Trump & His Appeal Bond

Episode Notes

Transcript

Will Thomas:

The capacity of well-funded white collar individuals to really gum up the works and slow down the process is an unfortunate reality of how our system runs here, and that’s the happy but depressing reaction I have to the Trump cases.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from Southern California. I write a blog named May I Please the court and have two books out titled How to Get Sued in the Sled. My blog may have please the Court is up and running in the New Year, so check it out. And I also have a new book coming out titled, how Would You Decide 10 famous Trials that Changed History Beyond the Lookout for It Next Month? Well, in a ruling on Monday, March 25th, earlier this week, the New York Appeals Court gave Trump a major victory cutting the bond needed in his civil fraud case from 400 to 64 million down to 175 million and gave him an extra 10 days to find the money or some other means of posting a bond or securities, which he seems to have. Well, after the ruling Trump wrote, we will abide by the decision of the appellate Division and neither post a bond equivalent securities or cash.

In response to the ruling Leticia James responded, Donald Trump is still facing accountability for his staggering fraud. The court has already found that he engaged in years of fraud to falsely inflate his net worth and unjustly enrich himself, his family and his organization. The $464 million Judgment plus interest against Donald Trump and the other defendants still stands well today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will discuss former President Trump’s current legal and financial issues. We will take a look at this recent ruling on the $464 million judgment specifics on the inability to secure a bond and what next steps will be taken to retrieve payment from President Trump, former President Trump in this case and others if the money isn’t enough and doesn’t come through. And to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined today by Will Thomas. He is the assistant professor of business at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where his research explores normative and conceptual foundations of corporate and white collar crime. Professor Thomas writes on issues of corporate agency, legal personhood and theories of punishment. He frequently comments on issues of criminal law and business having appeared in media outlets including the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Welcome to the show Will.

Will Thomas:

Hi, thanks for having me on.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, before we jump into today’s conversation, give us a little bit of background about yourself and tell us about the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Here’s your chance to plug your school.

Will Thomas:

Absolutely. Well, it’s an easy school to plug. So I am a faculty member in the business school. I am actually a double wolverine myself. I went to both the law school and I have a PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan, and so my role in the business school is to teach in that space. I teach a combination of business law and business ethics, and so lots of my research is coming in the space of corporate and white collar crime, but it’s really informed by this sort of broad holistic approach to business law that Ross, I think somewhat uniquely offers as part of your business education.

J. Craig Williams:

Excellent. Well, let’s jump right into today’s topic and maybe give us some background on this Trump case, but I’m really more interested in this kind of cryptic reference from the appellate court that says, we’re not going to give you an opinion, we’re just going to reduce the amount of the bond.

Will Thomas:

Yeah, so it’s been a complicated weird case for weeks and months and the last week in particular has sort of added to some complexity. So if we just step all the way back and think about what’s been happening here, Donald Trump has six major cases against him right now. There’s four criminal prosecutions, there’s two civil cases, this civil case coming out of New York. It’s actually the only one that really is only about Donald Trump the businessman as opposed to his sort of political persona. And it’s fundamentally a fraud case. We can spend a lot of time going into the details and all the proven allegations, but at the end of the day, the basic claim here is that the Trump organization, either through talk himself, through certain senior executives, have been systematically lying to banks, to insurance companies, to regulators, and they’ve been doing that to get some kind of financial advantage.

J. Craig Williams:

But Trump says no foul though. I mean he paid back all his loans. What’s the harm?

Will Thomas:

The Trump team’s arguments certainly at trial last month have really, in my view sort of struck a pretty categorical defense. They’ve been claiming there was never any fraud, there weren’t even errors made if there were errors or there was mishap subjectivity involved. It’s just what everybody else in the real estate industry does. Nobody was victimized. These are pretty categorical defenses and ones that frankly didn’t make really any attempt to make sense of lots of the documentary evidence that appeared at trial. So there’s a difference between some kind of good faith disagreement and outright lying. And this case has pulled up a lot of evidence that the Trump organization has knowingly, systematically lied about basic facts that led to about 350 million in essentially extra profits that they wouldn’t have gotten. And that’s sort of what gets us to what was happening to the appeal court this week where the appeal court said, we’re going to reduce your bond because it’s not that the appeal court has reduced the amount of money he might have to pay. At the end of the day, all they’ve said is in order to start your appeal, we need you to put up about half of the money that you’re said to owe so that we can feel comfortable that if you lose, you’re going to be good for the whole amount.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, people are saying that they’ve been denied by 30 different lenders. $454 million is not the largest verdict we’ve seen in this country and not the largest bond we’ve seen on appeal.

Will Thomas:

Yeah, so one thing I think is always challenging when you’re dealing with Trump as a defendant is there’s a certain sort of let’s push the limit business attitude that Trump has always brought to negotiations. And because he’s done that so symptomatically, I think it’s really hard when you’re looking at what his attorneys are saying in court to know are they being sincere here or are they really trying to push the edge and get some kind of business advantage? So if you ask me, is it possible to get a appeal bond for more than $500 million, I would say a couple things. One, yes, absolutely. Two. Well, even if it’s hard to get one bond for that much, it’s easy to get five bonds that total up to that amount. And three, you can get these kinds of bonds using all sorts of collateral, whether it’s cash, marketable securities or real estate, which the Trump organization has a lot of real estate

J. Craig Williams:

Right here in California. You don’t have to post the bond to appeal. You can go into court and say, here’s the deed to my property.

Will Thomas:

Exactly right. And in fact, there are some provisions in New York appellate law that would allow basically the same outcome, and in fact, the attorney general has pointed out on appeal, look, if the Trump team doesn’t want to put up the appeal bond, the appeal bond is a optional, they don’t have to put up a bond and B, not the only way they can, what we call furnish an undertaking and furnishing an undertaking is just some version of a guarantee that you will pay the judgment at the end of the day. There’s lots of ways you can do this. Appeal bond is the most common, but it’s not the only one.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. But why didn’t the appellate court turn around to Trump and say, okay, you can’t put up $454 million, but given all your bragging, you must have a few deeds that you can drop into court that would total that much.

Will Thomas:

Yeah, I think I was, on the one hand, I was a little surprised that the court was willing to entertain the idea of reducing it. And on the other hand, I don’t know Monday’s decision from the intermediate Court of appeals, it strikes me as the kind of equitable compromise that courts do a lot and that makes sort of practical sense. We just don’t think too hard about it. We boil down the dispute, right? State of New York wins a trial judgment for roughly $350 million plus interest. Trump says he shouldn’t have to pay any of that amount until after the appeal. New York said he has to pay it all before he appeals. Lo and

J. Craig Williams:

Behold, those are the rules.

Will Thomas:

Those are the rules. Now those are the rules for an automatic state. An automatic state is the kind of positive enforcement of a judgment that you can get without the court’s assistance. The court always has the ability, has the authority to grant another one. I would look at this decision by the court of appeals and think that this is a court that frankly sees this whole bond issue as just a side concern, mostly relevant to the actual substance of appeal, and they would just like to get to the appeal itself.

J. Craig Williams:

Right, because really is there a difference between putting a bond up and Leticia James being able to execute on the judgment?

Will Thomas:

There is very little difference. At the end of the day, if Donald Trump’s wealth were in some kinds of easily movable or hideable assets, that’d be a different story.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, he has tried to move some of his stuff to Florida.

Will Thomas:

He has tried to move some of his cash to Florida, and on the other hand, he definitely has enough real property in the state of New York that even if he could move his cash out, he could move other things out. Leticia James is going to very easily be able to grab his upstate golf courses, maybe the Trump Tower or 40, his other property in Manhattan, and those are going to be worth way more than she needs. And not only that, if you’re Donald Trump, I think the worst outcome would be for her to seize one of those properties because if she seizes the property, she is not going to keep it. She’s going to sell it to get her money back. You think about her incentives, her incentives are to sell it for as much money as she needs to get paid

J. Craig Williams:

Back and not anymore.

Will Thomas:

Exactly. If she sells it for more, she doesn’t get to keep that extra

J. Craig Williams:

Amount. It has to go back to Mr. Trump,

Will Thomas:

It goes back to him, which puts her in an odd position. Her incentive is actually not to get best market value, it’s just to get paid. And so for Donald Trump, having one of those properties seized would both be bad because he obviously wants to hold onto them, but also bad because he’s likely to sort of take a double whammy in terms of loss. He’s going to lose the property and then he’s not going to get into value. He would’ve if he sold it himself.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. It doesn’t have the Trump brand anymore.

Will Thomas:

Exactly. And you could imagine James saying, look, we need to sell this next week. In which case, number one rule of real estate, if you are forced to sell on a short timeframe, you’re going to lose money.

J. Craig Williams:

It’s a fire sale.

Will Thomas:

Exactly right.

J. Craig Williams:

So what is Trump’s option at this point? He’s got 10 days to run around and get five bonds, pony up a couple of deeds. What is he going to do?

Will Thomas:

Yeah, I’m really curious to see how they move forward. So if you listen to Trump’s attorneys right last Thursday, they seem to tell the court we are incapable, it’s practically impossible for us to raise more than a hundred million dollars appeal bond. So 175 million is way closer to a hundred than the former deal. It’s still huge by comparison. So if he couldn’t raise more than a hundred, he can’t get there on the other Trump on Friday, the day after said that he had 500 million in cash. So whoever’s telling the truth here is going to give us insight into whether or not he can actually meet this obligation.

J. Craig Williams:

Do you view the reduction in the amount of the bond as kind of a covert signal from the appellate court that we’re thinking about reducing the amount of the judgment?

Will Thomas:

So sometimes courts appeal will tip their hand a little bit in cases like this, right? They’ll take some precursor action that gives you a hint to where they’re headed. In this instance, I wouldn’t read into this decision too closely, and there’s a couple of reasons why. First, as you pointed out, there’s no arguments. It’s just here’s the dollar amount. But second, and I think this is more important, there’s nothing about the number 175 million that jumps off the page to me from trial. In other words, when I read the trial decision, there’s nothing I could point to that would sort of triangulate me to the idea that the court might be trimming to that amount. On the other hand, if I look at the ultimate trial judgment, the entry was almost exactly 350 million. Turns out 1 75 is 50% of three 50. To me, this is as close as courts get to a Solomonic compromise. They just split the price in half.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Well, that certainly sounds like it might be the case, but Will at this time, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to lawyer. Lawyer. I’m joined by Will Thomas. He’s the assistant professor of business law at the Stephen M. Ross School of Law of Business at the University of Michigan. And will, right before the break, we were talking about how Trump’s going to come up with this money. He claims he has it. If he has it, why didn’t he just walk in with it the day it was due?

Will Thomas:

Yeah, so if he had the money available to him, he was really risking a lot on getting the intermediate court of appeals to reduce that money on Monday. Monday was the deadline when his money was due, that appeal decision came in that day, so he was able to reduce that amount. We don’t know if the Trump team was essentially ready to write a check or post a bond later that afternoon because they didn’t have to show their hand. So presumably if they had the ability to actually pay that close to $500 million, they were ready to do it. But I think we’ll really find out in the next several days what position they were in there. Because look, even though I think the court of appeals just wanted to move on and get to the actual meat of the case, there’s no question that this is benefit to Trump, right? Trump is now allowed to appeal without having to secure a larger bond, and Donald Trump is a lot richer this week than he was last week, not because of this case, but because truth Social has now merged,

J. Craig Williams:

It’s sold truth social, well, it’s merged and it’s supposedly worth 7 billion when valuations out of Wall Street. We didn’t put it above three.

Will Thomas:

It’s remarkable, right? And there’s an irony here in this case, Tom’s lawyers have been arguing particularly last week that the problem he’s facing in getting an appeal bond is that all of his wealth is in real estate. And real estate is not necessarily the kind of collateral people want. What people want for collateral is cash. They want stock. So on the same day that New York steps in and says, you can post a smaller bond, Donald Trump finds himself with a mountain of stock that is worth a huge amount of money.

J. Craig Williams:

So he can just walk into court now and go, here’s 454 million worth of truth social.

Will Thomas:

So it turns out it’s slightly more complicated only because he has signed a shareholder agreement that prevents him from selling that stock and also using it as collateral. Now, I’m not going to say that it is impossible. I think it’s actually there’s three or four pretty straightforward mechanisms that he could find a way around that. And so at the end of the day, if that’s his only way to meet his 1 75, I could see him taking one of those steps. In other words, it’s three steps instead of one. But that’s exactly right. He doesn’t have to tap into his real estate at all.

J. Craig Williams:

Teflon. Don, how does it keep happening?

Will Thomas:

It is remarkable, the truth, social deal in particular, which obviously I think lots of us were falling when it first started really two years ago, and I would’ve told you had just completely fallen apart and it was never going to go anywhere. And then all of a sudden, about five weeks ago, it was suddenly resurrected when the SEC stepped out of the way. And we find all Trump in this situation where he is almost certainly richer today than he has claimed to be throughout this entire Litigation, which of course is what got him in trouble in the first place.

J. Craig Williams:

Last night, my wife was watching something that she was reminiscing about with childhood. She used to go to roller derby and watch these people beat up on each other. And my comment to her was, this is like nascar. These people, we just watch it to watch the wrecks. Are we just enamored with Trump as a train wreck?

Will Thomas:

I will say certainly both as an individual, but especially as an expert in some of these topics. I know this is a compliment, but he is an innovator. The number of times where Donald Trump in Litigation comes up with some new or crazy or odd argument or presses some legal issue that everybody else takes has settled. It just keeps my head spinning. I mean, you and I are sitting here talking about appeal bonds and your earlier comment I think is exactly right. These are just the rules. This is not a controversial weird space of the law. This is just boring background stuff that nobody ever litigates and worries about. And yet Donald Trump has somehow managed to capture the world’s attention on this really mundane point of appellate procedure.

J. Craig Williams:

And what does that do to the rest of the world? Because basically he’s teaching us and teaching our children that you challenge every single thing, every step along the way if it’s a period. No, it’s a comma.

Will Thomas:

I do think that it is difficult sometimes to take the long view on some of these issues. So let me just try to take the long view on this case. I think the Trump team’s defense, they’ve been arguing a couple kinds of straightforward legal claims, but a lot of their arguments have been in the court of public opinion. And you mentioned them at the top of the interview, no harm, no foul. We didn’t do anything wrong. To be honest, there’s not a lot of legal meat to those arguments. And I do think that although Donald Trump is winning the news cycle sort of week to week on those stories, what we saw by the time we got to trial is those arguments did nothing to impress the court, and actually they undermined the otherwise good legal arguments they had. So I do think that the Trump sort of spectacle approach to legal defense is not only not nearly as successful as it is in the political arena, but it can actively undermine his case in ways that’s going to make it actually a lot harder for him to win on appeal. I think he would have better arguments available to him had they focused less on public attention and more on just the boring, mundane legal claims that they could be making at trial.

J. Craig Williams:

I remember one of the first things I learned as a trial lawyer, and when a judge reprimanded me and he said, Mr. Williams, just because you’re making a strong objection doesn’t mean it’s any better, but objection at all,

Will Thomas:

Right? If I were a court of appeal, I would be looking at the fact that in an entirely unrelated case, the Trump defense team is telling courts that they cannot possibly raise an appeal bond for $90 million to cover his separate defamation judgment to Eugene Carroll. And within 12 hours of making that argument, they post bond.

J. Craig Williams:

There he is. Money’s in the bank

Will Thomas:

As an attorney. There’s two harms to this one. Obviously, you can’t make misrepresentations to the court and you can get yourself in trouble if you do, but even if you are technically accurate, it just costs you lose credibility. And I do think that’s a challenge of having Donald Trump as a client. He often says things that undercut the legal arguments being made, and then of course you have to stand up in court and try and square the circle. And that is not only awkward, but it wastes the time you could be using to make good legal arguments.

J. Craig Williams:

And then as an example in the civil fraud court, he just went off on the witness stand to the point that the judge reprimanded him.

Will Thomas:

Exactly right. And an important consequence of this, not just, it sort of leads the case against you here, but this actually really gets to the appellate process, right? People sometimes think of appeals as a new bite at the apple, but as we know, the role of an appellate court is actually pretty limited. By and large, they’re going to take factual determinations by the trial court as given unless they’re really egregious. And so when Donald Trump goes off on the trial stand, he is answering his own questions. He’s not responsive, all of

J. Craig Williams:

Those things, he’s campaigning

Will Thomas:

Well, they all worked their way into the trial determination. As Judge Engr said, in his opinion, he sat two yards from the witness. He observed his expressions, his demeanor, his body language, and based on all of that, he determined that nothing that witness said is credible.

J. Craig Williams:

Doesn’t it seem like we’ve now learned that there’s only one Trump that all of these people that come out and say, no, this is what he really meant. That’s not the case. He’s taught us time and time again that he’s only one person this way.

Will Thomas:

I think he has consistently shown an ability to soapbox and push a line. And sometimes, and look, he’s a former president of the United States. Clearly some of this is working in his interest, but certainly in the Courtroom it seems to do nothing but undermine his case. It annoys judges, it annoys the other side. It leads to bad legal arguments. And while it might be great for headlines next year, Donald Trump has to pay $500 million. Nobody’s going to remember the headlines from the middle of January where they’re going to remember is that giant sticker price that he had to pay up.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Well, will, it’s time for us to take another quick break. We’ll hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with Will Thomas, the assistant professor of business law at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. I kind want to ask a question that is more suited to your research and your work in normative and conceptual foundations of corporate and white collar crime. What are we really seeing here with President Trump, former President Trump, as we see in white collar crime? Where are the similarities?

Will Thomas:

One question that I’ve gotten from people a lot as this case has developed and as this prosecution’s been going is they want to know, is Donald Trump getting special treatment? Is he getting the benefit of his political persona or celebrity? And the answer is no. I think he’s being treated like many other high profile, well-funded white collar defendants. And what I think we are seeing is, and this is maybe the source of people’s frustration, it’s that white collar defendants in general just get better legal treatment. So we look at Donald Trump taking a long time, he’s able to stretch these cases out. The case I think of recently is the prosecution of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. So most federal cases take weeks to months. Her case from the day of her indictment to the day she reported to prison took about five years. And frankly, it was a pretty straightforward case. The capacity of well-funded white collar individuals to really gum up the works and slow down the process is an unfortunate reality of how our system runs here, and that’s the happy but depressing reaction I have to the Trump cases.

J. Craig Williams:

But all of that, I would say a large part of the white collar criminal basis comes from their ability to fund better lawyers. At least I know that’s, in my case, I mean being a trial lawyer myself, I see that. But we have some comedy to talk about with Trump’s lawyers. I mean, we have trial lawyers on one side, and I’m not going to say anything about what happened in the New York case. I’ll just point to the ones that were the election lawyers that are now facing disbarment mean. Do you have any explanation for that?

Will Thomas:

It does seem that while he’s had some good attorneys here and there in different representation, he’s also had some just, well, characters is the nicest term I can use here, but it seems to people who are sort of willing to make brazenly bad legal arguments, which is, I don’t know. I guess that’s a certain kind of legal chutzpah that most people don’t have. But yet one thing we’ve seen is if you represent Donald Trump as a client, you not only run the risk of being embarrassed by things he does or ways he might undermine your case, but lots of these folks have faced sanctions, some have been disbarred. It’s a risky enterprise to be his attorney. I think we also see this in the fact that Trump, and especially the Trump campaigns and Trump hack are spending I think an enormous amount of money on legal representation.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, what lawyer would take his case without money in the pocket?

Will Thomas:

Right? That’s exactly right. And particularly because he has a longstanding reputation of not necessarily paying his bills in a timely manner. So the drag that his campaign is almost certainly facing is in some respects, a consequence of his own making. He is being forced probably to overspend on legal bills to make up for a history of maybe not being the best client.

J. Craig Williams:

What do you think is going to happen in this appeal case? I mean, you’ve gone through the transcripts and looked at the trial case. Where do you think the holes are, if any?

Will Thomas:

So I think there are some technical and slightly boring questions around statutes of limitation where the Trump team at least has some decent arguments to make. They’re not the most exciting. It’s going to make a really boring opinion, but they could be significant in terms of adjusting the dollar amount. What’s interesting to me is other than some sort of over the top rhetoric in early parts of appeals or public comments, I don’t really take the Trump team to really be denying the findings of the court below. And I do think that that’s fundamentally a challenge they’re going to be facing here, which is there’s lots of factual determinations which are hard to appeal. And most of the big legal arguments that they have made about New York law, especially about the statute 63 12 were actually considered by the highest court in New York in 2013 in a case brought against a IG. So it’s not like the trial judges going to break new legal ground. He’s mostly just following a template laid out by the court of appeals. So while they might be able to carve off little bits of the final dollar amount by pushing some timing issues, I think the brunt of the case is really, it’s a really uphill battle for him to get much out of appeal.

J. Craig Williams:

And what does this do to Trump’s election prospects?

Will Thomas:

So I think there’s a couple ways that this can be harmful, right? This straightforward direct issue is paying out lots of money, makes it harder to run for president. I know he’s incredibly wealthy. I know he has this stock, even though who knows what the value of it will be in a couple months. But put this in context. The national presidential elections are, if my memory serves me right, still around a little over a billion dollars per candidate. So if you are being forced to pay out half a million dollars, one way to think about this is the Donald Trump presidential campaign now costs about 50% more than it should have. So that’s a straightforward harm.

J. Craig Williams:

Trump doesn’t need money to spend for his campaign. We all cover him because it’s insane.

Will Thomas:

That’s exactly right. So he’s managed to float for a long time on a fairly cheap campaign, at least compared to some of his predecessors. So on the one hand, it’s a direct harm. Is it going to derail him? I don’t know. I do think that the big question in my mind, and I think in a lot of people’s minds is Trump has been in lots of legal trouble over the past couple of years. It’s not clear how much it has impacted his overall electability. It certainly hasn’t chased off his hardcore supporters. But look, all elections are one of the margins. We really care about the margins. What I’m really interested to see is will we see a shift, particularly on those moderate or independent voters, when there is a final determination that in fact, he has to pay this money not only because it’s an indication that he did something wrong, but because this case in particular is basically a claim that says Donald Trump succeeded in business because he cheated the whole time, and that really goes to his core brand.

J. Craig Williams:

As Trump moves forward in this election, what’s going to be the silver bullet? Is there something that’s finally going to put him in the position where he can’t run jail?

Will Thomas:

I haven’t asked many candidates. I get the impression it’s a lot harder to run a campaign from prison. It’s certainly not impossible and it’s not illegal, but that’s certainly going to make life more challenging. So yeah, I think if he gets incarcerated, that’s going to hurt his chances for a bunch of reasons.

J. Craig Williams:

Is that

Will Thomas:

Possible? That is possible now I think it is. Again, this goes to the pace of white collar, Litigation and prosecution. I think it’s very likely that we’ll see at least one and probably two criminal prosecutions start against Trump this year, or rather two criminal trials. We have a case coming out of New York that’s scheduled for April 15th. I also think that although we’re waiting on the Supreme Court, once the Supreme Court answers by the end of term as they usually do, we’re still quite likely to see his DC January 6th case start in the fall, early fall. I think it’s unlikely that either of those cases would lead to him being incarcerated prior to the advent of the election, if at all.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, will we just about reached the end of our program, so it’s time to wrap up and get your final thoughts about this. And really the question that I want to ask is what haven’t I asked you that I should have asked?

Will Thomas:

Well, what’s interesting about this particular case is although it’s the case that doesn’t directly tie to Donald Trump, the candidate, in some respects what has been going on in New York, it started with the criminal prosecution of the Trump organization. Now it’s a civil case. Really, we’re seeing this serious press on somebody who’s been able to float by in popular press, engaging behavior that he sort of described is at least fraudulent, if not criminal. What we’re starting to see is an awareness that if you raise your profile in the way he is, that opens up this realm of criminal and civil enforcement that’s always there in the background, and that is hard to get moving. But once it gets moving, it’s also really hard to stop.

J. Craig Williams:

It seems like at some point in time it’s going to derail and become the train wreck that we all kind of think it’s been all along, but who knows? Well, will. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you very much.

Will Thomas:

Absolutely. It was delightful to end with that very upbeat note there.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, by now, you probably understand what I think about former President Trump, and I may be a bit more pessimistic than our guest will today, but I think that it’s justified at this point. We have a criminal conviction of the Trump organization. We have a civil fraud, substantial judgment. We have a defamation judgment, and as always, president Trump or former President Trump is seemingly doing everything he can to appeal and delay and wait, which is what his rights are under the law, and what also frustrates the rest of us because it seems like there’s never any end to hold that individual accountable for what we perceive his actions to be. But at some point there will be a silver bullet when that will be, can’t tell you, but you have the chance to vote this fall. So give it some thought. Well, that’s it for Craig’s Ran on today’s topic. Let me know what you think. If you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit [email protected], where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

Speaker 2:

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