When an MSNBC talking head questions whether Donald Trump was treated fairly by the legal system, you know it must be really unfair because normally the leftist network cheers on anything and everything that is detrimental to the former president.

But even host Katy Tur wondered whether Friday’s $354 million judgment against Trump, along with a three-year ban on his conducting business in the state of New York, went too far. After all, there are no injured parties in the case, no physical losses to point to, no banks or creditors claiming that Trump took advantage of them. 

How can you have a crime when there are no victims?

Even the not-so-inquiring minds at MSNBC struggled with that simple question. Tur started by pointing out that the law used to prosecute Trump doesn’t require there to be a victim (however bizarre that may seem):

A little bit of reporting that The Associated Press did regarding these sorts of decisions, these sorts of investigations, these trials... 

...basically they said they went back over 70 years and looked at all the cases that have been tried under this, this rule 36 or 6312, which is used here, which doesn't have to show harm done. It's not the burden. You don't have to show that anybody was hurt by your practices. There's nobody you defrauded specifically.

That may be true, if counterintuitive – but Tur also noted that nobody else had been targeted like this in over 70 years:

But they went back and they looked at cases over 70 years, I believe it was about 150 cases. And found that there was no case where there was a ban on doing business where there wasn't harm shown. So even though the threshold is harm shown in the past, it has only been used to ban someone doing business when it's been shown that somebody was hurt.
 
Say you're selling cosmetics that, that, that are poisoning you -- there's somebody that was hurt there. The cosmetics company gets banned. 
 
Is this fair, to go after Donald Trump like this in this environment?

Watch:

“Is this fair, to go after Donald Trump like this in this environment?”
— Katy Tur

clock the looks on Susanne Craig and Lisa Rubin’s faces.

pic.twitter.com/zUqR12JV3j

— scott poulson-bryant (@SPBPHD) February 16, 2024

The other panelists then attempted to explain that just because it was unprecedented didn’t mean it wasn’t fair, but they mostly spouted legalese and were utterly unconvincing in their tortured logic. 

The fact that Tur’s even asking the question gives you the answer – no, it’s not fair; it's vindictive, plain and simple. Meanwhile, Tur pointed out what we reported in January, namely that the Associated Press looked into the case and couldn’t find anything like it in the state’s past:

AP Admits It: No Other Case in NY History Like Crusading Prosecutor Letitia James' Pursuit of Trump

The AP found that the Trump prosecution was unprecedented:

AP’s review of nearly 150 reported cases since New York’s “repeated fraud” statute was passed in 1956 showed that nearly every previous time a company was taken away, victims and losses were key factors. Customers had lost money or bought defective products or never received services ordered, leaving them cheated and angry.

The trial and the ludicrous penalties imposed on Trump by the wild-eyed Judge Engoron accomplished nothing in the way of justice and did zero to improve the safety or well-being of the citizens of New York. All it did was what NY AG Letitia James initially set out to do – get Trump at any cost.