 issues take one. I'm Tim Appichell, your host. And today's topic and title is Trump's judicial preferential treatment. This week, we just found out that Donald Trump didn't have to come up with the amount of $454 million to post for his bond and for his appeal. What happened was you had an appellate court that said, oh, you don't have to come up with that much money. How about $175 million? And by the way, we're going to extend the deadline from Monday, and I think we're going to give you 10 more days in which to collect the money. This is very rare. Most defendants don't get that sort of treatment, hence the title of the show, preferential treatment. So with me to discuss that today is my co-host Jay Fidel and our special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton. Welcome back, Chuck, and good morning, gentlemen. So, Jay, to you, can you come up with any plausible alternative facts of why the appellate court would just be so generous to grant Donald Trump a reduction of what he needs to show for bonding of $175 million versus the $454 million, and give him another 10 days to come up with a cash? No. No, okay. Chuck, no. Expand, Jay, please, expand. Well, you know, I practiced this, you know, for decades in this state, and, you know, if you got a judgment to get somebody and they wanted to appeal, fine. But while they were appealing, you could collect the judgment unless there was a super city as fun. And that secure the plaintiff's claim, the judgment. And I thought that was, you know, a black letter all over the country, everywhere in the American system. But I guess not. And what is so interesting here is that the appellate division, which is the Intermediate Court of Appeals in New York, came up with this change. Where did they pull up the 175? Now, I thought I heard somebody say, well, that was what Trump's lawyers said they could afford if they really got pressed. But, you know, that's not the test of it at all. The test of it is, you know, what will secure the $454 million judgment, plus, plus additional interest, plus a kicker for all the expenses involved on the plaintiff's side to wait and collect. And so, you know, what's really remarkable here is that they found this number out of thin air. They found that 10-day thing out of thin air. That's not the rules. And at the same time, they said they were not questioning the judgment itself. Well, okay, I understand that because Trump has not appealed the judgment itself. He's only asking for time to post his security. But the bottom line is, this was really a shocker rule. And I'm sure that a truck is going to have the same reaction, because it doesn't comport with the practice in this state or any other state that we know of. Pellet courts don't do that. They're making it out of whole cloth. And so, what you get is favoritism. That's the way it shakes out. And what is surprising is that all three of the judges on the panel in the appellate division were Democrats appointed by Democratic governors of New York. Why in the world would they come up with this? Why would they shower really a huge benefit? Let me do the math. A $300 million benefit on Trump. Why didn't the plaintiff have the right, the state of New York have the right to take his properties? That was what the law says. It's really hard to figure out why the appellate division did that, except to show some kind of favoritism on the basis that he was a court president before, a former president, or that he was a sad situation where he had no money, even though he's boasted about being a multi-billionaire so many times in the past. I mean, it just doesn't seem insistent and it doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem fair to me or you or Chuck because if we were in similar circumstances, no court would do that. No court. Okay. Well, let's go to that real quick. The fairness issue. Does what appears to be preferential treatment to Donald Trump, does that hurt the credibility of the court system, the judicial system? And I'm not going to go into detail about the Supreme Court and all the little benefits and gifts they've been getting on for years now. What's the credibility of the justice system when we see what looks like an apparent misapplication of the law for preferential treatment to Donald Trump? Well, I thought it was only Eileen Cannon. I thought it was only Clarence de Clown of the Supreme Court and other members of the Supreme Court. I did not think it was going to reveal itself in the appellate vision of New York State with a panel of three Democrats. I do not understand, but what I come away with, your point, is that, you know, Houston, we have a problem in the justice system. It doesn't follow the law. It is not fair to the ordinary person. And ultimately, it's across the board. I don't know why the appellate vision didn't think of that themselves. What is carved on the Supreme Court that is the New York Supreme Court, which is like our circuit court building, which a quote from George Washington, you know, the firmest point of government is public confidence or words to that effect. How can you have public confidence in a system that is inexplicable and that is clearly favoring the big guys, you know, the 12 more presidents and the like, the stars from the network television, the guys who manipulate the press, the guys who do outrageous things, why in the world would you put a benefit on him? What are they blinded? They blinded by his notoriety. That's what it is. I just don't understand it. Okay. Well, well, maybe through the discussion of this show, we'll get a little bit closer to the wise. Chuck, you know, Donald Trump says he's being treated differently and he's crying about it, but he is being treated differently. He's being treated especially with preferential treatment. Do you agree with Jay as it's a mystery of to why the court reduced his amount required down to 175 and that he was given an additional 10 days to come up with the money? Well, unless George Conway is right and the three Democrats got together and said, you know what, being able to collect 175 mil is better than being able to collect nothing. So we'll take it. Well, okay, let me stop you right there. What happened if Donald Trump couldn't come up with the 454? All that means is that the appeal doesn't go forward, right? No, the appeal does go forward. It just means that they can collect. They can start collection action. It doesn't affect the appeal at all. Oh, okay. Let me jump in on one thing you said, Chuck. And that is if they don't put up a bond, if they don't put up the cash, if they don't put up some kind of supersidious security and he appeals or not appeals, it doesn't matter. The judgment is enforceable. Okay. And I would relish personally, I'm not in practice anymore, but I would relish personally the notion of going after the Trump Tower, going after the golf clubs, going after his assets. You know, he's claiming he has claimed for years to be a billionaire. It would be like rub your hands together, let's go for it, boys. And you know, you could have tremendous effect in your efforts at collection. And furthermore, I like to add that in New York, as in Hawaii, you have the right, the plaintiff had the right to examine under oath the judgment debtor. And that would be an examination, effectively a deposition under oath that would be memorable. So, you know, it would be, I would relish the idea of going after his assets. And I think, honestly, I think from what we do know, it could be collected, all 454 million plus. Sorry. Chuck, yeah, so go ahead, continue. You said it doesn't, it doesn't affect the appeal whatsoever. No, it doesn't affect his appeal rights at all. The only thing it affects, as Jay said, is the collection can proceed. The collection problem, though, for the creditors for New York State is going to be piercing the veil to get Trump because the judgment's against Trump, right? Not against corporation A, corporation B, LLC, C, whatever. So, you've got to get him individually. Any of those can file Chapter 13, Chapter 11, they can stop things right there. But because it's a fraud judgment, it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So, to the extent that it is treated in bankruptcy as a fraud judgment, he can't discharge it. It's stuck. But it's the judgment against him. Will he marshal his assets to get rid of it because he can't? If he really was going to simply just avoid collection, he would have gone ahead and started to file Chapter 13s and Chapter 11s for the corporations that owned the Trump Towers and the golf courses and myra lago and all that stuff to protect those assets from the judgment against him. But exploring the reasons for why he hasn't done that and how the appellate court came up with, there's no legal or factual justification either for A, the appellate court to even take the issue of the bond. I have never in 45 years of practice seen an appellate court consider a bond issue appealed just the issue of the amount of the bond. I'm sure it's been done somewhere in our history. There could be this bond as politically motivated or this bond was fraudulently obtained or they bribed the judge to get this high bond or whatever. You could do that, but that's not involved here. And if you look for the decision on the internet, I couldn't find it. I could find no citation of a single reason for the bond reduction. So there's no legal basis for the court to exercise the jurisdiction to do it. There's no legal basis for the court to exercise the discretion to reduce the amount. And there is no legal or factual basis for the amount that they substituted for the amount that the judge who knows the case, who knows what bond is legally justified based on the experience setting bonds for however many years that judge has sat on the bench. So you've got a bunch of appellate judges. It's a mystery for sure. Let me a couple of points on that. Number one is even if there was a decision, it'd be hard for us here today, the three of us, to figure out what that might have said because you can bat your head against the wall and try to figure out what they would have said to justify it. Hard to do that. In the absence of a decision, it's really impossible. Well, you can make the same kind of statement of concern. But anyway, I want to go into one other thing. Up till now, Trump has had the judgment has not been enforced. I'm sorry, the judgment has not been enforced. Yeah. And part of the judgment is that Trump has to suffer a monitor for his companies and that he is not supposed to be in charge. He's removed as the chief executive and his family removed as the chief executive. But that's not yet enforceable. And it hasn't yet come to pass. So what do you think Trump is doing to establish conveyances and transfers to move his assets out of harm's way? This is a classic concern about fraudulent conveyance to be the judgment. And he is probably a very busy boy already, now immediately, to move his assets around. There was a chart in the New York Times today about how he moves assets donations through various corporations and LLCs to pay his own legal fees with them. And it was a schematic with all these entities in this chart. And you say to yourself, this is a man who has lied thousands of times. This is a man who has conducted his real estate practice as a fraudulent enterprise. Do you think he would not move his assets right now before it all hits home? So one of the worst things this intermediate court did is to delay that, giving Trump another 30 days to protect his assets by moving him around on that kind of schematic. So they did beyond recovery at the end of the day. And that was really done, in my opinion. There's no justification whatsoever. The reason that Engaran put the monitor provision in his judgment was to avoid that exact thing. But now the fact is that there is no monitor yet, and Trump can do that. The reason he put that vision about not allowing the family or Trump to be the chief executive of these various entities, that's the reason too, to avoid Trump moving things around. It's not enforceable. And now we have another 10 days more or more before it actually hits home. So I think for reasons, it's not only they reduced it to 175, they put the whole thing on ice, including the provisions that were intended to avoid fraudulent transfer. Good point. The one other thing, and this follows directly from what Jay just said. The principal job of the courts in every single case is to balance the rights and interests of the parties. In this case, there has been a full trial adjudication that the state of New York, represented by Leticia James and her office, is entitled to principal plus interest of $454 million, accruing interest and so that's a higher number now. Absolutely no attention, no mention, nothing was done to engage in a balancing of the rights of the state of New York, the people of New York. There's no reference to it in any article. There's no reference to any mention of it in the decision. So the Intermediate Court of Appeals has failed in its most core value duty, which is to engage in that balancing of rights and interests. That is the first and foremost job of the judiciary. They have simply abandoned that entire responsibility. They have not conducted themselves as a court. There is no justification for- If you're a New Yorker, then where's your faith in the justice system of New York, which I mentioned earlier. Let me get your thoughts on something here. I want to talk about another example of what I perceive to be preferential treatment for Donald Trump by the justice system, and that is the immunity case. So Chuck, here we have a very, very closely written black and white decision that Trump, from the district court of appeals, that Trump is not immune from criminal prosecution as president. It was very, very tightly written. Yet, lo and behold, the Supreme Court takes it up. And then Trump is using that as a basis to try to delay all his other cases. So what's your take on the immunity case and whether or not that fits the pattern of what I would consider preferential treatment by the justice system? I like the question, Tim, because it goes right back to the point that I just emphasized. In any judicial proceeding, the very first thing you look at is what are the rights and interests of each of the parties, and how did the court engage in an evaluation and a balancing and termination and adjudication of those rights and interests? That hasn't happened. The Supreme Court has not engaged in an evaluation and balancing of the rights and interests of opposing parties in any of its recent decisions to any perceptible degree. That's not what's going on. That's not what they're doing. They're doing exactly what they're accused of, and that is they're predetermining a result, and they're backing the car into that garage in whatever manner they can to get the car in the garage and then slam the garage door shut. Are you implying or suggesting that the Supreme Court is playing politics and favoritism with Donald Trump? I'm actually saying more than that. I'm saying that they have completely abandoned the primary responsibility and priority of a judicial body. They have not either evaluated nor balanced the rights and interests of the parties. Okay. They have essentially predetermined which party is going to get what they want, and they got there. They made up history in the abortion case, which was false. That's been shown. They've made up pretext in the LGBTQ cases. They're a completely result-oriented court. They give no attention or consideration to either principle or process. There is nothing left of the rule of law with the Trump majority in our Supreme Court. The only thing left of the rule of law is read the opinions of Sotomayor, Jackson, and occasionally Kagan. You will see this is where the rule of law used to be. This is where it needs to be. That's been completely abrogated. Okay. Jay, your take on the immunity case, whether or not the Supreme Court did as Checks suggested. You read on it, please. I'd go a step further. They have no regard for public confidence, like in George Washington's quote. They really don't care the reaction of the public in the country, the reaction of the public in terms of confidence in our judicial system. They do these things out in the open. It's the emperor's new clothes. They're not wearing practice, procedure, precedent, or public confidence. Over time, that's not sustainable. You can't have a democracy where people don't believe in it, and they're telling us, don't believe in it because we're all politicized now. This is very, very troubling. It's troubling in the immediate term, but it's also troubling in the long term. I'm very worried that over time, this is going to have a really, really toxic effect on the country in general. As for the immunity clause, it's like to go a step further. I make the claim that the moon is made out of blue cheese. There's no legal priority. There's no legal precedent for this kind of claim. It's throwing it on the wall and seeing if it'll stick. That's what Trump and his lawyers do. That's what they've always done through a lifetime of Trump's real estate practice. You throw it on the wall. So the moon is made out of blue cheese, and you lay that on, and the Supreme Quest says, well, we're not sure. Maybe it's some other kind of cheese, and we are going to put it off. The action in putting it off is actually ruling in his favor, because everybody knows, down to the last guy in the last Republican cell in the country, we all know that his game is delay, and they gave him the delay. It almost doesn't matter what they do in terms of the ultimate decision on the immunity question. By the way, it struck me as Trump was talking, if they're going to fabricate this immunity right, why is it limited to the president? The Constitution doesn't limit any such right to the president. What about the vice president? What about the speaker of the house? What about the president of the Senate? What about any elected official? You could extend that all around the country, make everybody immune on the non-legal theory that these guys are entertaining. If he wins this crazy claim, this ticket on the wall claim over immunity, there's going to be more by more people. So not only do you lose public confidence, not only do you lose the notion of president and fairness in the court following the law, you lose everything because you know that people will make the same damn claim. There's no distinction really for this purpose between the president and any other public official. And Tim, one of the things that we need to be really mindful of, there is a third case, which demonstrates even more graphically, even more undeniably, even more starkly, the complete abandonment by the Trump majority on the Supreme Court of anything like judicial independence, judicial responsibility, any of that. And that's the case in which they abrogated the decision of the Colorado judge who went through full trial of whether Trump did participate in the insurrection within the meaning of 14th Amendment Section 3 found based on a strong preponderance of the evidence, overwhelming preponderance of the evidence that he did, it made some findings that were clearly maybe even intentionally legal error. The Colorado Supreme Court fixed those legal errors. So by the time it got to the Supreme Court, there was really nothing for the Supreme Court to reverse, to put Trump back on the ballot. So they made up out of whole cloth, state courts don't have the jurisdiction to enforce Article 14th Amendment Section 3. Where the hell did that come from? There is no precedent for that. There is no historical basis for that. There is no jurisdictional judicial basis for denying the states the authority to enforce the 14th Amendment. Okay, I guess worse. I guess worse. What they did is they gutted Section 3. Yeah, because that ruling Section 3 is meaningless now on the federal level. It's really awful. And by the way, we're talking now, let's see how much we've covered. We covered the New York civil case by the state of New York. We've covered the cases that fall subject to the immunity argument. And that would be Jack Smith's cases in both Florida, am I right? And in Washington. And we should talk about Eileen Cannon, because she's special. And we should talk about Fonny Willis. Don't overgave time. I do want to ask this though, because we're out of time. And that is, you know, the concept that the defendant is entitled to a speedy trial. What about the public's entitlement to justice? And that is to know whether or not your candidate for President of the United States is guilty or not guilty before the election of President of the United States. Doesn't the public have some kind of skin in the game to know whether or not your candidate is guilty of 91 indictments? Where is that? Where do we leave that, Jay? And it seems to be a second priority. First priority is Trump's rights, Trump's appellate rights, Trump's squawking about everything about how he's a victim. But, you know, there's nobody out there, a very good point to him. Nobody out there is saying, what about the public? And my point, what about public confidence? If I'm an ordinary, you know, citizen, and I look at all these delays and all these derailments of all these, you know, cases, I say, you know, our justice system is broken. This is like the OJ case. Remember how he got off and everybody was shaken and said, what happened here? Sure, it seems like he's guilty. And we lost confidence in that case in the justice system. But this is much worse, because this involves the government itself, the democracy itself, and it involves a number of proceedings, and it involves a number of indictments. So where does the average citizen go? Where does he compete on this? Well, yeah. So Chuck, to you, who would be the best advocate to stand up for the citizen's rights to know what justice served or not served before the election of a president? Good question, because the answer is the media. The answer is the media. Well, yeah, and there's another abrogation of responsibility that's at least several more shows of its own. But if you're going to have a judiciary serve any function, if it's going to adjudicate to anything, it has to adjudicate rights and interests. It has to adjudicate them in a manner in a manner that has some legal and factual support for it. And it has to adjudicate them in a manner that both defines those rights and interests and balances them when they conflict or compete in ways that are sufficiently consistent that they can be applied not only by other courts, but by citizens, by law enforcement, by people who have to live according to the rules. In other words, in order to have a rule of law, it has to be defined, clarified, consistently interpreted and consistently enforced. We now have a judiciary exemplified by our Supreme Court, if you can use that word, that has abandoned all pretense of any rule of law. All right. We have run out of time, so Chuck, I'll ask you for your last question. But other than that, they're doing a pretty good job. Other than that, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the plan? Would you like the plan? All right, so Chuck, your last thoughts on this subject matter, Trump's judicial preferential treatment? I think there is serious ground for question of whether there is even any ground for hope in our current judiciary. Wow. Think about that statement. Jay, last word, and Chuck just delivered a fairly morose statement, but there it is. Your thoughts? Well, this actually can be fixed. At the Supreme Court level, it could be fixed by reform, by adding additional justices. That would fix it, actually. And I guess at the Eileen Cannon level, it could be fixed by an impeachment of a judge who is clearly incompetent and politicized. And so each one of these problem areas that we talked about can legally theoretically be fixed. But the problem is, right now, the implication of what we've been talking about spills into the political arena. It is connected at the hip with the political arena. And that means the election in November. So the question I put, and I put it to myself, is whether people, voters, are going to be affected by what has been happening. The favoritism that Trump is enjoying right now, will the Republicans vote against him because of that? Will the Democrats vote against him or not vote at all? And I suggest, this is the dark side of it, I suggest that the Republicans are going to be joyful because they don't care about the rule of law. They only care about Trump. I mean, the MAGA Republicans, which is a lot of Republicans. And the Democrats are, you know, they're apathetic. Oh gee, whiz, too bad. And the problem is, I think in the end of the day, what we're talking about here is going to have a really bad effect on the election in November. It actually works in Trump's favor. And that means it's more likely that he will win and less likely that any of these problems will be fixed. Okay. Well, thanks for you gentlemen for a very serious and sobering discussion. I am, as Jay likes to put it, after the show, I'm going to soak my head in some cold water. I'd like to thank my special guest, special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton, for his attendance and his, as always, very wise comments and perspectives. I would like to thank my co-host, Jay Fidel for the same. I'm Tim Mapachello for American Issues Take One, and please join us next week. And until then, aloha.