Hochul lets the cat out of the bag about how politicized New York's prosecution of Trump was

February 20, 2024 by Monica Showalter

Following the monstrous $355 million fine leveled against President Trump and his associates for a victimless claim of inflating assets in New York City, New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, assured concerned investors that they have "nothing to worry about."

According to The Hill:

 New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) addressed New York business owners in a new interview and told them there was “nothing to worry about” after former President Trump was hit with a $355 million fine and a ban on conducting business in New York for three years.

Hochul joined John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM, where she was asked if other New York businesspeople should be worried that if “they can do that to the former president, they can do that to anybody.”

“I think that this is really an extraordinary, unusual circumstance that the law-abiding and rule-following New Yorkers who are business people have nothing to worry about, because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior,” Hochul responded.

If that response was meant to assure, it did the opposite.

Trump was handed a monstrous fine from a prosecutor rabidly against President Trump politically, a woman so biased she ran for office on pinning something on Trump, which is illegal, teamed with a sneering, grotesquely biased, judge with many conflicts of interest including potential family profits who made it clear all through his courtroom sessions that he intended to destroy Trump.

The fine was grotesquely out of proportion to an utterly victimless "crime" of supposedly inflating assets, while witnesses testified that nobody lost money, loans were paid in full, and banks were happy to lend again. The judge himself, a man of no training in the matter, made the assessments of the values Trump's properties, such as Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, grotesquely undervaluing the property, ipse dixit. Real estate professionals raised their eyebrows at that one. Judge, jury, executioner -- and we thought this crap only occurred in tinpot dictatorships, or in Alice in Wonderland tales.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley described the fine as "obscene."

Darn right investors have a right to be worried that they could be next. This story confirms that investors actually are thinking about this banana-republic state of justice in New York and wisely considering capital flight.

Turley wrote that it would get bad for New York:

The impact on New York business is likely to be dire. New York is already viewed as a hostile business environment, with the top end of its tax base literally heading south as taxes and crime rises. This draconian award is only going to deepen concerns over the arbitrary application of the law by figures like James, who previously sought to disband the National Rifle Association. (She has shown less interest in cracking down on liberal organizations like Black Lives Matter or the National Action Network of Al Sharpton despite their own major financial scandals.)

Catsimatidis is a bigfoot investor with a major following, and highly respected, so that question and answer will be closely followed and investors and companies will make their choices accordingly.

As one Trump lawyer said in the wake of this travesty verdict, according to the New York Times:

A lawyer for Mr. Trump, Christopher M. Kise, reacted with fury, saying “the sobering future consequences of this tyrannical abuse of power do not just impact President Trump.”

“When a court willingly allows a reckless government official to meddle in the lawful, private and profitable affairs of any citizen based on political bias, America’s economic prosperity and way of life are at extreme risk of extinction,” he said.

That's what New York investors are clearly thinking.

If they could do this to take down Trump, they could to it to anyone. And what's more, they probably will, given their gargantuan budget shortfalls and their need to raise money to pay for them. They got Trump on political grounds, but now they've got a taste for big unprecedented fines after what they got away with against the hated Trump, so they'll pin something on someone else and get themselves another one. They can fund their entire state budget shortfalls on just by confiscating huge businesses and their assets on technical legal grounds and prosecutorial favorites and whims.

In the end, investors will see what's going on, decide to flee to states that still have actual rule of law, and their New York properties will be sold to the communist Chinese or other unsavory players the New York ruling elites won't want to mess with, which is exactly what happened in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez started expropriating properties. When I visited Venezuela in late 2005, desperate property owners told me they had no choice but to sell their properties to avoid getting them confiscated and the only buyers for them were FARC's Marxist narcoterrorists because they were Chavista allies. Look for that same dynamic to start happening in New York as a result of this judicial travesty.

The other problem with Hochul's statement is that with her assurance that there was nothing to see here, worry not, she accidentally admitted that Democrats were all in this together and the Trump ruling was indeed politically motivated. Executive, legislative and judicial were all in this together with the Democrat party the final arbiter, there was no such thing as independent branches of government in New York. How the heck would she "know" what the nominally independent justice system would do to the next guy? In reality, she let the cat out of the bag as to what was really going on here.

She's offering her assurances to businessmen that nothing would happen to them, stop worrying, nothing to see here, Trump was 'special,' but in their minds, this travesty did happened to one guy, and he didn't commit a crime, so it could happen to all of them. 

Play ball, politically, Hochul effectively was saying, and nothing gets broken. Sound like a good business environment? 

At least Sicily is cheaper.

Stand by for a lot of capital flight from New York with this repellent response.