Bonchie at RedState pointed out that CNN host Laura Coates disturbed her Trump-loathing audience by bringing on Shark Tank judge and investor Kevin O'Leary late on Thursday night to deconstruct what New York's Democrat Attorney General Letitia James is trying to accomplish in her civil fraud trial against Donald Trump. He said O'Leary " took James to the cleaners with perhaps the most concise and easy-to-understand takedown of her case I've seen."
O'LEARY: Well, let's leave out Trump for a minute, and let's leave out politics, and just talk about what happens in real estate development anywhere. So, if you're a developer and you've got a building on the block, anywhere in America, and it's worth, let's say, $500 million, and you want to build a building right beside it, you go to the bank and say, "This building is worth $500 million. I'd like to borrow a construction finance loan against this asset, and I want you to tell me it's worth $500 million too."
And the bank negotiates with you, and says, "Well no, we think it's worth $400 million," and you fight it out. You are always trying to show your assets in the brightest light with the sunshine you can possibly determine for them. You want them to be worth the very most because you're only going to get a 40 to 50 percent loan to value, as it's called. Then you borrow that money, in the case of a $500 million asset, maybe you get $250 million, and you build the new building with a construction finance loan. So that's what this case is all about.
And by the way, forget about Trump, every single real estate developer everywhere on earth does this. They always talk about their asset being worth a lot and the bank says no. That's just the way it is. So in this case, what I'm trying to figure out, and I'm not pro or con, or I don't care about the politics, who lost money? Nobody. The bank got paid back the construction finance loan, and a new building was built. If you're going to sue this case and win, you've gotta sue every real estate developer everywhere. This is all they do. This is what they do all day long every day. So I don't think this thing will ever survive appeal regardless of what the fine is. This doesn't even make sense.
Now look, I understand Trump has a lot of problems in other indictments and everything else, but if you're a real estate developer, you're watching this and saying, "What is this? This is ridiculous."
Coates tried to argue that even if O'Leary is right, does "overvaluing" properties deprive the government of tax revenue? O'Leary just stuck to his point that if this is fraud, then every real estate developer is guilty. "I think it's going to be very, very hard to make this stick in reality later. This is not -- of all the things that Trump's being accused of and being litigated for and indicted for, this is not his problem. This is not his problem. He's got much worse problems than this. This is, for real estate developers, this is a joke."
O'Leary concluded by saying he's opposed to all the scandal-mongering on both sides: "I'm not in favor of this, that the courts are being used to try and sway voters on both sides of the equation. I don't understand why we're trying to, you know, impeach Biden. What a waste of time. And his son and all this stuff, and all of this litigation on Trump, hasn't moved the needle for either of these candidates. People don't care about this noise anymore."
