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NY Judge Spanks Trump's Lawyers For 'Frivolous,' 'Indefensible' Filings

Pony up, counselors.

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Benchslapped-01Donald Trump had a really bad day in court, and so did his lawyers.

While this could be said more or less any day of the week, it was especially true yesterday, as New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron issued a blistering broadside, sanctioning defense counsel and granting the New York Attorney General partial summary judgment in the civil fraud case against Trump and his associates.

The $7,500 fine assessed against attorneys Chris Kise, Michael Madaio, Clifford Robert, Michael Farina, and Armen Morian was more or less de minimus. But the court’s cumulative outrage after four years of legal shenanigans from Trump’s lawyers was not.

Starting in 2020, the legal team lobbed objection after objection as the Trump family and business failed to comply with subpoenas or sit for testimony, eventually earning their client $11,000 in fines for contempt. At one point, they even tried to get a federal judge to enjoin the AG’s investigative efforts, only to be summarily rejected by Judge Brenda Sannes because Younger abstention, LOOK IT UP. (Well, more or less.)

After the indictment dropped, the lawyers filed round after round of motions seeking to get the matter transferred to the Commercial Division and away from Justice Engoron on the bizarre theory that the investigation and eventual prosecution were unrelated matters. In fact, the lawyers seemed to be under the impression that they could simply repeat already-rejected arguments in new motions forever and eventually Justice Engoron would come to see that the AG lacked authority to bring an enforcement action, despite a state law giving her authority to do just that. Ignoring a warning in January that the court was contemplating sanctioning defense counsel for repeating arguments which “were borderline frivolous even the first time defendants made them,” the lawyers made the exact same claims in a motion to dismiss filed this month.

“Defendants’ conduct in reiterating these frivolous arguments is egregious. We are way beyond the point of ‘sophisticated counsel should have known better’; we are at the point of intentional and blatant disregard of controlling authority and law of the case,” Justice Engoron wrote furiously. “This Court emphatically rejected these arguments, as did the First Department. Defendants’ repetition of them here is indefensible.”

Spamming the judge turns out to have been a massive strategic error, although not quite so ill-advised as Trump’s desperate attempt to deflect scrutiny of his assets by suing AG Letitia James in her personal and professional capacities in Florida state court. That case was removed to federal court, landing on the docket of Judge Donald Middlebrooks. After the federal jurist accused Trump of a pattern of abusive litigation and sanctioned him and his counsel a million dollars in the RICO LOLsuit against Hillary Clinton, Trump quietly dismissed the claim against AG James.

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“Unfortunately, sanctions are the only way to impress upon defendants’ attorneys the consequences of engaging in repetitive, frivolous motions practice after this Court, affirmed by the Appellate Division, expressly warned them against doing so,” Justice Engoron wrote, adding that “It is of no consequence whether the arguments were made at the direction of the clients or sua sponte by the attorneys; counsel are ethically obligated to withdraw any baseless and false claims, if not upon their own review of the record, certainly by the time the Supreme Court advised them of this fact.” [Cleaned up.]

It’s not a great mark on an attorney’s resume, and it’s a particularly ignominious comedown for Kise, the former solicitor general of Florida who was paid $3 million by Trump’s PAC to decamp from Foley & Lardner and join Trump’s legal defense team. After telling Trump to simply give back the government documents he was storing at Mar-a-Lago, Kise found himself shunted up to New York to play second fiddle to Alina Habba, who had spent the prior two years antagonizing the court. Habba has now wandered off to cash checks from Trump’s Save America PAC and blather on conservative media as his “legal spokesperson and general counsel,” leaving her hapless partner Michael Madaio and Kise holding the bag.

As Republican strategist Rick Wilson says, everything Trump touches dies. Lawyers included.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

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