One of ABC’s legendary Shark Tank investors dismantled the logic behind a radical judge’s asinine ruling against former President Donald Trump.
Kevin O’Leary — a.k.a “Mr. Wonderful” — called the ruling by leftist New York Supreme Court judge Arthur Engoron an egregious “assault on the 11th sector of the S&P 500, which is real estate” during the Feb. 18 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend. Engoron fined Trump $355 million for allegedly inflating his assets and banned him from being an officer in any New York-based corporation for three years, despite “nobody” losing money, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out. O’Leary analyzed the whole event as an overexaggerated demonization of a common practice within the corporate world when real estate developers haggle with banks in order to get loans. “This is not about Trump anymore,” O’Leary concluded. “If you’re a developer and you see this happen in the state of New York, why would you take the risk to put up this much money and have a judge arbitrarily decide that you are in some form of breach of fraud when no damages occurred at all?” In O’Leary’s view, “This is crazy!”
The Journal editorial board noted that what Engoron did smacked of “political overkill” and constituted the equivalent of launching “a Hellfire missile to annihilate a shoplifter. Deutsche Bank [which signed off on the loans for Trump’s real estate] made money on the loans, and its valuation teams gave a ‘haircut’ to the numbers provided by Mr. Trump. There was no real financial victim.” Effectively, The Journal analyzed, “This is choosing a target and then hunting for something to charge him with, which is an abuse of the law.” Washington Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York also noted in a post on X that “The banks relied on their own due diligence and priced loans from that, not Trump's statements.”
O’Leary further noted that this politburo-styled prosecution has changed his perspective on what’s the worst state in America to do business:
This is about the competition of states. I thought before this judgment that the number one loser state in America was California, which is basically putting itself out of business slowly and surely. But after this judgment, I’m going to make New York the number one loser state, followed by California, then Massachusetts, New Jersey, Michigan. These are places where taxes are not competitive.
O’Leary concluded that Engoron’s ruling was eventually going to be overturned on appeal because “this is so damaging to business in New York” and “it makes no sense.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News at (818) 460-7477, CBS News at (212) 975-3247 and NBC News at (212) 664-6192 and demand they tell the truth about the holes in the logic of Engoron’s anti-Trump ruling.
