NY Appeals Court Throws Out $454 Million Civil Penalty Against Trump
In the civil case brought by Letitia James, fulfilling her campaign vow to get Trump and his family.
The Appellate Division, the intermediate appeals court in NY State, has thrown out the $454 million penalty assessed against Donald Trump and his businesses in the civil case brought by Letitia James, fulfilling her campaign vow to get Trump and his family.
It’s a complicated decision, as CNN reports:
A New York appeals court has thrown out the nearly half-billion dollar judgment against President Donald Trump in the civil fraud case brought by the state’s attorney general.
Thursday’s decision, which was not unanimous, leaves Trump still liable for fraud. The judges aligned to uphold his liability and toss the penalty so the case could move forward for further appellate review.
In the prevailing opinion, the judges wrote, “While the injunctive relief ordered by the court is well crafted to curb defendants’ business culture, the court’s disgorgement order, which directs that defendants pay nearly half a billion dollars to the State of New York, is an excessive fine that violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
MORE TO FOLLOW
Massive Win!!!
New York Appeals Court has just THROWN OUT President Trump's $500+ Million civil fraud penalty!
It was always a witch hunt, election interference, and a total miscarriage of justice… and even a left leaning NY appeals court agrees! NO MORE LAWFARE!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/j8P138Hhd8— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 21, 2025
I believe you mean $0.00
Thank you for your attention to this matter. https://t.co/RlJ5d2hIQf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 21, 2025
The case and verdict had already served its transparently political purpose. https://t.co/eT6Sh2AOX1
— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) August 21, 2025
🚨 President Donald J. Trump’s FULL Truth post on corrupt Tish James’ case being dropped:
TOTAL VICTORY in the FAKE New York State Attorney General Letitia James Case! I greatly respect the fact that the Court had the Courage to throw out this unlawful and disgraceful Decision…
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 21, 2025
The New York Court of Appeals just nuked Letitia James’ case against President Trump.
No victims. No fraud. Loans repaid. Even the bank said it wasn’t harmed.
What James wanted wasn’t justice—it was a media win and an unconstitutional fine to fatten the state.
Her entire $350M… pic.twitter.com/HhdmfQ2lRJ
— Natali Morris (@natalimorris) August 21, 2025
Trump posted on Truth Social:
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
God forbid you disagree with a prosecutor on what your property is worth.
God forbid that a bank do it’s own due diligence and make a loan with a property as collateral that was payed back. It was a pretty safe bet because I think the bank knows that Trump really likes Mar a Lago and would not want to default in a way that would cause him to lose it.
God forbid an Attorney General run for office vowing to target a specific citizen over politics and then following through with that on thin prosecutorial grounds and someone think it’s kind of suspect.
Agree with first sentence.
Also agree that Donald Trump loves Mar A Lago hyuuuuugely, but the love factor is likelly irrelevant to the determination about making a loan.
The whole mess needs to be thrown out, and hopefully it will be. This is an excellent and appropriate first step.
Your not kidding. Trump even has a standard clause in his applications with his appraisal stating not to rely on his but for the banks to do their own. They did and had no problem so loaned the money and got it back. No victims.
It will be interesting to see if the entire thing isn’t thrown out and I wonder if Trump is going after Tish for violating his civil rights and asking for her to be removed and disbarred. If she is convicted of mortgage fraud then she will be anyways.
The disclaimer defense was rightly thrown out in court. It cannot cover perjury, fraud, presenting something non-GAAP without an explicitly saying so, etc.
Just one example is from 2012-2016 Donald Trump signed SFCs stating that the Trump Tower Triplex was THREE TIMES its’ actual size. That is just one example of fraud.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23991865/trump-ny-fraud-ruling.pdf
Get “Tish” some tissues. Better get the Costco sized pack after jer
Indeed, but this decision doesn’t say that. Let’s hope the Court of Appeals does.
Correct. This case was the equivalent of a half-billion dollar fine for running a yellow light. The fine has been quite properly squashed to zero, and the next step is to get the yellow light ticket thrown out, which can be pursued in a normal fashion. The half-billion dollar fine was racking up interest every day, so Priority One was nuking it.
> disagree with a prosecutor on what your property is worth.
Do you know what the prosecutor used as estimates of worth? Appraisals ordered and paid for by Trump et al. Appraisals that they denied the existence of to the CPAs that prepared Trump’s signed financial documents.
Quite simply, those appraisals were incorrect, and disregarded. It would be improper to include them. If somebody appraised your 1964 Cadillac in perfect condition as worth $15000 from the blue book value, and you later get an expert who knows what they are doing who evaluates it as a more appropriate $50k+ you would not need to submit the incorrect evaluation when going to the bank for a loan using it as collateral.
If Trump is guilty of this charge, then so is every car dealer, real estate salesman, antique dealer, Hollywood actor and millions of others. You always state what YOU think your property is worth and it is up to the buyer/lender to decide what they will pay/loan. I am sure the SCOTUS will throw it out completely.
I’m not sure if there is a federal ground for SCOTUS to overrule the original state decision beyond the excessive fine issue which has already been dealt with by the state appeals court.
Violation of his civil rights to have the law applied equally. Tish ran on getting Trump for something and then went ahead and used a novel reading of a law to do it. Something no one had ever been charged with before in that manner. I’d say she is in for a world of hurt.
There is no such right. She is in no kind of trouble whatsoever. Even if the Court of Appeals does the right thing and overturns the finding, she still won’t be in any kind of trouble.
So there’s no equal protection clause?
Wow. Thanks for letting us know that all of American jurisprudence has been a lie and only YOU knew.
As you well know, you demonic liar. the equal protection clause does NOT require even-handed prosecution. There is NO SUCH THING as a right “to have the law applied equally”. There has never been such a right in America, or in any other country as far as I know. No court has ever recognized such a right, and no conviction has ever been overturned for it. It just doesn’t exist. And you know this.
The value of a business to investors is the total of all its earnings forever, discounted for time. Equivalently, it’s the total of all the dividends it will ever pay, discounted for time.
The value of a business for tax purposes is land and buildings.
The two have nothing to do with each other.
Which one is relevant to a lending bank? Nobody knows.
Lenders rely on both anticipated cash flow and the value of collateral.
All ludicrous court penalties get overturned. Why are they allowed to begin with?
Because there are no consequences for the judge who initially imposes them.
that is, as Dems like to say, the root cause
Stop reading my mind. No accountability ensures repetition.
Did Alex Jones ever have his Billion Dollar fine overturned?
No
There was no billion dollar fine. Those were compensatory; not punitive damages.
The district court said this is not a penalty, it’s compensation, so there’s no cap. This decision says if it’s compensation, why is it going to the government? The government wasn’t the victim. There were victims (there weren’t, but this decision says there were) but they weren’t parties to the suit. So this has to be classed as a penalty, and as a penalty it’s too high.
The prosecution made the (laughable) argument that allowing Trump to submit incorrect (in their opinion) property evaluations affected the bank’s evaluation (which the prosecution also claimed was incorrect). Therefore, this horrible man’s example will somehow or other cause hundreds of other banks to overestimate values of property and therefore cause an immense collapse, dogs and cats living together, etc… In short, 2008 all over again.
James needs to be disbarred for this.
The possibility of James being disbarred is about as likely as finding a rope with only one end.
Compare the disgusting way Giuliani was disbarred by the App.Div. (Might have been the Second Department since Rudy was a Brooklyn Boy).
“finding a rope with only one end.”
So appropriate!
Lettie James IS a rope with only one end. Start pulling on the one end we can see, and no matter how long or hard you pull you will never find the end of her corruption and evil.
Remember when she went after the NRA? Same MO then, same corruption, same abuse of her power as a :judge” or DA. They don’t come any crookeder than she is.
So the fine is now tossed. Next step, the entire case must be tossed. Then, to secure the peace and safety of all, James needs to be tossed into a new hotel… the kind with the Grey Bars and stainless potty chair in the bedroom and dining room. the ONLY room.
James needs to be sentenced to eat a live toad very morning.
I’d happily supply some “recreational” Colorado River Toads.
waiting for Tish to defend her own
fraud in the mortgages on property she owns …. like she said she and her father were married … and that the
property was a 4 apt. unit when it was a 5 apt unit which allowed her
to get a better loan rate …
disbarment and jail.
Mortgage fraud is a federal bounce. Put Tish in gen pop with lots of angry women she sent up and in a southern sweatbox.
Gittum fever is caused by TDS, It appears to affect the rationale ability of the brain when processing any news of Donald Trump.
Sounds like they are after Artie “Picture This” Engoron.
he’s small fish, they need to get Merchan and Kaplan
You mean Dildo Baggins? They should throw him on the court at a WNBA game
Good call on the courts part but they should have sank the whole case. Instead, they look like they are trying to play both sides by killing the damages but leave the ruling intact. Of course, the left isn’t going to care that the court left the so-called conviction intact. They are going to scream bloody murder over the $500 million. I’ve already seen this in the comments on YouTube videos.
Hopefully the next court throws the rest of the case out.
should have sunk
The penalty must be no be more than a multiple of the damages claimed by the victim. 😉
And there weren’t any proclaimed victims in this case.
This is just one example. It helps to actually read the court documents.
As has been explained to defendants many times, in many legal proceedings, and in painstaking detail, “where, as here, there is a claim based on fraudulent activity (under Executive Law 63(12)), disgorgement may be available as an equitable remedy [i]notwithstanding the absence of loss to individuals or independent claims for restitution.[/i]”
…
(20) The defendant borrowers did not default on any loans; but we only know that with hindsight….The next borrower, or the one after that, might default, and it its SFCs are false, the lender might unfairly be left holding the bag. This will distort the lending marketplace and deprive other potential borrowers of the opportunity to obtain loans and create wealth.
(21) The subject loans made the banks lots of money; but the fraudulent SFCs cost the banks lots of money. The less collateral for a loan, the riskier it is, and a first principal of loan accounting is that as risk rises, so do interest rates. Thus, accurate SFCs would have allowed the lenders to make even more money than they did.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23991865/trump-ny-fraud-ruling.pdf
New troll.
Hey, James has a sock troll. The argument here is that the bank evaluation is somehow incorrect due to the Trump evaluation being different. The immediate issue with this delusion is that if you gave a thousand real estate experts the job of evaluating the value of one building in NYC, you will get at *least* a thousand different answers, with wide variance, and a number of “If X happens, it is worth Y, but if Z happens…”
323 pages means they made stuff up on the fly. No one in their right mind wades through 323 pages of legalese.
Fortunately the appeals process worked, we should all be grateful that for all the times it gets things wrong we live under the American Justice System, and Trump will win similar appeals in a case that he likely would have won if he wasn’t too stressed to be a good defendant (show contempt for the jury and you lose the case goes for any participant).
Three cheers for the American Justice System the worst system except for all the others that have been tried.
yes, but then the process becomes the state inflicted punishment
In France the court would have most likely just added to the penalty.
Unfortunately, the appeals process is ongoing and Trump will spend hundreds of thousand dollars for legal fees before everything is over.
In the UK he wouldn’t have a chance of victory at any level.
No, the appeals process hasn’t worked yet. This decision leaves intact everything except the size of the fine, which is the least important aspect of it. Let’s hope the process works at the Court of Appeals.
Still has to get rid of the fraud convictions, which have no basis. This is not like James or Schiff or that FED lady.
I went to trade in my car a couple of years ago. The dealer offered me $50 trade in value. I wanted $20,000,000. We finally settled on $51. I got the better of the deal since the car as only worth $50.
According to James, you are guilty of misrepresenting your car price by $19,999,000 or so dollars, despite the fact the dealership and you came to an equitable deal, and therefore you owe the government $20mil plus for the *prospective* loss that this and other dealerships will incur by allowing evaluations from the clients that vary from whatever educated estimates that a group of real-estate ‘experts’ in black robes decide a year or ten later. Oh, and the dealership doesn’t get that dollar because they were colluding with you, and may get sued by the government for their part in this scheme also.
For bonus points on your test, define just exactly where this differs from the government simply demanding money from you ‘because you have it and they want it.’
(Spoiler: It doesn’t.)
There was no fraud.
Lenders do their own assessments of collateral. They DO NOT rely on borrower valuation..
As EVERYONE knew going into this case.
Where is that jackass political judge in all of this? He should be removed from the bench.
Dear unDemocrats, I offer a sincere thank you. Fair minded people around the world saw your OCD to “get Trump” with unrestrained lawfare as dangerously maniacal. You have driven a whole lot of people from your party and straight into the arms of the man you hate. Thank you for the manner of attention to this matter.
Why should anyone have remorse for an act that harmed no one?
Get “Tish” some tissues…better buy the Costco value pack with her own fraud case still pending.
Her fat black ass needs to go to prison. Racist moron.
Nearly all of the tweets cited in the post, including Trump’s, are outright wrong. The court did not find anything wrong with the case against Trump; the only thing they found wrong was the size of the penalty. So Trump gets financial relief, but no moral victory yet. That has to await the court of appeals.
No, the court, which is indeed left-leaning, did not agree with that.
The case has not been dropped, there was no “total victory”, and the court did not throw out the decision, just the size of the penalty.
No, it didn’t. And it did not say that there were no victims. This tweeter highlighted the text of the decision and then deliberately mischaracterized it. The court absolutely disagreed that there were no victims; it said there were, but they weren’t parties to the suit and weren’t getting the money. The money was going to the government, not to the victims, and that makes it a fine, not compensation, so it has to be treated as a fine. That’s all.
The whole case was indeed a travesty of justice, but this decision doesn’t agree.
For you doesn’t the fact that Trump lies through his teeth about the case lend additional credence to the evidence and the rulings based on them that he, his family, and his employees committed fraud and perjury?
No, it doesn’t. Trump has always had a loose relationship with facts and details. He generally gets the broad picture right but doesn’t care about the details that make it up, and just makes assumptions, often wrong ones. That’s just how he is. You could say he’s not smart enough to understand the details, or you could say he’s smart enough but just doesn’t care enough to bother ascertaining them before speaking. Either way it’s annoying as hell, but I don’t think it speaks to an underlying moral fault.
This entire episode was bogus from the beginning. Hopefully James will meet her end soon.
The moment Letitia James announced that she was running for New York State Attorney General on a platform of “getting Trump,” the New York State Bar should have begun the process of disbarring her, and followed through with that.
One cannot be the chief law enforcement officer of any jurisdiction after having announced that one intends to abuse the office, in order to “get” anybody.
Thus, James must be removed from office and disbarred. She must also be prosecuted federally for fraud, for lying on mortgage documents.
That the New York State Bar has not acted against Letitia James tells us that it is hopelessly corrupt.