Trump lawyer Alina Habba says $350 million verdict will be overturned: 'Won't get away with it'

By 
 February 19, 2024

Donald Trump's exorbitant $350 million fine for "fraud" will be overturned on appeal, his lawyer Alina Habba told Fox News. 

Hours after the shocking and draconian penalty was announced, Habba told Sean Hannity that the liberals who have weaponized the law in New York "will not get away with it."

“They will not get away with it,” Habba said. "We will come at them, we will come hard, and we will literally fight until the truth comes out. There was nothing wrong. President Trump has done nothing wrong.”

Staggering penalty

In a sharply worded ruling, Judge Arthur Engoron said Trump's alleged misdeeds "shock the conscience" and that Trump and his sons demonstrated a "pathological" lack of remorse.

Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who pledged during her campaign to go after Trump, similarly said the real estate icon is being held accountable for "staggering" fraud.

The punishment could certainly be described as staggering.

Trump has been ordered to pay $350 million, but the penalty could rise to $450 million with interest included - and he cannot do business in New York for three years.

His sons Eric and Donald Jr. were fined $4 million apiece and barred from doing business for two years.

The punishment is particularly extreme in light of the fact that there are no known victims of the "fraud."

But the facts appeared to have little weight with the judge, who found Trump guilty before the trial even began.

Hope for Trump on appeal?

Trump has decried the verdict as an unjust and politically motivated, and legal observers have warned it could chase businesses out of New York.

Conservative legal expert Jonathan Turley called the penalty "obscene" and predicted the U.S. Supreme Court could intervene to set things right.

"The one hope for New York businesses may be the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the deference afforded to the states and their courts, the court has occasionally intervened to block excessive damage awards," he wrote in a column for The Hill. 

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is now facing half a billion dollars in civil judgments from New York's courts.

In addition to the fraud judgment, Trump must pay $88 million to an advice columnist who says he raped her decades ago, and who once said rape is "sexy" on live television.

Trump is also facing multiple efforts by Democratic prosecutors to have him convicted of criminal charges and potentially jailed ahead of the presidential election.

" A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature."
Thomas Jefferson
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