Andrew McCarthy writes for the New York Post about a significant courtroom development.

Consumer protection law is designed to protect the public from unscrupulous business schemes. It was never intended to make state bureaucrats the arbiter of every transaction between private parties, much less sophisticated financial actors.

That was the distinct message that arose out of last week’s appeals court hearing in state Attorney General Letitia James’ unabashedly politicized civll fraud case against Donald Trump.

As readers will recall, Judge Arthur Engoron, an elected Democratic hack in a robe, ordered the former president to pay nearly half a billion dollars in fraud damages … despite the total absence of fraud victims.

James may edge out her fellow progressive Democratic Trump tormentor, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Brsgg, for what we might call the Lavrentiy Beria Award — named for Stalin’s most notorious Soviet secret police chief, who coined the phrase, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Having campaigned for office promising that, if elected, she would find a way to wield her powers against the Democrats’ archnemesis, James did the unprecedented: She invoked against Trump a consumer protection statute — Executive Law §63(12) — enacted to protect the public from “persistent fraud” practices.

The legislature’s intention was to empower the attorney general to take action against scammers who broadly defraud the public but don’t harm any single consumer badly enough that it would be worth the prohibitive expense of bringing an individual lawsuit.

Even in its intended application, the law is vague: The AG may sue even if the alleged scheme is not actionably criminal, as long as she deems it somehow deceptive.

But §63(12) was never meant to turn the AG into what James aspires to be: the uber-regulator of all business conducted in the Empire State.

In particular, it was not intended to let the state government intrude into business transactions between financial professionals that involve no criminal activity.