Fri: I Am Not Sad That Dianne Feinstein is Not My Senator

The Ghost of Property Values Future

A judge has already shredded one of Donald Trump's defenses in his upcoming New York fraud trial.

In his order finding Trump had committed bank fraud, Judge Arthur Engoron has already addressed and dismissed the former president's claims that past lies on his financial statements may be justified because the value of his properties and other assets eventually went up, reported The Daily Beast.

“He claims that if the values of the property have gone up in the years since the [statements of financial condition] were submitted, then the numbers were not inflated at that time,” Engoron wrote. “The defenses Donald Trump attempts to articulate in his sworn deposition are wholly without basis in law or fact.”

That's bad news for the former president, whose lawyers requested a bench trial, meaning Engoron alone will decide the outcome – and he has already determined Trump is a liar.

“What he is saying is completely inconsistent with how real estate professionals talk about valuations,” said David Reiss, a Brooklyn Law School professor. “When you talk about valuations at a given time, you’re talking about what its value is at that time. It becomes more valuable in the future, but that’s its value at the time."

The former president's defense is so bad it actually violates the laws of physics, according to another expert.

“He's defying the very laws of physics,” said cosmologist Marina Cortês at the Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal. “The past is different from the future. That is the most basic knowledge we have in cosmology. The arrow of time is the most fundamental property of reality.”

Don't Bring In a Physics Professor As An Expert Witness

A summary judgment in the legal case against the former president rules that he’s exactly as shady as he looks.

Engoron made similarly short work of the two-pronged paper defense Trump and his attorneys mustered for the billions in dodgy valuations they racked up—the magical disclaimer supposedly stipulating that the estimates supplied to bankers, loan officers, and insurers were “worthless”; and the allied contention that any reasonable financial officer would soon override such valuations via standard due-diligence research. “Defendants’ reliance on these ‘worthless’ disclaimers is worthless,” he drily noted. “The clause does not use the word ‘worthless’ or ‘useless” or ‘ignore’ or ‘disregard’ or any similar words. It does not say, ‘the values herein are what I think the properties will be worth in ten or more years.’ Indeed, the quoted language uses ‘current’ no less than five times, and ‘future’ zero times.” And he observes that the due-dilgence dodge is little more than a license to frontload systemic fraud into any company’s business model: “Defendants’ stance is, practically speaking, that they may submit false [suspected fraudulent claims] so long as the recipients know, from their own due diligence, that the information is false.”

Something There is That Doesn't Love a Wall ... Or a Tree

A 16-year-old boy has been arrested in northern England in connection with what authorities described as the “deliberate” felling of a famous tree that had stood for nearly 200 years next to the Roman landmark Hadrian’s Wall.

Thousands of visitors each year walk along Hadrian’s Wall, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that guarded the Roman Empire’s northwestern frontier.

Many pause to admire and photograph the tree at Sycamore Gap, a beloved icon of the landscape made famous when it appeared in Kevin Costner’s 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.

Photographs from the scene on Thursday showed the tree was cut down near the base of its trunk, with the rest of it lying on its side.

Northumbria Police said the teen was arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage. He was in police custody and assisting officers with their inquiries.

“The tree is a world-renowned landmark and the vandalism has caused understandable shock and anger throughout the local community and beyond,” police said in a statement.

“This is an incredibly sad day,” police Superintendent Kevin Waring said. “The tree was iconic to the North East and enjoyed by so many who live in or who have visited this region.”

The Northumberland National Park authority asked the public not to visit the felled tree, which was voted English Tree of the Year in 2016.

Fox Noise on the Impeachment Hearing

NEIL CAVUTO: All right. For the better part of six hours, I have been following these hearings, save an hour off to do my Fox Business show earlier today. I don't know what was achieved over these last six-plus hours. Welcome, everybody, I'm Neil Cavuto. I want to put in perspective here, though, and we are going to legally go through all the details, but James Comer, the Oversight Committee chairman, had said that there would be presented a mountain of evidence against Mr. Biden, he was referring to President Biden, but none of the expert witnesses today presented—yet—any proof for impeachment.
You think that's bad? He was just getting started.

Now to be clear, this was not about impeachment; this is about launching an impeachment inquiry. But it is worth pointing out that none of the witnesses today were fact witnesses. That means that none were involved in the investigation into the alleged activities in the first place. What's more, none of the witnesses testified today of direct knowledge of what Republicans have been claiming about Joe Biden.

In other words, that this—the way this was built up, where there's smoke, there would be fire. Again, I'm not a lawyer and I'm going to be talking to some darn smart ones in a moment, but where there's smoke today, we just got a lot more smoke.

We also say that the best they could say now, after this six-plus hours of testimony back and forth, is that they're going to try to get more bank records from Joe Biden and his son, says that they're needed to determine if a crime was committed. Understood. But none of that was presented today, just that they would need those records to further this investigation today, even though this occurs after months of Republican probes that failed to provide anything resembling concrete evidence.