| TAKING DOWN TRUMP 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully Tristan Snell Melville House (January 30, 2024) |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-68589-125-1 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-68589-125-X | 182pp. | HC | $27.99 | |
Once upon a time, when I was surfing the Web, I happened across a page titled The Canonical List of Advice for Tyrants or something similar. This contained all the things a tyrant should do, or should avoid doing, in order to stay in power. There were 23 items. I was able to add number 24:
This is a lesson that Trump has never learned. Probably he is incapable of learning it.1 He routinely fails to pay his lawyers for work they have done defending him (as he routinely failed to pay contractors to Trump Organization businesses, back in the day), and lo and behold, some of them have turned state's evidence in the Georgia election fraud case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Others, notably Rudy Giuliani, may be in the process of doing so.2
That is one of the revelations Tristan Snell, with his experience as Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York, is able to provide us. Snell worked in the Consumer Frauds Bureau, and he prosecuted the Trump University case — an example of blatant fraud perpetrated by Donald Trump and the first instance of Trump being seriously held to account for misconduct.
The thrust of this book is to pass along the lessons Tristan Snell and his team used to force Trump to a $25 million settlement, returning 90 percent of the money they'd paid to some 6,000 attendees of Trump University. Success against a high-profile figure like Trump requires, above all, persistence. Some luck is also required — and did I mention persistence?
The subpoenaed bank records were revelatory: Trump had indeed been drawing profits from the school—big ones. The records even included an image of a check for $500,000 that Trump had writen to himself (and we later found out through witness testimony that Trump had been writing those checks to himself every few months). And that was not all: HR and background check records revealed that most of the "instructors" were motivational speakers or sales representatives totally unqualified to teach anything about real estate. One of them had come to Trump University from being a manager at Buffalo Wild Wings. While two of the instructors had indeed been real estate investors, I found court records that revealed they'd gone through personal bankruptcy as a result, shortly before being hired by Trump. More online research unearthed a YouTube video (with only 34 views at the time): the introductory video featuring Donald Trump which was played at the beginning of evry introductory Trump University seminar, and in which Trump reiterated the lie that he "hand-picked" all the instructors. – Pages 50-51 |
This brings us to another often overlooked aspect of the prosecutorial process: the appaling lack of resources brought to bear on one of the most important elements of American government and the rule of law. Ath the time, the entire New York AG's office consisted of a mere 250 attorneys, and only about 75 of those attorneys worked on the affirmative or prosecutorial cases that the office brings; the rest do vital work representing the state on all variety of legal matters, including ones in which the state gets sued. Our team on the Trump University case consisted of one primary AAG (me) and two others who worked on it at different points, plus the various cheifs who manage the entire caseload of their respective bureaus and divisions. We had almost no paralegal support. I handled all the exhibits and exhibit binders myself. All of the final painstaking work to get all the documents correctly ordered and uploaded and electronically filed, and then ready for printing and serving on the other side, was done by me, with help from my bureau chief, Jane Azia. When we ran out of time on the Friday slated for the filing, I stayed at the office until 2:30 that night, and she and I came back in on Saturday to finish the job. And that is why the case was filed on a Saturday, not because we were trying to be sneaky or tactical (as Trump accused us of doing), but because we were short-stffed and there had literally not been enough hours in the day. The situation is not much better in the other government enforcement offices that have been tasked with bringing Donald Trump and his cronies to justice— the Manhattan DA's office (where senior attorney Mark Pomeratz was lured out of retirement and was working for no pay, and he had managed to get attorneys seconded from a large law firm, where the firm was paying them to spend six months at the DA's office), or the Fulton County, Georgia DA's office (where resources resource woes initially slowed down their investigation of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 Georgia election results), or even the Department of Justice (which regularly suffers through hiring freezes where they are literally not able to maintain a headcount of attorneys even when the usual amount of attrition happens and attorneys leave for other jobs). – Pages 105-7 |
The discussion continues through page 110, and is very much worth reading — especially when Republicans are objecting to putting more resources into the Internal Revenue Service. And note Snell's mention of the fact that junior attorneys at private law firms can earn double or triple what senior attorneys get at the New York AG's office.
| Case | Defendant | Plea | Co-Defendants | Venue | Trial Date | Notes |
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| Trump Organization Business Fraud Case | Donald Trump | NG | Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Marvin Weisselberg | New York | 16 February 2024 | ? |
| The charges : Misstating worth of properties. Donald Trump was convicted; On 2/16/2024,Trump's judgement was set at $354M; his sons' at $4M, and Weisselberg's at $1M. Prosecutor: Letitia James, New York State AG. Judge: Arthur Engoron, SDNY |
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| Classified Documents Case | Donald Trump | NG | Walt Nauta, Carlos De Oliveira | Florida | 20 May 2024 | ? |
| The charges : 40, including willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Prosecutor: Jack Smith. Defense Atty: Aileen Cannon |
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| Stormy Daniels Hush-money Case | Donald Trump | NG | Michael Cohen (convicted) | New York | 25 March 2024 | ? |
| The charges : 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutor: Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA. Judge: Alvin Hellerstein, SDNY |
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| January 6 Insurrection Case | Donald Trump | NG | Six co-conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani | Washington, DC | March 2024 | ? |
| The charges : 4 counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights in his relentless pursuit to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and remain in office. Prosecutor: Jack Smith. Judge: Tanya Chutkan, Chief US Judge for the District of Columbia. |
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| Election Interference Case | Donald Trump | NG | 18 co-defendants | Atlanta, GA | March 2024 | ? |
| The charges : 13 counts including racketeering, forgery, perjury, filing false documents, false statements and others. Prosecutor: Fani Willis, Fulton County DA. Judge: Robert McBurney, Judge of the Fulton County Sperior Court |
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