After successfully delaying Donald Trump’s chances of facing criminal consequences before he returns to the White House, his legal team is making another last-ditch effort to block a massive civil fraud judgment against him.
Trump has appealed that judgment, but his attorney D. John Sauer — the man Trump has nominated for the next solicitor general of the United States — is urging the state of New York to drop the case entirely as “necessary for the health of our Republic.”
Sauer’s letter to New York Attorney General Letitia James on November 26 invokes George Washington’s farewell remarks against “the spirit of revenge” and Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving address during the Civil War.
“In the aftermath of his historic election victory, President Trump has called for our Nation’s partisan strife to end, and for the contending factions to join forces for the greater good of the country,” Sauer wrote. “This call for unity extends to the legal onslaught against him and his family that permeated the most recent election cycle.”
In February, Trump lost a years-long blockbuster civil trial in a case in which a Manhattan judge found that the former president and his associates defrauded banks and investors by inflating the values of his assets in return for more favorable loans to benefit his real-estate empire.
New York Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay more than $350 million, plus interest, for so-called “ill-gotten gains” from his decade-long fraud scheme.
Today, the president-elect and his co-defendants — including his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and top Trump Organization associates — owe nearly half a billion dollars, as interest continues to accrue as they appeal.
“As counsel for President Trump in this appeal — and now as his nominee for Solicitor General of the United States — I have had the opportunity to experience this partisan division personally, and I strongly believe that it is necessary for the health of our Republic for the strife and lawfare to end,” Sauer wrote in his letter, which largely outlines previously rejected arguments in the case.
“You now have the singular opportunity to help cure this division,” he added.
Legal experts aren’t convinced.
The letter is “pitched as a gracious winner’s call for national unity as in [Lincoln’s] Second Inaugural and respecting the voters’ verdict. It’s nauseating,” wrote University of California law professor Harry Litman.
“Whether Sauer was able to type this with a straight face is unclear,” added MSNBC’s Steve Benen, author of Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.
Sauer — who argued in front of federal appeals court judges and the Supreme Court for Trump’s “immunity” from criminal prosecution — signalled in his letter that Trump’s attorneys may file legal arguments that the fraud case unconstitutionally interferes with his duties as president.
“It is laughable. This is not a serious legal argument. Nothing in here is a serious legal argument,” said former federal prosecutor Kristy Greenberg. “It’s more political rhetoric.”
Trump was criminally convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a Manhattan jury earlier this year.
But the special counsel overseeing two sweeping criminal investigations into election interference and mishandling of classified documents is effectively closing those cases in the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 election.
Unlike the federal cases, Trump, as president, cannot overturn state-level criminal and civil verdicts.
