Donald Trump is found liable for fraud in his real-estate dealings

The purpose of a trial is to find facts and assign fault. But for civil lawsuits in which the evidence is unassailable, parties can ask a judge to skip the fact-finding and cut to the punishment. So it was in the fraud case brought by New York’s attorney-general, Letitia James, against Donald Trump in state court. On September 26th the presiding judge agreed with prosecutors that for years Mr Trump had misled lenders about the value of his properties in Florida, New York and Scotland to secure better terms on his loans. Inaccuracies of the kind unearthed by prosecutors and backed up with “indisputable” evidence, wrote Arthur Engoron in a withering judgment, “can only be considered fraud”. This was, he ruled, not a matter of “rounding errors or reasonable experts disagreeing”.