump himself not to run, with sources suggesting Trump’s price tag for withdrawal was a staggering $5 billion.
Trump’s erratic behavior continued at a campaign rally in Iowa, where he made bizarre remarks about his preferred method of demise. During the speech in Ottumwa, Trump discussed electric boat batteries and recounted a conversation with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina. He stated, “If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down, and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left, and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark; you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time; do we agree?”
In addition to these remarks, Trump criticized various sustainable energy technologies and vowed to reverse the Joe Biden White House’s mandate for electric vehicles.
Ron Filipkowski, a Florida criminal defense attorney, told The Guardian that he witnessed Trump “slurring his words” when he started “riffing about how he would rather be electrocuted to death than be eaten by a shark.”
