Is Lindsey Barking Up The Wrong Tree?

Lindsey Halligan, the president's handpicked U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that Letitia James signed a contract that prohibits her from renting the second home she was buying, but did so anyway, which Lindsey says violated the terms of James' loan agreement, as well as federal bank and mortgage fraud laws.

Except for the fact that the contract doesn't say any of what Halligan says it says, it's a strong case.

The actual language in her mortgage contract and Fannie Mae’s own guidelines concerning such contracts, permit the kind of short-term rental activity James engaged in.

The mortgage contract she signed includes a “Second Home Rider” that explicitly allows short-term rentals, provided she maintains “exclusive control over the occupancy of the Property". 

That means that she can't turn it over to a rental management agency, which she has not done.

Fannie Mae’s own guidelines support this interpretation, stating that short-term rentals are permitted under the Second Home Rider as long as the borrower doesn’t hand over control to a third party like a property manager.

The indictment says James reported “thousands of dollars” in rental income.  

Her tax records report $1350 - a thousand, give or take, not thousands.

That sounds like a pretty short-term rental.

I guess the only real question that could possibly be on the table is did Letitia lie on her tax return?

But I guess Halligan doesn't know that tax fraud is illegal (not surprising since she is one of trump's lawyers) so she didn't think of that approach to the witch hunt.

(Have you noticed that every form of malfeasance that donnie accuses the world of committing against poor little him are always among his key tactics?) 

If she had thought of that, it might have been a better lawsuit, assuming that James is playing fast and loose with the IRS.

Which one would suppose Halligan could have discovered.

If such a possibility existed.

Which, apparently it doesn't.

And if Halligan had wanted a non-fictional indictment.

But the truth or fiction of the indictment matters not.

Because after all the dust settles, all this will have had nothing to do with guilt or innocence.

This little retributive caper will cost an American citizen a lot of money.

Letitia James may be able to foot the tariff for not bowing down to donnie, but most of us couldn't.

And that's the point.