Eric Goode, hotel owner, is a hero in the battle for our democracy.

He's the only hotel owner who could be found to join Laurence Tribe and CREW with their emoluments lawsuit. And without a competitor who could claim he had been damaged, the lawsuit was likely to have been tossed out of court.

Even now, the chances are iffy. It still might get tossed -- but there's a real shot now.

And the hotel owner took this on knowing that he might be subjecting himself to years of legal harassment from the Trump organization and from the Justice Department, the IRS, and any other powers DT can bring to bear.

I, for one, want to offer Eric Goode, owner of the Bowery Hotel and the Waverly Inn, a huge THANK YOU.





https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/style/eric-goode-donald-trump-emoluments-clause.html?_r=0

Eric Goode, 59, is a New York entrepreneur who is an owner of downtown establishments like the Bowery Hotel and the Waverly Inn. He was a creator of Area, the art-gallery-nightclub from the 1980s. He is also a conservationist with something of an obsession for turtles.

And now he is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that accuses President Trump of violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, a once-obscure provision intended to prevent federal officials, including the president, from falling under the influence of foreign powers.

Mr. Goode is an unlikely, reluctant and unusually prominent plaintiff in the high-stakes constitutional lawsuit. “I do question the wisdom of it,” he said over a cappuccino in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel, which looks like a British manor’s library with a rain forest growing in it. “Hopefully I am not going to get audited and harassed for the next three years, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I’m worried about veiled forms of retribution.”

SNIP

The CREW lawsuit would be stronger if more hoteliers had joined, said Mr. Goode, who asked colleagues to take part. But there were no takers.

“You’d be surprised how incestuous the real estate business is in New York,” he said, “and how many people have deals with the Kushners and the Trumps and may fear retribution.”