Thread by @WayneAllenJones, For those unfamiliar with my profession, you can often tell a judge’s [...]

For those unfamiliar with my profession, you can often tell a judge’s feelings toward your case or your client by the length of their written orders.

Losing with a short memo is bad. Losing with a LONG one is terrible. Why? Appeals.

A judge writing a long memo for an unfavorable ruling is thinking specifically of appeal. They’re making sure every angle is covered, every i dotted and every t crossed. In effect they’re throwing everything they have behind their decision.

This applies specifically to @POTUS and his fight to stop @ManhattanDA from optaining his tax records. Trump lost that argument once in SDNY, again in the 2nd Circuit, and again before SCOTUS, which sent it back to SDNY.

When the case got back down to SDNY, Trump field a new complaint with supposedly different reasons why the DA shouldn’t be able to access his tax returns. That’s what SCOTUS allowed him to do.

Vance filed a motion to dismiss, basically saying Trump has no legal claim.

Today the court agreed with Vance and dismissed @potus’s case. If could’ve done that with a one-page order. Quick and dirty.

Instead, the court issued a 103-page legal opinion of exactly how wrong Trump is on the legal merits.

103 pages is WAY beyond the normal length of a district court ruling. It’s longer than the vast majority of SCOTUS cases.

For the judge to go to that length (heh), he REALLY meant that Trump had to GTFOH with his BS.

Now, Trump has already filed an emergency appeal. And this kind of ruling, dismissing a case, gets reviewed fresh by the appellate court. Nothing says the 2nd Circuit HAS t buy a thing that SDNY is saying. It’s a clean slate.

But let’s be real. 103 pages WILL be noticed.

This is especially true given that the gist of the ruling is that @POTUS is just trying to get past @ManhattanDA with a back-door version of the SAME immunity claim that lost before SCOTUS.

The 2nd already rejected Trump’s nonsense once. SDNY just said he’s back on his BS.

This tells me that SDNY is sick of Trump’s shit. I’ve represented clients who were on the bad side of the district court. It was NOT fun. It did NOT go well.

The PRACTICAL effect of all of this is another stall for time. Trump will go to the 2nd, lose with a three-judge panel and ask for the full court to hear it. They’ll likely refuse. Then he’ll ask SCOTUS to review. All of this will eat up the clock between now and 11-3.

This has never been about Trump having a claim on the merits. It’s always been about jamming up the process with procedural hijinks. Defendants who have the cash and the legal team do this all the time.

And it’s gonna work. We won’t see his taxes before 11-3.

So we have to make our decision based in part on his refusal. Every presidential candidate for four decades has released theirs. It’s an ordinary step in the process. Trump is the first to refuse.

He hasn’t just refused, he’s lied about WHY. And he’s used the courts to fight tooth and nail to shield them. We don’t have the returns, and won’t. But we know a lot just observing his behavior.

He wouldn’t fight so hard to shield the tax forms if they were kosher. Something MAJOR is in them. Otherwise he’d have just done like every other contender for the White House. His unprecedented fight to shield his taxes tells us there’s something unprecedented IN them.

So, #TrumpTaxes will remain hidden until after the appeals are done. But the fact that @potus is DESPERATE to hid them will not. We know. We see it very publicly. How many #TrumpMeltdown’s have we seen over his taxes? Too many to count.

So take what we know from his efforts to conceal. Nobody fights that hard, for that long, at that expense for no reason. Nobody.

There’s a REASON @POTUS is TERRIFIED of disclosure.

It says all we need to know about his character. #TrumpLiesMatter.

NB: a commenter noted, correctly, that Trump might not get the delay he wants. The courts don’t HAVE to grant him a stay pending appeal. And they may be sick of his shit. But they also want to avoid meddling in an election, and if they refuse the stay it could affect outcome.

The same is true of GRANTING the stay. Allowing him to keep concealing his finances, which I strongly suspect will be criminally incriminating, would have a potential election effect just as much as refusing to shield him.

It’s a Hobson’s choice, in a way.

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