Just a gentle reminder (until dang gets here) that HN usually lets sufficiently big political news pass even if it's likely to generate lots of heat and little light.
I've already erased several snarky, gloating replies because I would like to see discussion of this proceed in something like a civil manner.
Regardless of one's beliefs on Trump, it is a good day when presidents are no longer de facto immune from law. We now have case law that presidents can be prosecuted post-office. In terms of Montesquieu checks and balances, this is a good day.
In terms of the pragmatic health of America, I'm not nearly as sure.
No, they were immune. Donald Trump is the first US President to be criminally indicted after leaving office. Mueller himself went before Congress and said nothing could be done about a President's illegal activities because you cannot pursue a President for illegal activity.
I suspect now that the custom (of pardoning and not prosecuting former and current political opponents) has been broken, we'll see a lot of prosecutions of political opponents in the future, because "lawfare" is now an established tactic.
I don't think that's a good thing.
Edit: How is it lawfare? The charges are based on a questionable, novel legal theory that no one has ever been prosecuted for before, as nonpartisan legal experts have observed from the beginning:
“The bottom line is that it’s murky,” said Richard Hasen, an expert in election law and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “And the district attorney did not offer a detailed legal analysis as to how they can do this, how they can get around these potential hurdles. And it could potentially tie up the case for a long time.”
They said the same about impeachments when Trump got 2 in a row, it has yet to happen to Biden. I wouldn't be so sure. Trump might be a precedent-breaking president because that's simply his essence.
Why link an article from a year ago, before the trial was even scheduled? You cherry picked one quote ignoring the rest of the article that actually answers a lot of questions your quoted expert asks.
<< “The bottom line is that it’s murky,” said Richard Hasen, an expert in election law and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “And the district attorney did not offer a detailed legal analysis as to how they can do this, how they can get around these potential hurdles. And it could potentially tie up the case for a long time.””
If you continue to read further in the article you linked then you would see that the DA had an answer to that:
<<“Bragg said the indictment doesn’t specify the potential underlying crimes because the law doesn’t require it.”
But beyond that, the DA did offer an explanation to how they could move forward with charging Trump:
<<“Falsifying business records can be charged as a misdemeanor, a lower-level crime that would not normally result in prison time. It rises to a felony — which carries up to four years behind bars — if there was an intent to commit or conceal a second crime. Bragg said his office routinely brings felony false business records cases.
In Trump’s case, Bragg said the phony business records were designed to cover up alleged state and federal election law violations. The $130,000 payment to Daniels exceeded the federal cap on campaign contributions, Bragg said. He also cited a New York election law that makes it a crime to promote a candidate by unlawful means.
“That is what this defendant did when he falsified business records in order to conceal unlawful efforts to promote his candidacy, and that is why we are here,” one of the case prosecutors, Chris Conroy, told the judge Tuesday.
Prosecutors, however, also alluded to another accusation involving tax law: that Trump’s scheme included a plan to mischaracterize the payments to Cohen as income to New York tax authorities.
“They did talk about tax crimes, and I think that could be potentially more compelling for the jury,” Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, said on ABC News. “It’s a safer bet than the campaign finance crimes.”
Bragg is “going to bring in witnesses, he’s going to show a lot of documentary evidence to attempt to demonstrate that all these payments were in furtherance of the presidential campaign,” said Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election lawyer in New York and the director of Fordham Law School’s Voting Rights and Democracy Project.”
> And they ignored the statute of limitations in order to bring these charges several years late.
Again, in the article you linked it explains how they were legally able to extend the statute of limitations for this case:
<<There were some extensions during the pandemic, and state law also can stop the clock when a potential defendant is continuously outside the state.
Can you give an example of another US President who was charged for a criminal offence outside of their term of office and declared to be immune from prosecution?
Or one who was investigated and then publicly not charged because they were deemed to be immune (for crimes outside of their term in office)?
Bill Clinton undeniably committed perjury. That was during his term, but not related to his duties as President.
Despite his clear guilt, every Democrat in the Senate voted not remove him from office, and he was never charged by a criminal court.
He was also accused of rape and sexual assault by numerous women, and never charged in any of those cases.
The Democrat voters I knew at the time (including myself) knew quite well that he was guilty of perjury and sexual harassment, and probably sexual assault as well, but didn't care.
We felt that the investigation was politically motivated, and that having him in office was more important than enforcing the law.
Look, if you want to toss Bill Clinton in jail for any or all of those offenses—go right ahead. I don’t think many Democrats would complain or shed a tear. If that’s the price for holding criminals responsible, then it’s one I’ll gladly pay.
Easy to say now, when you know it won't (can't) happen, and even if it did, it would have no effect on governing the nation.
As defrost said well: "the question of whether this was fair or unfair rests on whether other POTUS's have skated on criminal acts [for which they didn't have immunity as President]". Other POTUS's have, so, it was unfair.
Changing that may be a good idea, or it may simply lead to more abuse of power as the party in office investigates its enemies. I guess we'll find out.
You are literally holding the judicial process hostage and throwing proportionality out the window to make some contrived, disingenuous point.
People are not willing to entertain this non-sense. He means it when any reasonable person would burn Bill Clinton just to avoid the catastrophe conservatives would bring upon this country by making the law useless.
Show me the proof. Not some poorly reasoned allegation or out of context edited excerpt, but the original source where "they" say they intend to end democracy.
>Not some poorly reasoned allegation or out of context edited excerpt
I'm sorry I have to ask, do you guys think everyone else are just toddlers or that your uh... group of incredibly like minded individuals is really that clever?
>does thing
>claims to not do thing
Oh well I guess that settles that! We were all worried for nothing.
I certainly don't think everyone else is a toddler, but I do wonder about some people.
Anyway, this line of discussion is so far outside the HN guidelines (or the limits of "curious conversation"), I see little point in continuing.
If you want to bandy insults in a forum that doesn't expect any sort of rational thought, may I suggest reddit? I think you'd like that site better.
Edit in response to post below: Serious lack of self-awareness. Read your first message again and you'll see who made reasonable discussion impossible.
You prevented any possible discussion of dissent or disagreement by ignoring readily available proof and stuffing it under what I'm going to politely refer to as rationalization.
Don't you dare pretend like you're adhering to guidelines or standards of any sort, this forum or otherwise. The grandstanding is cute, but it's only fooling yourself.
Because US Presidents have immunity (limited) for official acts commited while in office.
Donald Trump was convicted for acts outside of term in office as POTUS, the question of whether this was fair or unfair rests on whether other POTUS's have skated on criminal acts outside of their term in office.
He gave the reasons. He took a deal for a fine, loss of his law license for 5 years, and not pursuing lawyer fees as his punishment for what he did. In exchange for that, he would be immune from being prosecuted any further on that matter. It's quite plain in the article you linked.
It was 2001, Clinton was leaving office, Bush was entering. They didn't need a prosecution of a former president on their hands. They had just assumed the White House after losing the popular vote, people were bitter about the whole 2000 election to begin with. There was no political will to prosecute the Clintons, because the entire point of White Water and the subsequent Lewinsky investigations was to damage the Clintons politically. Mission accomplished.
I mean, it took years to badger the DOJ into prosecuting Trump for waging an insurrection when he was on his way out. Honestly Trump would have gotten the same treatment as Clinton if he hadn't gone apeshit at the end. He wouldn't have a Federal indictment or a Georgia indictment. The other Florida indictment wouldn't have happened if he would have just returned everything he had taken instead of lying about it for a year and trying to hide it.
The two NY cases would have resulted in a fine and community service if he had just kept his mouth shut and shown a little contrition.
> There was no political will to prosecute the Clintons, because the entire point of White Water and the subsequent Lewinsky investigations was to damage the Clintons politically. Mission accomplished.
Yeah, just like now, the goal is to damage Trump politically. That's exactly what people mean when they say the prosecution is politically motivated.
No, in this case the crime was known about since 2018, and it was prosecuted because it was a serious crime. Someone went to jail for it already and they were prosecuted by the Trump administration. Hard to call this political when this case was first prosecuted by a Republican AG.
In the case of Clinton the entire “crime” was that he lied in the process of a political investigation into him which, ultimately we know today, had absolutely no legitimate basis whatsoever, as they ultimately found no crime aside from the one they induced. Today Republicans call this a “process crime” and they view it as foul play, presumably because they run that playbook themselves and know how dirty it is.
Today his conduct is a matter of course for Republicans — AG Jeff Sessions lied before Congress and wasn’t prosecuted. So really kvetching about Clinton at this point is ancient history and water under the bridge.
Again I ask you, point to something concrete which shows Bragg is a political operative instead of an independent DA. I’ll wait.
> Again I ask you, point to something concrete which shows Bragg is a political operative instead of an independent DA. I’ll wait.
By his own admission, Bragg sued over 100 times to block Trump's policies. That's over 100 times he acted like a political operative instead of an independent (in the political sense) DA. How much more proof do you need?
That's not an "admission" that's a statement of fact which is his record.
But let me get this straight. Those 100+ cases were brought while Bragg was working as Chief Deputy Attorney General of New York. I'm not exactly sure what the Chief Deputy AG role is, but clearly he wasn't a director. Either way, how does working as and fulfilling the role of Deputy AG for the state of NY make him a political operative? It's not a political role in the least. Those 100+ cases were DACA and immigration cases, so they were for NY citizens and constitutions, not political investigations into Trump.
Frankly, I think you have a definition of "political operative" so broad that it includes every Democrat. That's not the standard we run things on. Democrats only investigating Democrats and Republicans only investigating Republicans is not how you arrive at accountability.
What proof I'm looking for is Bragg campaigning on the idea that he would "go after" Trump, as people keep saying. Him stating a fact of his past that he did these prosecutions in his role as Deputy AG is not that. Despite you trying to paint him as biased, he had actually said many times he will follow the facts and won't prejudge the case.
Also, crucially (and I don't know why this is continually glossed over) he did not even bring the case to begin with -- it was brought by Cy Vance. Bragg actually received great flak from Democrats for not acting with more alacrity, which is what you would have expected if he were out to "get" Trump. By the time Bragg was elected the case was already before a grad jury. So this whole demonization of Bragg misses the mark entirely.
> Also, crucially (and I don't know why this is continually glossed over) he did not even bring the case to begin with -- it was brought by Cy Vance. Bragg actually received great flak from Democrats for not acting with more alacrity, which is what you would have expected if he were out to "get" Trump. By the time Bragg was elected it was already before a grad jury. So this whole demonization of Bragg misses the mark entirely.
That's "glossed over" because it's not true. Bragg was elected Manhattan DA in 2021. This case was brought before the grand jury on Jan 30, 2023 and the indictment was approved on March 30, 2023.
As for the rest, this discussion is clearly going nowhere. Bragg declared his intention to fight Trump during the campaign and spent several years trying to find a way. If you don't think that's political bias, I can't convince you.
---
Edit: Stop wasting my time. You claimed Vance brought the case, then quoted a source proving that was false: "Vance did not seek an indictment". To avoid admitting your mistake, you changed your claim from "brought the case" to "the first grand jury". I don't think you're discussing this in good faith.
No, you are incorrect. The case was first brought by Cy Vance in front of a grand jury when he was on his way out of office in 2021. He left the rest of the case to Bragg.
Vance authorized the attorneys on the team to present evidence to the grand jury near the end of 2021, but he did not seek an indictment. Those close to Vance say he wanted to leave the decision to Bragg, the newly elected district attorney.
Bragg's grand jury was not the first grand jury to have heard the evidence.
> As for the rest, this discussion is clearly going nowhere.
I disagree, I think you're learning a lot of new facts about the case you were unaware of before. Like the one above. I'm happy to spread knowledge.
> If you don't think that's political bias, I can't convince you.
If you think that's political bias then you must think every Democrat is politically biased against Republicans and vice versa, so therefore no Democrat can ever investigate a Republican. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to me to be the obvious conclusion from your stance. I don't see a way a Democrat could prosecute a Republican without charges of political bias with your outlook on what constitutes bias.
Thankfully that's not the system we live under (yet), so I don't care if I can't convince you that's a bad way to run things. Suffice it to say though, you (and moreover Trump) are going to be sorely disappointed if that's your expectation for how things run.
Edit in response to your edit (as the someone else said, learn to post, you're supposed to wait for the rate limiter to expire not to circumvent it with edits):
> Edit: Stop wasting my time. You claimed Vance brought the case, then quoted a source proving that was false: "Vance did not seek an indictment". To avoid admitting your mistake, you changed your claim from "brought the case" to "the first grand jury". I don't think you're discussing this in good faith.
1) I'm not wasting your time, any moment you spend here is a moment you choose to spend. If you consider the time engaged with me wasted, you are the one wasting it. I haven't forced you to write a single word or to spend a single second doing something you didn't want to do.
2) That "Vance did not seek an indictment" does not mean Vance didn't originally bring the case. The facts were originally made public in 2018 due to Michael Cohen's testimony before Congress. Cy Vance then opened a case into the allegations, and advanced it to the point where in 2021 it was in front of a grant jury. Crucially at that point, Vance was on his way out and Bragg had already been elected. Which means while the case was being worked on before Bragg even got it, which is what he states in the other source I linked in this thread ("I haven't seen the facts of the case yet", meaning the case that Cy Vance started).
Either way, the point you seem very intent on missing, is that when Bragg started as DA, there was a case already started by Vance, that had already been before a grand jury once before, that already had been investigated and worked on for years. So to say that the case only made it to trial because Bragg had some sort of political agenda is false. He said before he was elected that he would continue the case and let the facts direct it, without prejudging it. You are conveniently ignoring all of that to conclude the prosecution was politically motivated because Bragg is a Democratic political operative. The track record and history of the case does not bear that theory out.
> I don't think you're discussing this in good faith.
Then don't talk to me anymore, I'm not going to try and convince you of my faith. Why am I spending all these words and hours if I'm not being genuine? Don't waste your time with such pointless allegations, just go do something else.
I've said already I'm not a lawyer so maybe I'm not using terms precisely that you understand a different way, but I'm not trying to deceive you or make specious arguments. I'm genuinely engaging with you at a fine grained level and we are honed in on this idea that Bragg is a political operative. You've brought very light evidence to bear such as anodyne statements of a desire for pursue accountability of political figures like Trump, and the fact he worked for a Democratic state government, but you haven't explained how that doesn't preclude all Democrats from investigating any Republican. I'm still waiting on that logic.
But moreover you claim Bragg's history of bringing DACA cases against the Trump administration on behalf of citizens is evidence of some sort of Democratic political animus against Trump himself.
To which I pointed out in fact the case was first brought/started/opened/whatever not by Bragg, but by his predecessor. The most aggressive statement against Trump you can find is Bragg stating he will continue the already started case, and he will let the facts take him where they may, which includes holding Trump accountable if necessary, but all the while not prejudging before looking at the facts of the case.
Which.... just doesn't rise to the level of political bias you are alleging that would bring into question the veracity of the case that just concluded.
"political prosecution in a rigged court is not a good day. Not knowing the exact charges and being unable to defend yourself is not a good day. Being able to convict while disagreeing on the specifics wrongs is not a good day."
What are you talking about? His fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth amendment rights that concern conduction of a criminal trial were all honored. They didn't disagree on specifics, charges were decided and enforced.
There's no evidence of rigging the court or that the prosecution was "political", short of the politics of everyday judiciary anyway.
If you've got a problem with how this case was conducted, you ought to take it up with the country's 238 year-old precedents for its handling of criminal justice theory (and in some cases, I'd agree with you) - NOT how this specific case was conducted.
If Trump doesn't understand the charges against him, maybe he should have paid attention when his lawyer explained it to him. The charges are pretty clearly laid out.
He paid off a woman whom he had an affair with to not talk about it during the election. That is election tampering. He then falsified business records to cover this up. It’s a classic political coverup and bribery case.
I doubt it would have made a difference with his cult but who knows.
For it to really be "decided" SCOTUS would need to weigh in. Case law is is as you say based on precedent. And the higher the court that decided the stronger the precedent. A conviction that hasn't even started the appeals process isn't much to go on.
This was a state criminal case, not a federal one. It will go through the New York state appeal courts and end up in New York Supreme Court. IANAL but based on the commentary I've read, if SCOTUS overrules the state court's decision, all hell breaks loose legally speaking.
That said, SCOTUS has a very liberal interpretation of the concept of precedent so anything is possible.
> It will go through the New York state appeal courts and end up in New York Supreme Court.
Nitpicking: New York's court nomenclature is super weird. "Supreme Courts" are their ordinary trial courts. Their highest level court is the Court of Appeals.
The Supreme Court could rule that the law itself is unconstitutional.
Or it could rule that the trial was invalidly performed. That would overturn the conviction, though prosecution could be brought again.
As you note, either of these would cause all hell to break loose. Last week I would have said that it was nonetheless certain. Today, noting that the court decided not to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I'm far less sure. They have no specific love for the man, even if I still think they're likely to act in a partisan manner in general.
Just one example of why this might be overturned. Typically (almost always) the defence has the last word to the jury. (presumption of innocence). In this case the judge let the prosecution go last. Why is this a problem? The prosecution did not reveal the second crime (they gave a set of possible crimes) needed to elevate the misdemeanour to a felony, until they spoke at the end.
So you literally have a situation where the defendant went through a whole trial not knowing the full set of specific laws he was alleged to have broken. And the set of those laws were only revealed to the jury at the last moment. Literally denying the defence a legal opportunity to respond to the laws that the defendant was alleged to have broken.
Breaking law A = misdemeanour
Breaking law A + another law = Felony
Prosecution never revealed the other law Trump was alleged to have broken until closing arguments.
Trial is about breaking law A. But closing arguments are about breaking law A in combination with another law.
The prosecution gave a set of possible other laws at closing arguments, in which they went last. The judge instructed the jury that they can individually select which other law they think Trump broke.
How can this possibly be a fair trail process, when you can defend yourself for breaking law A, but get punished for breaking laws A + X. In which X is not revealed to you during the proceedings of the trail, but only to the jury at the last moment.
> Typically (almost always) the defence has the last word to the jury. (presumption of innocence).
This is actually the complete opposite of the truth. Almost always, the side who has the absolute last word to the jury is the side that bears the burden of proof, i.e., the plaintiff (or government in a criminal trial). Usually this manifests as plaintiff goes first, then defendant, then plaintiff gets a rebuttal argument.
You're correct. But in this case, because the second crime was the reason for the felony charge, and revealed in the closing arguments. The only way it could be have been responded to, is if the judge allowed to defence to go last.
This will be one of the contentions in any appeal.
So the NY criminal dockets are sufficiently closed down that I can't find the defense's briefing papers on its motions. But given that some of the public orders do castigate that defense for trying to reraise the same "these charges are complete bullshit" too many times, that the defense helped prepare the jury instructions (which specifically include mention of the second crime), and the fact that the underlying second crime has been heavily reported on news media since the charges were first brought, I find it hard to believe that the first opportunity the defense could have known about the second crime was in closing arguments.
Also, I don't see in the transcript of the closing arguments any objections defense raised to the second crime only being brought up then, so even if it were true, it can't be raised in appeal.
> Typically (almost always) the defense has the last word to the jury.
Where did you hear this? This is not true as far as I know.
Here is a NY State guide to jury trials that seems to support that prosecution always goes second:
After all evidence has been presented, the defense may deliver a summation, or a closing statement to the jury. *The prosecutor must then deliver a summation*. The summations review the evidence and present arguments based upon the evidence in the case to try to persuade the jury to convict or acquit the defendant.
So first the defense may (they can opt not to) deliver a summation. Then (meaning after the defense) the prosecution must (they don't have a choice) offer a summation.
> So you literally have a situation where the defendant went through a whole trial not knowing the full set of specific laws he was alleged to have broken.
No, this is not literally the situation. He knew the entire time he was charged for "Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree" under NY State law. This was made very clear to him, but moreover his lawyers knew this the entire time as well. The particular law states:
That the defendant did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
INTENT means conscious objective or purpose. Thus, a person acts with intent to defraud when his or her conscious objective or purpose is to do so.
So they did not have to prove commission of an additional crime, they had to prove intent to commit an additional crime. The facts the jury used to determine whether Trump had this intent were presented by the prosecution at trial, and the defense had every opportunity to mount a defense against them.
It's not like some surprise evidence was revealed at closing which the defense had no opportunity to counter. In fact, they had every opportunity to mount a defense.
Notably, when they had their chance, they rested their case after calling a single witness who actually, in dramatic fashion, was caught in a lie by the prosecution on cross the way the defense hoped to catch Cohen in a lie on cross. Now it's laughable when they claim "we didn't have a chance to mount a defense", and people who didn't watch the trial treat that credulously.
What exactly would they have said in defense if they had another opportunity? "Cohen's a liar, the judge is biased, the jury is rigged, the venue is not friendly." Nothing we haven't heard already, that's the point; everything that could have been said, has been said, and now that the verdict is "guilty" they want to have said more, as if whatever they have to say isn't more of the same deflection the jury didn't buy.
We will see what the appeals court says but it's not looking good based on the fact many people have tried to argue this point on appeal, and it's been rejected.
How did you watch the trial when it wasn't televised?
"Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree" is a misdemeanour, a small fine. Which at this point (2016) expired and could not be charged.
The main reason this was resurrected and elevated to a Felony is because of politics. The prosecutor is a Democrat that literally got elected on an "I'll get Trump platform". Which under the American system is fine. But suppose he doesn't get Trump in the end. Should he be charged for defrauding voters? Clearly he raised money off the promise to get Trump.
As far as the judge:
The standard for a judge to recuse themselves is public "perception of bias"
How could the judge not be biased, when he donated to a "Stop Trump" campaign in the past. Which is also contrary to NY ethical guidelines for judges.
His daughter was and is fund raising millions off the trail.
How can the judge's claim no to be biased be taken seriously when his family has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial?
>"INTENT means conscious objective or purpose. Thus, a person acts with intent > to defraud when his or her conscious objective or purpose is to do so"
How could this trial have proved what it charged .. the intent for classifying the NDA as a legal expense was fraudulent (that it was really a campaign contribution). When there's a gap of a year between the time Trump got elected, and the classification happened. Trump got elected in 2016. Accountant classified it as a legal expense in 2017. How could the act of misclassifying be the campaign contribution (the fraudulent act), when it happened post election?
Without mind reading, how exactly did they manage to prove that NDA was a camping contribution and not simply to spare his spouse embarrassment from an affair from being publicly alleged ?
How can this be a fair trial when the judged allowed the prosecution to state that it is a fact that the payments constituted an unlawful financial contribution, yet simultaneously denied Trump the opportunity to present his expert campaign finance witness, that would have countered those claims. The jury makes decisions based on the evidence they get to hear. Yet the judge allowed only one side to be presented.
Finally, A conflicted judge will jail a former President based on a convoluted crime that requires two parts, with the second part ambiguous intent to commit X crime, and some aspect of mind reading and time travel.
Doesn't seem like most Americans are on board with this. This is bouncing Trump's poll numbers.
The people that want to get "Trump" are not stupid, so this just must be part A of a bigger plan ...so what is the next phase of their plan to prevent the public from electing Trump in a Democracy? I'm waiting to see.
I can tell you are getting your news about the trial filtered through right wing media, principally because these talking points are the kind of thing I get in my email inbox from the Trump campaign newsletter and Fox News. Most of the info you seek was presented at trial.
It's fascinating to me that you've paid enough attention to the trial to have received the right wing talking points as to why it's objectionable, but you haven't actually looked into any of the first hand information directly from the trial to verify the right wing talking points.
> How did you watch the trial when it wasn't televised?
I was using the word "watch" in the github repo sense, not in the visual television sense. I followed along with it via reporters who went to the trial and wrote down what they heard. Also I followed commentary from former prosecutors, attorneys and judges. I tried to stay away from political commentary from pundits and politicians, and I looked at left and right leaning sources.
> The prosecutor is a Democrat that literally got elected on an "I'll get Trump platform".
I've asked others for a source for this, and the best they have come up with is Bragg saying "We need to hold Trump accountable", which is a pretty anodyne statement for a DA to make compared to the one your purporting him to have made -- "I'll get Trump" is pretty extreme. What I've heard him say specifically is that he promised to follow the facts wherever they lead, and he promised not to prejudge the case.
> Should he be charged for defrauding voters? Clearly he raised money off the promise to get Trump.
He didn't actually campaign on a platform of getting Trump, he had a platform of reducing gun violence and reforming Riker's. Show me Bragg making one single stump speech or campaign event where he promises to "Get Trump". I predict you won't be able to, because actually Bragg is an eminently fair and competent DA, and all around good guy.
> How could the judge not be biased, when he donated to a "Stop Trump" campaign in the past.
Because he didn't -- he donated $15 to pro Biden and $10 to something called "Stop Republicans". It was seen as maybe not a great move by the ethics board, but they dismissed the complaint, and the appeals court didn't step in. At the end of the day, yes the judge is a Democrat. But that does not mean he is automatically biased against Trump and all Republicans to the point he can't preside over this cause. And frankly we don't want to live in a system where the standard is that politicians can only be judged/investigated/prosecuted by members of their own party.
Judges can and must be fair to a defendant even when they disagree with them politically. That is their whole job and we should be putting people in that position who can do precisely that. In the case of Judge Merchan, during the trial is he was eminently fair to Trump. He allowed him to get away with 10 counts of violating a gag order without any jail time. Normal people would be behind bars after 1 instance. Merchan made objections on behalf of defense counsel, and in fact had to warn Trump's attorney that he was dropping the ball for his client when he was failing to object. So the ethics board was right in dismissing the complaint, as the judge was fair to Trump.
> His daughter was and is fund raising millions off the trail.
Under the law she doesn't have enough stake in the outcome of the trial for it to matter. I hear people complaining about this constantly, but how do you figure the daughter of the judge raising money for Democrats means the judge is biased against Trump. Again, his conduct during the trial shows that he in fact was not biased. So what does the daughter have to do with anything. Seems like a red herring to me.
> How could the act of misclassifying be the campaign contribution (the fraudulent act), when it happened post election? ... Without mind reading, how exactly did they manage to prove that NDA was a camping contribution and not simply to spare his spouse embarrassment from an affair from being publicly alleged ?
Read the testimony of Hope Hicks. She testified under oath that he admitted to her after the election, while he was President, that he was fortunate to have hid the information from voters because he feels they would have reacted negatively to it. Trump had the opportunity to defend himself on this point but he didn't, so it's a matter of fact at this point.
> judged allowed the prosecution to state that it is a fact that the payments constituted an unlawful financial contribution
Because it was already adjudicated by SDNY.
> denied Trump the opportunity to present his expert campaign finance witness, that would have countered those claims.
Trump was free to present the witness, but he was looking for the witness to instruct the jury on his own interpretation of the law, which the judge disallowed because that's the judge's role in the trial, not an expert witness'.
> Yet the judge allowed only one side to be presented.
The judge allowed both sides to be presented. The defense was allowed to call any number of witnesses who could have testified in Trump's defense. Allen Weisselberg. Keith Schiller. Trump's family. The doorman who was paid off, I don't know his name. Any of them could have cleared up the matter, but they weren't called in Trump's defense because Trump's counsel knew they wouldn't have stood up under cross. Because Trump is guilty.
> a former President based on a convoluted crime that requires two parts, with the second part ambiguous intent to commit X crime, and some aspect of mind reading and time travel.
No mind reading. No time travel. It's just that he had to falsify business records in furtherance of another crime. The law is actually 2 pages long and straightforward. Moreover, most laws have more than one part, so that's not really objectionable. Maybe the case is a little convoluted, but that's because the crime was; they intentionally tried to hide this scheme through obfuscation, shell companies, and ultimately fraud -- of course it's convoluted.
> with the second part ambiguous intent to commit X crime,
No ambiguous intent. Pure intent. The jury determined Trump had that intent. Juries are the people in society we task with determining intent of criminal defendants, and they did so in this case. Why is that objectionable to you?
> Doesn't seem like most Americans are on board with this. This is bouncing Trump's poll numbers.
Doesn't matter if most Americans are on board with this, and it doesn't matter what happens to Trump's poll numbers -- it wasn't a political prosecution, it was an application of the law. Why are you bringing political considerations into this?
> The people that want to get "Trump" are not stupid, so this just must be part A of a bigger plan
I wish the trial was televised. The source of information about the trial I'm relying on is Allen Dershowitz and CBC news youtube channels. Derszowtiz is a self described lifet8me Democrat and CBC news is hardly right wing, it's actually kind of opposite.
Allen is an experienced lawyer and gifted lecturer and orator. The criticisms that Allen has levied against the trial are nothing more than simple logical counter arguments to what went on in the court room.
CBC is pretty much is Canadian version of PBS.
I have also watched yesterday a more conspiratorial take on things which I suppose you could classify as fun intuitive speculation. Ian Caroll on Twitter
This doesn't really make much sense in this specific case. It was a state court, and he was found guilty of a state crime. While state decisions can be appealed to the Supreme Court, it requires that some Constitutional or some violation of other federal law be in question. I haven't seen anyone argue that in this case, even Trump's biggest supporters.
Contrast that with the Jan 6th case, which is a federal case and is currently before the Supreme Court.
Sure, New York Supreme Court then. But SCOTUS still weighs in on matters of federal law and constitution which I'm sure will come up from Trump's legal team.
Case law is case law. The point was we haven't even gotten started yet on "deciding" anything.
I don't see any non-frivolous argument that can be made here. Federal law doesn't preempt state criminal law (you can in fact be tried in both federal and state court for the same offense), and I have a hard time seeing any constitutional claim that can be pressed here (especially one that isn't precluded by defense failing to object).
Don't really think it's a good idea to let lawyers pick who the people can vote for. Nor that justice is served when the conviction is obtained on alleged book keeping crime from 2017 in which it was claimed it was to influence an election in 2016, and relied on testimony from a man that perjured himself multiple times. And that it was illegal for a bookkeeper to select "legal expense" for payment of an NDA agreement.
I think it is Michelle Obama.
That's what the "market" thinks. You are welcome to "arbitrage" it with some $!
Biden has a non zero probability of dying before the election (of natural causes). Plus DNC nomination is a super pac driven process. Math might just compute.
> Biden has a non zero probability of dying before the election (of natural causes). Plus DNC nomination is a super pac driven process. Math might just compute.
So the odds of Biden dying, times the odds of Michelle Obama wanting to run, times the odds of the DNC not picking Kamala Harris—the current VP, times the odds of Michelle Obama actually winning, might work out to 4%?
...uh... I don't even know what to say about that.
Hmm, yes, getting into financial contracts with people who live in cloud cuckoo land, for a few percentage points that get eaten up by the site itself seems like a good idea.
The other cases will probably get delayed till after the election, and dropped if he wins. It's kind of odd he's been prosecuted for this odd not really a crime stuff but not for the more serious ones.
This is absolutely a crime - you really don’t want to tolerate politicians committing crimes to conceal information from voters. What makes it different is that it’s entirely at the state level so you don’t have political interference: he can’t have judges he appointed running interference and prosecutors are not wondering whether the guy they’re charging will be their boss. I suspect that if the national GOP hadn’t purged opposition figures you’d see more cases brought with the protection of a hypothetical “law and order” wing of the party.
The case is a funny one though - false records to cover up influencing an election through unlawful means but the means were not specified - could be a) campaign finance laws or could be b) NY tax laws or c) other. I think the jury were told any would do and I'm not sure that's published so even after being convicted Trump doesn't know if it's for a, b or c? I'm not a lawyer or even an American - I just follow this out of mild interest.
I'm not a Trump fan but I'm not sure how well this plays out. He's unlikely to get locked up and saying don't vote for Trump - he's guilty of stuff although we are not quite sure what but definitely guilty, may not play that well with electors.
... Wait, how is it not really a crime? It's fraud. Now, it's not terribly _serious_ next to some of the other stuff he's being charged with, but arguably that's part of _why_ it got done quicker; more serious crime takes longer to prosecute.
>Yet to get the case to court, Bragg had to turn the charges into felonies, with longer time limits. So he invented a novel and untested legal theory, maligned even by liberal legal commentators, that the bookkeeping issues were to illegally influence an election – his own 2016 winning election.
It's a special crime invented to get Trump. It's legally dubious that that's ok. I'm not a lawyer but I'm told there is a principle that laws should be clearly laid out rather than cobbled together after the offence and the case may well get overturned on appeal as a result.
Please be more critical about what you read. The source you linked is full of lies and is designed to mislead you.
For instance, this line right here: "But then along came Alvin Bragg, a Left-wing prosecutor who ran for office on the promise that he would do what prior prosecutors had failed to do, to get Donald Trump."
Try to find out where Bragg "ran for office on the promise the he would... get Trump".
I guarantee you, you will not be able to find this, because Bragg didn't actually do that.
Continuing:
There is nothing illegal about paying money to buy silence. It happens every day in court cases and business deals, where money is paid for non-disclosure agreements. And there is nothing illegal about politicians hiding their dirty laundry, happens every campaign.
This is so reductive. It's not what happened. You can do both of these things, *but you can't use campaign money to pay for it*. Because if you did, you'd have to report it, thus defeating the purpose of the payment.
That's the whole reason they had Michael Cohen do it off the books. But again, they had to hide the payment, so they lied about its purpose (legal expenses, they were not), and then they memorialized that lie in corporate records.
Crime 1 - falsification of business records. You can't tell the government a payment was for legal expenses when it was not.
Crime 2 - misuse of campaign funds. You can't use campaign finances to make hush money payments without reporting them, and you can't circumvent that mandated reporting by having your fixer take out a mortgage and then paying him back with pretextual "legal expenses".
Sorry I spent an hour writing this and now I want to post it even though the comment in reply to me is dead. I don't think that comment should be dead except for the first sentence where they came in hot. But it's otherwise important for the conversation going on.
> here is an article outlining his plans and promise on doing just that before he took office
This article does not show that Bragg ran for office promising to prosecute Trump. Quite the opposite. Notwithstanding the article you linked was written after the election, it doesn't even allege what you are claiming.
Bragg, who will be sworn into office on January 1, said he hasn’t been briefed on the facts of the Trump case, which is before a state grand jury. But he indicated he has no plans to disrupt the investigation he’s inheriting even as he also wants to focus on his own agenda.
“This is obviously a consequential case, one that merits the attention of the DA personally,” Bragg said in a recent interview over lunch in Harlem.
He ran on a platform to shake-up the culture of the storied prosecutor office.
Half the article isn't even about Trump, but about Braggs other plan's, you know... the platform on which he actually ran. The article admits Bragg did not campaign on prosecuting Trump when it says "he also wants to focus on his own agenda.", explicitly differentiating Bragg's agenda from prosecuting Trump. The entire "Day One Plans" section is what Bragg actually campaigned on: "reducing gun violence and addressing what he’s called a “humanitarian crisis” at Rikers, the long-troubled New York City jail" according to the article.
Bragg even explicitly says he plans to treat Trump the same as any other citizen, in that he will apply the same standards to Trump: "even though the investigation involves a former president, he would apply “the analysis that we’ve always used, I’ve always used, in multiple offices.” He said that is: “Would you bring this case otherwise? That’s got to be the guiding light.”
So thanks for the article, it proves my point. You won't be able to find one that proves your point, because Bragg didn't actually campaign on prosecuting Trump.
> The falsification was that the records were not properly labeled as campaign expenditures.
Well that's the crux of the matter. Your framing, that they were "not properly labeled" was Trump's defense, and was rejected by a jury after reviewing the evidence. In fact, the jury found the records were not properly labeled intentionally in the commission of a crime.
> which is usually not done by local/state courts
But sometimes is, as in this case.
> prosecutors usually don't have the authority to prosecute on federal campaign laws
But sometimes they do? Either way that's not what happened here, they didn't prosecute on federal campaign laws. All they had to do was show that Trump intended to commit a crime, one of which could be violating campaign finance laws. That's not the same as prosecuting a federal campaign law. And besides, the article lists two additional crimes that were on the table to satisfy that requirement.
> this case is very novel in that regard.
I would expect it to be -- not too many people are prosecuted for the facts of this case because not too many people put themselves in a situation to be prosecuted as such.
> Furthermore, the judge allowed the jurors to differ on what the second crime (the alleged crime the falsified records were covering for) actually was. So, the jury was not unanimous on all facts of the case.
Wrong, the jury was unanimous on the facts required for conviction. If the law requires the commission of an additional crime, and 6 jury members points to crime A, while the other 6 jury members points to crime B, that satisfies the requirement of the law. There's no requirement for them all to have to point to the same crime, why should there be? The point of the upgrade to a felony is to make it so that if you do more crime, you do more time. What is the problem with this, that seems reasonable to me.
> you are usually given ample and crystal-clear instructions at every step of the process, notably getting an easy-to-follow checklist of what facts you have to find to find the defendant guilty.
And sometimes you're not? You keep pointing to "usually this" and "usually that", but not everything is usual, especially in an unusual case. Something being unusual doesn't mean it's wrong or nefarious. And you seem to be speaking as to how things are usually done, but I'm not confident you have the depth/breadth of knowledge or experience in this area to actually claim how things usually are with any authority. There are other resources that have been posted here (a link from justsecurity) which seem to indicate that this law has been used frequently in the past to prosecute individuals.
> Judge Merchan did NOT do this and instead gave somewhat confusing verbal instructions to the jury.
You can't say this, you don't know the jury was confused. If they were confused, they had ample opportunity for clarification from the judge. In fact they used this process to get clarification over the transcript and their instructions. The judge asked them if they needed more info and they said no. So the jury was not confused by their instructions. When they rendered their guilty verdict, they knew exactly what they were doing.
> He specifically says he "will hold him accountable" but does not even entertain the idea that the facts may show Trump is not guilty. In fact, not once did he stated that the facts may end up indicating Trump is not guilty.
The first sentiment expressed by Bragg in that interview is in response to a direct question, that he would be ready to inherit the case from Vance because he has experience in pursuing Trump, and he is "ready to go wherever the facts take [him]".
He reiterates several times the idea he will follow the facts where they lead, and he notes he is speaking carefully because he does not want to be accused of pre-judging the case by Trump. He does note that he has a history of pursuing Trump also in response to a direct question.
When I listen to Bragg saying he will follow the facts, juxtaposed with your statement that he "does not even entertain the idea that the facts may show Trump is not guilty.", I have to ask: what do you think Bragg means when he says he is "ready to go wherever the facts take me". Doesn't that imply he is open to the facts taking him to where Trump is not guilty?
> You were simply incorrect in trying to split a single charge/crime into 2.
Okay well I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't mean I didn't watch the trials and haven't been following. What I was trying to clumsily express was the point from the article you linked: "The third “unlawful” action could be violating the Federal Election Campaign Act, meaning Cohen’s payment to Daniels was a contribution to Trump’s campaign that exceeded the legal limit—which Cohen already pleaded guilty to."
> No, federal election crimes are not prosecutable by state/local courts. Supreme court has ruled on this many times.
But he did not prosecute a federal crime. I don't know how you keep coming back to that. What he prosecuted was a state crime, which as an element includes an intent to commit another crime, which may or may not be a federal crime. Prosecuting an intent to commit a crime is not prosecuting a crime.
> The judge should have pointed out this problem in the case initially, but instead let the case go ahead with Bragg citing violation of federal campaign laws as a matter of fact for the case.
Because it's not actually a problem. You keep overstating what happened. Bragg did not have to cite violation of any other laws. He had to show intent to violate a law. Intent is hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. It was the jury who found Trump's intent to be a matter of fact.
> As such, there is a very strong case of overturning the case, possibly with reversible error cited given that the judge allowed the case to go forward through misapplication of state law by allowing prosecution to cite federal campaign law.
I mean, I guess we will see :shrug:. On the other hand it might be perfectly fine, and the appeals court will tell us.
> The problem with the jury not agreeing with what the secondary crime (hidden by record falsification) is that it adds ambiguity to the facts of the case and makes the case for appeal much stronger.
I don't see that as a real problem.
> also possibly indicates the jury was not actually unanimous on the intent requirement for the felony charge
No, the jury was in fact unambiguously unanimous on the intent requirement. Each and every one of them was asked if they agreed with the verdict as read, and every one agreed. That's the end of discussion on that matter.
> Do you think it's okay if a jury does not get sufficient instruction on how to interpret the relevant laws and apply facts for the case?
As someone who often has to give clear instructions to people (in the case of proctoring exams) I know there is no set of words you can say to 12 people that will be understood by all of them in the same exact way. For this reason, I realize that dialog and clarification are necessary for resolving misunderstandings, and that's exactly what the process allowed for at trial.
> The jury had to ask multiple times for clarification on the jury instructions. They specifically had to ask the judge to reread the instructions multiple times because they were not given a written copy of the instructions!
So? As I was listening live, I heard trial lawyers predicting this would happen on the basis that it always happens. As I said, people need clarification no matter how clear you (think you) are. The fact they asked for clarification should be evidence that everything was clear in the end. Because they were asked by the judge if everything was clear, and they answered in the affirmative. You are here asking me to not trust the jury because you feel the instructions were unclear, but you weren't even there.
> Ask yourself, if you had just sat on the jury for such a long trial and the judge finally read out a 55-page jury instruction, would you recall all the instructions required for your job?
No, but I would have asked for clarification until I was clear, exactly as the jury did.
Regardless, this is just the law in NY, and in fact had they been given a copy of the instructions, that would have been grounds for an appeal:
The prohibition against jurors being provided with a copy of the written legal instructions stems from a 1987 decision by the New York Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — in a case called People v. Owens, which involved a drug sale.
The court found that “the distribution of written instructions to the jury is not expressly authorized by law, and error in such submissions cannot be deemed harmless,” meaning that providing the instructions would result in a conviction being overturned.
Personally I would give the jury a copy. But then again I can see the downside, as it would leave them interpreting a document to find clarification rather than interacting with the judge. I can see the merit on forcing them to ask the judge, because ultimately he is the expert, not the document, which no matter how well-intentioned and crafted, probably contains some bugs. So its better to have him be the authority rather than the instructions he put together.
Also clears things up for appeal, because the judge can ask them if they are clear on the instructions, and they can answer in the affirmative or not, so we don't have to wonder if they were unclear about things after the fact. They are each on record under oath saying they are clear about the instructions, what more do you want?
We can agree to disagree on Bragg's intent - I don't see any movement from either of us there. I cannot give reasonable doubt that Bragg had no personal and political ambitions to prosecute trump and create a sham trumping up of charges in order to claim fame for making Trump a felon. He had a long history of intent towards Trump leading up to and during his campaign for office.
> I don't see that as a real problem.
To clarify why the admission of arguments involving federal election laws are fatal for the case, I will defer to an anonymous 'Robert' on another forum I follow who said it very well (slightly edited fix some very minor grammatical issues):
All jurors had to agree that Trump acted to conceal another or third crime. They did not have to agree on what the third crime was. If one juror failed agree that a third crime was likely committed with intent, then the prosecution would have failed to show that the decision of the jury included all 12 jurors or in other words that the decision unanimous. They would all have to find all the elements of the crime they selected were proven by the prosecution beyond reasonable doubt. The problem is that by including a federal crime as one of the possible third crimes, the judge, without objection from the prosecution, included a crime which the prosecution had no power or authority to prove (as state prosecutors, they cannot prove a federal crime). If the jurors agreed on the elements of a crime for which there was no proof, or for which the prosecution lacked the authority to prove, by law it is not "proven". Since the judge did not require the jurors to state which third crime they had selected, it is not possible to conclude they did not pick as the third crime one which had not been proven by the prosecution, and thus it is not possible to state or conclude that the verdict was unanimous. The identity of the possible third crimes came very late in the case; it was not identified in the indictment. Had that been in the indictment, it would be clear that there was lacking an essential element for the case to proceed. That omission is not cured by postponing the identity until jury instructed.
So, there was clear error from the judge and prosecutor that led to error from the jury, meaning the judgement will absolutely get overturned. Given this and other potential issues in the case, there is a non-zero chance of reversible error being found, which would be a very serious matter.
The judge completely failed here, and had at least 3 possible options to deal with this issue:
1. Reject the case as presented in the indictment. Bragg could revise the case to only deal with elements that are within his authority.
2. Make arguments presented from Bragg regarding federal election law inadmissible, striking them from the record and/or instructing the jury to disregard all arguments involving federal election law for their deliberation. This option still isn't great given how late this would be in the case and could still get the judgement overturned on appeal, but would have at least shown the judge remotely cared about the glaring problem.
3. Instruct the jury to state which tertiary crime (unlawful behavior that leads to violation of NY election law) they believe Trump committed. If none of the jury listed federal election law as part of this, then there could be valid judgement. Again, not great and likely would get hammered on in appeal.
The fact that the judge did nothing to attempt to deal with glaring issue is pretty insane. It will be a pretty ugly stain on the judge's career once all of this is said and done.
> I don't see that as a real problem.
Again, we can agree to disagree on other elements involving the jury, including the jury instruction clarity and process.
> Regardless, this is just the law in NY, and in fact had they been given a copy of the instructions, that would have been grounds for an appeal
That is an incorrect, very narrow reading of a previous case judgement in NY. The case judgement said that written instructions are not mandated by law, and any errors related to the written instruction are not harmless. This means that any error identified within or involving dissemination of the written instructions to the jury would be grounds for overturning a conviction, which frankly is usually already covered by other laws and precedents around jury instructions. None of this actually prohibits a NY judge from giving written jury instructions, just that NY judge usually won't to prevent any possible unintentional error that will get the case overturned.
This NY-specific precedent is very controversial, and many other states routinely give written copies of instructions to juries so they can review it as they need.
> He had a long history of intent towards Trump leading up to and during his campaign for office.
Noting that most Democrats have said something negative about Trump in their careers, would you say that Trump cannot be investigated by Democrats due to conflict of interest?
> Robert
I’m wholly uninterested I. What “Robert” from some other forum has to say, I don’t know why you are bringing him up here. Is he an expert? An jurist? A lawyer?
Either way he in making the error many here keep making, and that is, I’ll say it again, they did not have to prosecute or prove a federal case. That was not the law. The law was to prove intent, and the jury found intent. That is a prosecution of NY state law, even if the intent was to violate federal law.
If you want to show the prosecution was not right, you’ll have to argue against the intent part, not that state prosecutors are barred from prosecuting federal crimes — because no federal crime was prosecuted by state prosecutors in this case. Trump has not been found guilty of a federal crime in this case and the NY state law didn’t require him to have been.
A lot of the objection about the verdict seems to come down to a being unhappy that the law as written is being applied to someone people support. I can sympathize — it’s tough when people you admire are revealed to be criminals and dirt bags. People are going through some feelings, I can appreciate that.
Still, it’s interesting to me, because in all these words I don’t see people here defending the conduct or saying it didn’t happen, which is the key takeaway for me.
> It will be a pretty ugly stain on the judge's career once all of this is said and done.
You’re speaking very confidently here about a very unusual and unprecedented situation, and you are citing “Robert from another forum” as an authority, so I am not sure where this confidence comes from but suffice to say I’m not as certain about the future as you are. I wish I was
> This NY-specific precedent is very controversial, and many other states routinely give written copies of instructions to juries so they can review it as they need.
Okay but it is common in NY, it was done out of an abundance of caution to preserve and maintain the integrity of the trial, and in the end all the jurors affirmed under oath and on the record that they were not confused by the instructions. So we are not left to wonder and this isn’t a basis for appeal.
Yeah I agree it looks like a bodge to get Trump for violating campaign finance laws which the court didn't have jurisdiction to do. I'm guessing it may get overturned for that reason.
For starters, not orchestrating the 2014 coup, not shelling the Donbas on Feb 16 2021, not violating the Minsk agreement would have helped. The laws Ukraine passed that made Russian speaking Ukrainians second class citizens were also egregious. Keeping promises that assured Russia NATO wouldn't encroach would be useful.
I don't know if this situation can be resolved with the current administration. I think it will take new leadership to negotiate away from the brink. I'd like to see RFK in there even if he had a chance.
It is funny that people think Putin is suddenly going to pause everything because Trump decided to call him up. In no way does he trust Trump anymore then Biden and many republicans do openly support escalation with Russia.
Trump's version of "calming things down with Russia" is complete capitulation and America exiting NATO. His plan is to stop sending arms to Ukraine and then to look the other way when Putin invades Poland.
Yes I agree, there will need to be concessions. That's what happens when you lose a war. Or we roll the dice and escalate. It's a matter of picking the best of several bad choices available.
If Putin invades Poland then full mobilization, likely nuclear war ensures. At some point this happens regardless because we will only make progress in Ukraine through escalation to stages that force Russia's hand. This isn't WW2 and replaying that in your head and saying we need to learn for that won't serve you well.
And here's the latest escalation: "Joe Biden" took a giant step yesterday toward commencing World War Three. The move was framed as the US gives Ukraine permission to use American missiles to strike deep within Russia. That was a bit disingenuous, you see, because Ukraine’s military lacks the know-how to actually launch the missiles, so American military “advisors” will have to be on hand to do it, meaning US military personnel will commit an act of aggression upon Russia.
> the US is convicting and jailing their political opponents
No, the independent prosecution is charging, and the independent jury convicting, a criminal who happens to be the political opponent of the current administration. Being the political opponent can't be a get-out-of-jail-free card when you actually commit crimes.
And it's yet to be determined whether jailing is going to happen. I think that's deferred at least another month?
But why announce that you're running that far in advance, if not to use "running for president" as a shield against the criminal cases that everyone could see were coming?
Not only is it one of many cases currently moving forward against Trump brought by several different independent judiciaries at the state and federal level, but the House investigation failed to bring charges against Biden even though they did their best to turn it into a partisan show trial.
It takes an extreme level of blatant criminality for anyone to indict, let alone convict, a politician.
Therefore... what? Only independents can be attorneys general? Can be judges? Or nobody can be judges?
Your observation is true, and yet, we kind of need to keep a civilization running, and for that we need courts and stuff. What kind of plan do you have for how things would be different, and will it actually work in the real world?
Great, but you should have more when making charges of bias and corruption than "he's a Democrat, therefore dirty".
When we say someone like a prosecutor is "independent" it means they are not directed by a superior. Bragg is not directed by the mayor of NY, the governor of NY, the AG, or the President. He may be a Democrat, but he's still independent (lower case "i"). If you come in and call him a "Democrat" when someone else calls him independent, you are implying he is a Democrat before anything else, and his actions are driven by allegiance to the party. That's not true.
So can you tell us anything specifically that Bragg did that was not independent, where he was directed by Biden or Democrats?
Or did he prosecute Trump as the law directed him to?
> Or did he prosecute Trump as the law directed him to?
Clearly not. He essentially said "We have to get Trump" before he even found a crime to charge him with. Then invented a "novel legal theory" to prosecute him.
Going to need a source for this. Every source people have pulled up for me so far attempting to "prove" this has Bragg saying something to the effect of "I will follow the facts where they take me". Maybe you have a different source?
> Then invented a "novel legal theory" to prosecute him.
You mean he applied the facts to the law and brought a prosecution where he thought a crime had been committed, as is his job as DA.
Can you explain why "inventing a novel legal theory" is wrong or indicative of bias? Or evidence that Bragg is somehow controlled or not independent?
Ok, I looked it up. His exact words were "we have to hold him accountable". That's a declaration of intent to target Trump.
And he listed his long experience of opposing Trump administration policies. "I also sued the Trump administration more than 100 times... So I know that work". Notice he said "Trump administration" - that was political opposition, he was suing to oppose Trump's policies. Even in his previous position, he was a political opponent of Trump, and used his office to pursue political goals. That's clearly bias.
> Can you explain why "inventing a novel legal theory" is wrong or indicative of bias?
Because legal changes should not be retroactive. If something is currently illegal, it doesn't require a "novel legal theory" to prosecute. Novel legal theory is just a way of saying "let's change the way the law is interpreted or enforced". And that's fine, as long as it's only enforced after the change is made public.
This is the kind of general, anodyne political statement every candidate ever makes. Seriously, if this is the basis we use to overturn cases as evidence of bias, then it would mean every Republican is immune from prosecution from every Democratic DA, and vice versa.
> Notice he said "Trump administration" - that was political opposition, he was suing to oppose Trump's policies. Even in his previous position, he was a political opponent of Trump, and used his office to pursue political goals.
And with this statement you've made the definition of political operative to include everyone in a state government opposed to the policies of the federal government controlled by the opposing party.
So now that you've made everything politics, nothing is politics, and we can get back to the facts at hand.
> Because legal changes should not be retroactive.
There was no legal change, the law was applied as written as it has been to many other individuals.
> If something is currently illegal, it doesn't require a "novel legal theory" to prosecute.
The novelty here is applying new facts to an existing law in a way that hasn't been applied before. That's what people mean when they mean "novel". They don't mean the law is being twisted to fit the facts. They don't mean the law is somehow new or different this time. It's the same as it's always been.
The novelty comes from it being unknown whether or not the facts actually fit the law by virtue of the "theory" being untested in court. This novelty is not unfair to the defendant. It doesn't mean they are being singled out or unfairly targeted for prosecution. It just means the specific facts of the case haven't been tried in this way before, and why should they have been? The facts are unprecedented.
> Novel legal theory is just a way of saying "let's change the way the law is interpreted or enforced". And that's fine, as long as it's only enforced after the change is made public.
No, that's a terrible system. All that means is you can get away with crimes if you are creative enough. You would just have to point to the novelty of the theory, the fact that the law hasn't been applied that way before, and then you'd be free. Then that specific crime would be open season until the bug was patched by legislation, which we all know takes forever. It's like discovering a zero day exploit, advertising it, and then hoping an unspecified patch will fix things at some point in the future. Uh, no that's a recipe for an pwned system, sorry. Novel crimes call for novel applications of the law. Criminals have an asymmetric advantage as it is with the presumption of innocence, there's no reason to give them more of an advantage.
> There was no legal change, the law was applied as written as it has been to many other individuals.
Can you cite a single case before Trump's where this law was applied, as a felony, without actually charging the defendant with the other crime that makes it a felony?
I looked. In the cases I checked, the second crime was charged.
And an honest observer has to wonder why that second crime wasn't charged in this case. Did the prosecution doubt they could prove it?
Even AI has bias from its training data sets, as we've seen from the NUMEROUS controversies of racism and sexism from AI (like ChatGPT) over the last 2 years.
The universe, and its circumstances, has itself a bias towards occurrences we believe to be unfair. Old news.
True, but I imagined GOFAI -- algorithms you can read and write. Something like an expert system. Not LLM "AI". You seriously wouldn't want to trust your freedom and the nation's fate on confabulatory black box neural nets that nobody can understand, right? ;p
This is going to be appealed; I’m fairly certain it will get overturned on appeal.
Several prosecutors prior declined to prosecute. Centrist legal experts doubted the case. Of course partisans always opined one way or the other, but you had independents questioning this trial.
Worse, the people now complaining are conveniently ignoring how much political effort was put into getting Hunter Biden to look bad just before the election. My rule of thumb these days is, anything republicans blame others of, they're doing themselves, worse.
> On October 14, 2020, twenty days prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published an article based on content provided to the publication by Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.
State conviction, not a federal one. Trump appointed so many federal judges it’s not certain if a federal conviction would stick considering it would be appealed to top federal appeals and Supreme Court.
Do you know if the Federal Supreme Court has the power to overturn this conviction? It’s always felt like the power of SCOTUS is absolute and that they wouldn’t hesitate to issue such an order if a case is brought before them.
And there would be clear grounds to do so, if the state courts rule that it's not necessary to clearly identify, prove, and (most importantly) allow a defense against, the alleged second crime that is an essential element of these charges (without which the charges are only misdemeanors).
That is obviously a violation of due process, punishing someone for an uncharged and unproven second crime.
But that's what was done in this case, under the DA's by all accounts "novel legal theory".
---
Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so I'll respond here. You pointed out that the statute doesn't require proof of the second crime. I agree, it does not.
And that's precisely why the SC could declare it unconstitutional - it punishes an alleged second crime (by elevating the first crime to a felony with more serious penalties) without providing for due process in the prosecution of that second crime.
And I just read about a second reason the SC could overturn the case:
"The Supreme Court has long held, under a doctrine known as the “rule of lenity,” that “fair warning should be given to the world, in language that the common world will understand, of what the law intends to do if a certain line is passed.” Thus, when the meaning of a criminal statute is unclear, the Constitution sometimes requires that statute to be read narrowly because an unclear criminal law did not give potential defendants “fair warning” that their conduct was illegal."
"if the current slate of justices decide that they must have the final word on whether Bragg may prosecute Trump, they could easily invoke the rule of lenity to justify asserting the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over the case."
"and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit
another crime"
That doesn't really seem to require that the second crime is charged, or demand some certain level of proof (it just says "intent to commit another crime"). I guess I agree that if you wanted to make sure the felony stuck you'd charge the second crime in an attempt to establish that intent, but the statute doesn't really spell that out.
And in general, "The defendant had intent to commit another crime" is, in this context, a finding of fact that is in the jury's court.
Successful commission of the crime is not required. Nor is it required that the jury all agree on what other crime was attempted. If the prosecution makes the case that the defendant tried to commit 12 other crimes and each member of the jury thinks intent on a different crime was proven beyond a reasonable doubt, they are well within their conscience to convict.
It's strange how you're both listing the ways this statute denies the accused due process as if that made the law valid. As if merely saying that this law doesn't require due process makes it so.
To me, those are all the reasons this law is unconstitutional. New York shouldn't be able to simply write a law that ignores due process in the prosecution of some other alleged crime.
Put aside your feelings about Trump and ask yourself if that's a situation you'd like to find yourself in: accused of a laundry list of crimes and convicted even if the jury doesn't agree on which one you committed.
>To me, those are all the reasons this law is unconstitutional. New York shouldn't be able to simply write a law that ignores due process in the prosecution of some other alleged crime.
It seems that this trial is just one of many[0] (in fact, such felony cases under this law aren't uncommon at all and no one has successfully made your argument in appeals of cases where this specific law[1] was applied.
Perhaps you could get in touch with one of your former law professors to clarify your reasoning (you are actually a constitutional lawyer, or at least attended law school, right?), as it doesn't seem to comport with the jurisprudence of New York and/or Federal courts.
31 cases in 15 years is hardly proof that "such felony cases under this law aren't uncommon at all".
And that document doesn't say whether the second crime was actually charged in any of those cases. It could well be that in those other cases, due process was observed, the other crime was charged, and the objection I raised here did not apply.
That was true in the first case discussed in the link, The People of the State of New York v. Josue Aguilar Dubon, AKA Saady Dubon, AKA Alejandro Ortiz. "He and his company, Epic Auto Repair Corporation, were indicted on second-degree Tax Fraud, two counts of third-degree Tax Fraud, and two counts of fourth-degree Tax Fraud."
The jury all agree he committed a crime while attempting to commit another crime. They don't have to agree on what what crime, precisely, he was attempting to commit. Due process doesn't really enter into it because he wasn't accused of successfully accomplishing the other crime, merely of attempting one.
This is, to give an analogy, in the same space as OJ Simpson being found guilty of wrongful death and innocent of murder, for committing the same actions, and the fact that he could be tried for both not being a case of double jeopardy.
> This is, to give an analogy, in the same space as OJ Simpson being found guilty of wrongful death and innocent of murder, for committing the same actions, and the fact that he could be tried for both not being a case of double jeopardy.
OJ wasn't "found guilty of wrongful death". He was found liable, because that was a civil case, not a criminal one. That difference is also why double jeopardy didn't apply.
I can't really discuss due process with someone who doesn't know the difference between civil and criminal law.
You are correct, which highlights the way in which common sense can deviate from the actual application of law in an English-common-law-derived system.
The common sense idea would be that investigating the same fact pattern twice would be trying the same crime twice.
The actual law does not agree with that assessment for the reason you have indicated.
Due process doesn't prevent you from being found innocent of a crime and liable on a civil case on the same set of actions, and it (apparently) doesn't prevent you from being found guilty of falsifying documents to attempt a crime without requiring the jury to agree on what crime was attempted.
Trump's case, were he innocent, wouldn't have been hard to win. Even if the prosecution alleged there were 100 possible crimes Trump tried to cover up with false documentation, the defense would only need to provide one reasonable intent that wasn't a crime. That would provide reasonable doubt.
The prosecution won this case by focusing on a specific crime the false documents were meant to conceal and providing a lot of evidence as to Trump's intent. The defense didn't offer a reasonable alternative intent for the false documents. Intent is usually very hard to prove in court, so it should be reassuring that this law has such a guardrail against abuse.
They did not focus "on a specific crime the false documents were meant to conceal". They presented three possible crimes to the jury, but didn't even require them to declare that he had committed any of those crimes, let alone agree on which. If some of the jurors simply believed that "hush money" is illegal (as many people do), they could have convicted on that basis.
Each of the alleged crimes has subtle details that separate it from the perfectly legal practice of paying someone for non-disclosure. By failing to charge a specific crime, the prosecution avoided discussing those details.
Ask yourself: why didn't the prosecution charge Trump with violating 17-152, and avoid this issue? Could it be because they didn't think they would win such a charge?
> They presented three possible crimes to the jury, but didn't even require them to declare that he had committed any of those crimes
The crime he was convicted of requires proof he falsified documents to attempt to commit those other crimes, not that he succeeded. He doesn't have to be guilty of another crime to be guilty of felony record falsification in attempt to commit another crime.
And the statute doesn't require the jury to agree on what crime was attempted. That's a finding of fact left to the jury, but each juror may choose which scenario is most likely; you can't play the scenarios off each other as reasonable doubt if at least one of them is what happened in each juror's individual best judgment.
In response to your edit (learn to post...): So the jury is qualified to adjudicate the charged crime, but they aren't qualified to adjudicate intent of another crime? Or is your argument that they must additionally and explicitly declare that adjudication? Or is it that another jury has to do it ahead of time?
The jury can hardly adjudicate another crime if that crime isn't specified. And they can't do so fairly if the defendant isn't allowed to present a defense for the charges of the second crime.
And they haven't adjudicated a second crime if they don't agree unanimously about what specific crime was committed.
It's a mystery to me why the prosecution, which has mentioned a state crime they claim applies, didn't charge him with that crime. That would have provided due process and made the conviction far more convincing. Were they afraid they couldn't actually prove that crime?
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems from the outside looking in that former President Trump has managed to find himself in the unenviable position of being such a toxic legal client that increasingly few bar professionals are willing to take his case.
It is unfortunate, because the system actually only works if defendants rights are protected by competent counsel. But any public defender can tell you that there's no accounting for your client sabotaging your ability to protect their rights.
Any competent lawyer will tell their client to exercise the right to remain silent, and that saying anything unless directed by your lawyer can dramatically increase your chance of a conviction.
It doesn't even take a keen power of observation to realize that Donald is completely unable to remain silent on anything. His recent civil fines of ever increases amounts are evidence of that. Getting on TV/Twitter/whatever and admitting guilt is not a great way to avoid a conviction at all, the prosecution will gladly, and rightfully, use your own words against you.
Trump's defense team was held back by Trump. Trump is running for office. He's not just trying to win the case, he's trying to maintain an image of perfection for the voters. ("I didn't have sex with her at all, and all of this is just political persecution by a corrupt judge, orchestrated by a president who knows he's losing.") Trump's lawyers were handicapped because they had to try to maintain the image, not just win the case.
That's the genius of '3 felonies a day' ( but muh exaggeration!).
Hunter Biden is next.
Nevermind that probably 10% of HN breaks federal law by possessing weed, and probably another 5% are guilty of serious felony 5+ yrs in jail for simultaneously also living in a house where grandpas shotgun is sitting in a safe somewhere 100 ft from their dimebag of weed.
I hope the people cheering this are aggressively prosecuted for every single crime they've committed. Cuz justice.
I mean if you're running for office and your junky kid gets federally indicted as prohibited person with firearm, something probably 5+% of the populace is unwittingly guilty of due to using pot and being in a house where a gun exists somewhere but basically all but never prosecuted despite being a damning 5+ yr prison charge. The implications aren't too hard to figure out. Some peaceful junky trashing a gun getting federally prosecuted like this is like double lottery ticket winner territory, except it ain't bad luck. It looking more like politics.
I know. What kind of dystopian fascist nightmare do we live in where falsifying business records to hide the hush money you paid to silence your mistress during an election is even a crime?
Basically every business falsifies their records, and sure especially Trump. When Trump was apolitical and being a corrupt businessman this didn't happen, now magically that he is politically active suddenly the felony charges bust out.
He's a criminal sure, but selective prosecution to undermine democratic process destroys democracy and undermines equal application of law. If he was pursued this aggressively before his campaigning when he was doing the same illegal corrupt shit it would look a lot less political.
> now magically that he is politically active suddenly the felony charges bust out.
But the felony counts were of him falsifying business records to break election laws.
He did this while he was political, because he was political, and he hasn't stopped being political since.
There's no suddenly here, it finally happened now because that's the speed of the justice system even with trump doing whatever he could to delay it as long as he could.
The rest of the "political persecution" claims fall apart after that.
The question is which is worse, almost everyone getting away with it until/unless they have political enemies, or most everyone equally pretty much getting away with it.
I'm comparing bad to worse, not good to bad. I'm saying in this case it's worse, even though everyone getting prosecuted may be better.
>The question is which is worse, almost everyone getting away with it until/unless they have political enemies, or most everyone equally pretty much getting away with it.
Except they don't[0]. This is a pretty commonly prosecuted crime.
Of course it’s a political prosecution for Alvin Bragg. But Trump ought to be prosecuted. He tried to overturn the election. Jail is appropriate. If you can’t get him on the actual crime, getting him on a related crime when everyone in America knows in their bones he’s guilty as sin is justice.
Like getting Al Capone on tax crime. Justice isn’t about everything being 100% rule following at all times, it’s about crimes being punished.
Trump is a criminal... but prosecuting him for crimes he actually committed according to the evidence and a jury of his peers... destroys democracy? Sure, Jan.
But it's not selective. Because someone finally prosecuted him. Letting him get away with it because he's rich and because he's running for president while locking up others for lesser crimes would be selective prosecution. If we can't even convict trump how can anyone in our society trust the rule of law?
It's definitely selective. Fauci appears to have lied to Congress about gain of function research funding, a crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Yet he walks free.
Letting him get away with it because he's rich and because he's advised the president while locking up others for lesser crimes would be selective prosecution. If we can't even convict Fauci how can anyone in our society trust the rule of law?
As someone who despises Trump and Biden and generally can see the election horse race from a somewhat dispassionate view, it seems nakedly obvious that aggressive prosecution of record keeping here is raw political selective prosecution as is the interest in Biden's dumpster gun.
Ideally, all are equal before the eyes of the law. But if there be inequality, better the burden to follow the law more closely be upon those with more power and more aspiration, not less.
Is Hunter Capone? Federal prohibited drug user with firearm with no aggravating factors is unicorn prosecution territory. I guarantee 5+% of HN is guilty of this due to weed but it's almost never prosecuted unless as a tack on for some other serious shit. It's naked political attack on the Bidens.
Hunter, as far as I know, does not have any particular power or ambition for political office.
But frankly, I'm not against him being brought to justice for breaking the law either. We have let politicians become too comfortable bending the law to serve their selfish ends; if pinning down Hunter for every law he broke sends a message to the rest that their station can no longer protect their families from the scrutiny of Justice, so be it.
Australian here. My 2 cents. For some reason I kinda like Trump in spite of his antics & theatrics. "Like" may be a strong word. In some respects I "like" Biden too, I've enjoyed some of his speeches, the coherent ones.
I recall Trump's 2016 election victory speech was actually good, well said. Read the transcript. He was sincere in his complements to Hilary, and he emphasised uniting everyone and repairing division which is exactly what leaders should do more often.
In my country we've had some shocker victory speeches from both sides of politics. Rambling egotistical diatribes feature heavily, or straight up reinforcing division and team-sport gloating.
This trial. I don't get it. $130,000 is nothing. NDA payments are legal, but we're told that classifying the payment incorrectly is some great crime? Give me a break, it's a porn star! Who cares if they had sex 20 years ago? Obviously a running president doesn't want a disgruntled porn star blabbing about old raunchy encounters, factual or otherwise. Enter the legal NDA.
America is funny. Bill Clinton lied about his affair with an employee while he was president. The Stormy affair supposedly happened long ago. Regardless of how much Trump is disliked, this trial and conviction is a circus. It confirms "lawfare" is indeed a thing, aimed at what looks to me like a crime no worse than jay-walking, relatively speaking. Good luck USA.
If you don't understand the trial, maybe you should have followed it.
> Who cares if they had sex 20 years ago?
Trump cared. He cared enough to pay her $130,000 for her silence, because he thought if she said what she had to say, he would not have won. This was the finding of the jury, and all that matters as far as his conviction.
> Enter the legal NDA.
If it were paid with legal funds. But it can't be paid for campaign funds, because they have to be accounted for. That's illegal. And you can't get around paying with campaign funds by having your fixer do it for you and then reimbursing him through disguised "legal payments". That's fraud.
Trump did both, so therefore today he's a criminal and a felon.
> this trial and conviction is a circus.
You didn't even pay attention to it, so how would you know? The trial was not a circus at all. It was all above board, the defendant's rights were maintained. Do you have anything specific to say as to how and why it was a circus?
Question: Do you think a candidate for high office should be able to commit and cover up crimes if they think it will increase their chances of getting elected? If not, if they do cover up and commit crimes, and are then elected, do you think they shouldn't be prosecuted if those crimes later come to light? Or are you immune from any crime you commit to get into office as long as you get elected to that office? Because it really seems like people want that to be the case.
Your comment epitomizes the staunch posturing of the expressive political circus that brought this case in the first place.
> "therefore today he's a criminal and a felon"...
This token is repeated ad nauseam. As if the objective is less about justice and more about political ammo; gleeful celebration of tokenized, distributed memes and sound bites. Biden had his prepared statement ready to go: "Nobody is above the law"..."Trump is dangerous" etc.
Your comment begins with "you don't understand", followed by "you didn't pay attention". So simple! You're basically saying "if only your cognitive abilities weren't so lacking, you'd see the trial wasn't a circus at all. Nothing to see here!"
USA is a hugely important ally to my country. We want USA to do well, no matter what party is in power. I wish more people would get behind their president while they're in office, regardless of whether they voted for them or not. Same in my country. It's clear that significant cohorts seek to tear people down with endless negativity, even advocating civil unrest if their choice of president doesn't eventuate. Left and right, tantrum politics is the norm. If you can't see the circus, you are unable to remove yourself from the circus tent.
> As if the objective is less about justice and more about political ammo; gleeful celebration of tokenized, distributed memes and sound bites.
Again, maybe you don't understand American politics if you don't know why people would be happy about this.
> Biden had his prepared statement ready to go: "Nobody is above the law"
Not exactly a statement one needs to prepare, it's what he's been saying for 4 years.
> Your comment begins with "you don't understand", followed by "you didn't pay attention".
I'm not questioning your cognitive abilities, I'm calling you ignorant in as nice a way as I can. In your post you recited a bunch of things you are confused about:
- $130,000 is nothing.
It's not nothing, it's $130,000. In fact it wasn't only $130,000, the total payments to Cohen was $420,000. Either way, you should see the amounts normal people are prosecuted for. The Just Security article linked elsewhere in this thread shows people prosecuted under this law for returning unpurchased items at a store and using store credit. So prosecutors better be lifting their heads for $130k.
- NDA payments are legal
Not if they are unreported and excessive campaign expenditures.
- classifying the payment incorrectly is some great crime
If it's done intentionally as a lie to conceal a campaign finance violation, hell yeah that's a crime.
- Who cares if they had sex 20 years ago?
Trump cared, he thought his wife and family would care, but moreover he thought his voters would care, and he voiced that fact to Hope Hicks, which she testified at trial.
All these facts were learned at trial. So yeah, you would not be asking these questions had you paid attention to the trial.
> Left and right, tantrum politics is the norm. If you can't see the circus, you are unable to remove yourself from the circus tent.
So you can't point to a specific circus in the case of this trial as alleged. Instead you gesture vaguely to political tantrums, which is unconvincing. But note the person throwing the biggest tantrum at the moment is in fact Trump and Republicans. Everyone else as far as I can tell is acting like an adult.
You haven't been paying attention if you believe the moniker "convicted felon" started 3 days ago.
> Again, maybe you don't understand American politics if you don't know why...
Again you're joining unrelated dots to paint a picture of my "misunderstanding & confusion".
> ...people would be happy about this.
Happy about the displacement of justice with weaponising the legal system? There was never any confusion about why some are happy with the guilty verdict.
> It's not nothing
It's relatively nothing. It's white-collar slap-on-wrist stuff. The only difference is your efforts to tie it with crucially pivotal presidential campaign business. The wild claim you know Trump "knew he wouldn't win" unless he covered it up, is a glaring stretch.
Many voters didn't want Hilary, for various reasons. They would have stayed the course, unmoved by scandalous naughty interactions from years ago. Even after Trump's sexist and sorry "locker room talk" caught on mic, women still voted for him. Ask yourself why. Then ask yourself, if they weren't shaken by misogynistic locker-room talk, would they be shaken by sordid Stormy stories. Highly unlikely.
Likewise, many voters don't want Biden. For whatever reason - maybe it's less about Biden and more about not wanting Dems, or Harris after she stared into the camera at Americans and said with a straight face "the border is secure". Maybe that's why people will vote for a convicted felon whose dishonesty about the stationary cupboard is the lesser evil.
> So yeah, you would not be asking these questions had you paid attention to the trial.
I would and I did. Just as millions of others did. I'm asking the questions and all you have is "you don't understand, $130,000 violation, convicted felon etc". If you're trying to convince me of anything having "discovered" my vacuous understanding on the subject, you have failed.
> Circus
Even the judge had to step in to stop the mud-slinging descriptions of ass-slapping money-shot testimonies, unrelated to the case. A circus.
> You haven't been paying attention if you believe the moniker "convicted felon" started 3 days ago.
Can you show me an example of anyone besides a random internet comment using it? Like a journalist, media outlet, or a politician?
I know people are apt to use the phrase "twice impeached" because he was impeached twice. And one-term because he wasn't reelected due to his unpopularity. I know they do say "liable for rape" because he was found to have done that in a court of law. But no, I haven't heard "convicted felon" before he actually became a convicted felon, I'll be surprised if you can back that up substantially.
> my "misunderstanding & confusion".
You said it, not me.
> Happy about the displacement of justice with weaponising the legal system?
You are Australian, and here you are repeating American right wing propaganda to shit on a system of justice about which you know nothing except filtered through said right wing propaganda. Just stop? Please?
Can you even explain precisely how the system was weaponized without referencing said right wing sources?
You can't because it wasn't. We'll let the appeals process prove that for you, but the mere fact Trump is now given the right of an appeal should make clear that the system that's applied to everyone else is working for him, and that's not a "weaponization" of anything.
Trump was tried in a fair and speedy manner, he was was informed of all charges against him, his bail was set at a reasonable amount, he received all due process in accordance with the 14th and 5th amendments, he was presumed innocent throughout the trial, he was given a rigorous defense and was adequately represented by counsel, he heard all the evidence against him, he was afforded the right to cross examine all witnesses, he maintained his 5th amendment right to not testify, a jury of his peers applied the facts to the law and convicted him unanimously, and he will be sentenced fairly under the 8th amendment. And again, this whole process is subject to review and that is his right as well.
So where is the problem? Where does the weaponization come in? The prosecutor was independent of any political influence and they weren't even feds. Who is doing this weaponization? Joe Biden? How? And if Joe Biden is weaponizing the legal system, why is it prosecuting his own son? Does Joe Biden hate his own son that much?
Sorry, but this whole "weaponization" idea is literally a Republican political talking point, and you've bought into it from across the world for some reason. Republicans formed a whole committee over it and have had hearings for years now about this idea, hearings which crucially haven't actually produced evidence of weaponization! They keep promising it will come though!
> It's relatively nothing.
This is why I don't think you really paid attention to the trial at all, because the reason the amount breaks the law was explained at trial.
Anyway, I can understand why none of this seems important to you, seeing as it's about a political system that you are not a part of and which doesn't impact your life like it does mine. Maybe I'll try to explain it to you. In America we have a system where you have to spend money to get elected. The more money you spend the better your chances of getting elected. Because of this, everyone who is running for office has to report campaign expenditures, because there are limits on what people can spend.
Donald Trump felt that what Stormy had to say would hurt his campaign. This is not my "wild claim", this is a matter of fact determined by the jury as part of their verdict, so that's a settled matter. Trump felt that what Stormy had to say about their affair would hurt his chances at getting elected. Again, the evidence for this was presented at court and I don't have to repeat it here because you assure me you followed the trial, but if you didn't you can find it in the testimony of Hope Hicks and David Pecker who presented the best evidence of this fact. Anyway, the jury found that evidence credible.
So he committed fraud to hide everything. This was not a mere "white collar crime" -- this was a circumvention of the safeguards of the democratic process. If that's tolerated, then all slimeball shitbag candidates (and there are many) will do the same thing: hide their affairs, their rapes, their assaults all their dirty laundry through the same slimeball sleazebag scheme Trump came up with here.
Maybe that kind of behavior is tolerated in Australian politics, but it's a felony in America.
> I'm asking the questions...
You're asking questions that were answered clearly at trial. I'm not trying to convince you of anything.
> Even the judge had to step in to stop the mud-slinging descriptions of ass-slapping money-shot testimonies, unrelated to the case. A circus.
Erm, it's more like if you convict a clown, there's going to be evidence of a circus at trial. That testimony was relevant to the charged conduct, and the defendant invited the testimony when he denied the affair happened. If he didn't want to be embarrassed by contrary testimony, he should have just admitted the conduct. Don't you think it's highly relevant that the jury believe the affair happened if they're going to accept the lengths to which Trump went to conceal it?
That's not the same as the trial being a circus, and you admit that when you say the judge kept things in order.
> NDA payments are legal, but we're told that classifying the payment incorrectly is some great crime? Give me a break, it's a porn star! Who cares if they had sex 20 years ago? Obviously a running president doesn't want a disgruntled porn star blabbing about old raunchy encounters, factual or otherwise. Enter the legal NDA.
Neither having sex with a porn star, nor paying a porn star to be quiet about the sex is illegal. Fraud is illegal, though, and is much worse than jay-walking.
A guilty verdict is likely to motivate a large section of his own base to vote for him, but will also hurt his chances to sway undecided voters to vote for him.
In the end, it's going to depend on how many are motivated to vote for the democrats, and how many are motivated to vote for/against trump.
I don't think so. I think more people are going to see this as a politically motivated kangaroo show trial than not. It takes some votes away, but it gives him others, at best I think it chsnges the calculus by roughly 0.
I think you underestimate the number of people who thought "they can't impeach a president for getting a blowjob" and actually meant it rather than using it as a tool of political expediency. Those people don't see this as justice. I think more people are principled than not.
Idk, you'd think there would come a point when enough people say he's a fraud that it gets through to his base. He's now a convicted felon, representing the party of "law and order". That shouldn't end well.
I think the more interesting question is how many of the people who aren’t ardent supporters will still vote for him. There are enough Republicans who didn’t like him but still wanted their party to win to shift an election which was already tight. This goes double for anyone who is not a complete diehard on the subject of abortion and might be asking themselves why they’re carrying water for a convicted felon, especially since they already got the tax cuts.
Trump supporters aren't going to sway the election.
They were always going to vote for him and will always vote for him.
The election is going to get decided at the margins by the kind of people who can still get swayed one way or the other to vote or not vote for one or the other candidate.
Actually convicting him can give a solid reason for someone who would have only very reluctantly voted for him to switch to Biden or just not vote at all. Old school Reagan conservatives who find that voting for an actual convicted felon is something they just won't do. It does create an additional nice red line of illegality, which should still matter to a few folks. It will cause some ethical problems with some Republicans for voting for him, and it really doesn't take much. The 2016 election was decided by a few 10,000s of people in 3-4 different states.
Where it can backfire, though, is if the conviction is overturned on appeal.
I think you're missing a big factor here: both candidates have a track record as president. We haven't had that in a long time, often it's only the incumbent with a record, which we usually associate as in their favor. Part of that record, for both of them, isn't due to anything they did, but the times they ran things are associated with them. And of course part of it they're each responsible for.
Despite all the rhetoric, Trump has a pretty good track record to the average american. Wars ending, dollar a gallon gas. In contrast, Biden doesn't look too good. Wars starting, groceries going up weekly. We can say what is who's fault and what is out of their control and whatever, that is just noise to all but decided voters. I think that this case will sway some away, sway some for that don't like what they see as political weaponization of the justice system, and all in all it stays in Trumps favor.
> Despite all the rhetoric, Trump has a pretty good track record to the average american. Wars ending, dollar a gallon gas. In contrast, Biden doesn't look too good. Wars starting, groceries going up weekly. We can say what is who's fault and what is out of their control and whatever, that is just noise to all but decided voters.
Voters are able to assign fault to some degree, or they'd also assign "global pandemic starting" to Trump's record.
That's the thing, I think he gets a pass on that. Probably doesn't get a pass on the lockdown or money printing, but no reasonable person blames the president for an illness. A war between foreign countries, lots of people have it in their heads that the president is very powerful and can start or stop stuff like that, true or not, but an illness...
Do you think Alexey Navalny‘s conviction for embezzlement caused him to lose any supporters? Probably not. It was a transparently political use of the justice system to sideline an opponent.
People I’ve talked to feel the same way about Trump. I’ve asked why vote in the primary for a candidate who lost the midterms and his last election, and the sentiment is that “We can’t let them get away with it” meaning the lawfare against Trump.
It almost certainly won't sway very many. But the Electoral College means that a small number of voters in the right place can radically change the outcome.
His supporters can't "vote harder", so it's entirely a question of how the marginal voters comes down on it. They don't have to switch their vote, but just decide to stay home.
I doubt the effect will be measurable, given the vast number of confounding variables. But should he lose, they will almost certainly ascribe it at least in part to the conviction.
>People I’ve talked to feel the same way about Trump
You should tell them they're mistaken. He isn't being sidelined or kept off the ballot. That's a blatant lie that he is spreading himself. The case was supposed to happen last year until him and his lawyers used procedural tactics to delay it into this year. At any point he could have quietly chosen to settle, publicly declare innocence and then let the news pass just like he did with the Trump University case. But again, he chose not to for this one.
1. Those are unrelated to the falsifying business records case, and those efforts weren't what Trump and his campaign have been referring to for these past few days anyway.
2. Those cases happened because Trump is alleged to have led a violent coup against his own government in violation of the 14th amendment. Something we all seem to have forgot with this constant distraction of courtrooms that this individual finds himself in.
3. Several of those cases were in states that Trump won. Of the several states that Biden won, the challenges were dismissed. Based on your link, it is entirely unfounded to claim this was political retribution.
4. In March the Supreme Court ruled none of them can proceed anyway and the map is irrelevant now, the article says this too. The 14th amendment can't be enforced by state courts, it has to be enforced by Congress.
In my opinion, you have to ignore a staggering number of facts and disregard all the actions of every single person in the courtroom all this month, including the actions of Trump and his own lawyers, to believe that this case in any way a political hit job. The judge actually went out of his way to prevent the prosecution from making it about that; the case was entirely about the illegal ways he conducted business along with his subordinates. Read the transcripts yourself if you don't believe me. https://pdfs.nycourts.gov/PeopleVs.DTrump-71543/transcripts/
His base thinks he's a victim of a conspiracy by the "deep state" to convict him on fraudulent charges by a kangaroo court. They don't for a second believe he's guilty of anything except being too much of a radical iconoclast for "the man" to handle.
I mean, I assume his base know he's a fraud. He has never made all that much of a secret of it. They just don't care. Like, approximately no-one, you'd assume, is, at this point, saying: "I'm voting for Trump, the noted honest legitimate businessman... wait, he was convicted of a CRIME? Well then I'm not voting for him." His voters know he's a crook.
A significant number of people who told pollsters they were planning to vote for Trump said they would change their mind if he was convicted in court. The question is whether these voters are in swing states.
All 34 charges are first degree felonies. Falsifying business records, up to four years per count, with a maximum sentence of 20 if served consecutively.
And past the statute of limitations unless they can be presented as felonies. Stand by for things to get very weird... I just hope they don’t get “kinetic.”
Eligibility to be on the ballot varies from state to state.
But he can of course be written in, and it will be interesting to see what happens if he becomes the People's choice via write-in on the ballot of states where a felony bars you from the ballot.
I believe in general he could still be elected because there's no federal law against a felon holding the presidency and technically in States, you vote for the slate of electors (all of whom are eligible to serve), not the person they are voting for.
Even assuming the case where it was indeed politically motivated to bring a case forwards in the first place, a jury of peers had to be selected by the lawyers of both sides.
And that jury of his peers found him guilty, unanimously, on all counts.
Thanks to that jury selection process, there's no informed way to claim that the jury was politically motivated so in the end his loss is going to hurt his chances.
Agreed. For all the craziness of American politics, I generally believe our jury system is the "shining star" of our country's institutions.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but I generally believe that when you get 12 well-intentioned people together, the outcome is much better than when you have politicians giving quips to the cameras. Every single person I know that has served on a jury has said they were very impressed with the thoughtfulness and professionalism of their fellow jurors.
I was on a jury and some of them were reasonable, competent people, but I was shocked by a couple of them at how clueless and careless they were. They basically made a choice at the beginning of the trial and didn't seem to listen to anything after that.
What is asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence.
So far as I saw from following the trial (not super closely, so I may have missed something), no defense witnesses were prevented from testifying if they had relevant evidence. (You don't just get to put, say, Trump's hairstylist on the stand, unless they have something to say that touches on admissible evidence.)
The part that seems more in line with the claim by the green account was not about witnesses, but lines of argument.
There's a claim called "advice of counsel". In this case, it would be claiming that Trump's lawyers told him to do this. Well, in a criminal trial, you don't get to just claim "my lawyer told me to do it" and that's automatically a get-out-of-jail-free card. No, the prosecution gets to examine that claim. In particular, they get to put your lawyers on the stand and ask them questions, under oath, even though those questions touch on matters that would normally be covered by attorney-client confidentiality. [That is, asserting that defense leads to loss of attorney-client confidentiality in areas covered by the claim of advise of counsel.]
Trump's attorneys chose not to assert that defense. They told the judge, before the trial, that they weren't going to use that defense. Then, during the trial, they wanted to make an argument that was something like "recommendation of counsel", where it would sound to the jury like "advice of counsel", but the prosecution wouldn't get to grill the lawyers. That is, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
The judge didn't let them do it. Trump's lawyers tried, at least twice with different wording, and the judge blocked it. Rightly so - you don't get to skirt the restrictions by trying to re-word the label.
I despise this guy as much as any sane person. And for sure he did everything he was judged for, and much more actually, even before becoming president.
But for better or worse, people in power have some kind of immunity, especially for minor things. When political opponents are pursued for those minor things, it's a bad sign for democracy.
Committing felonies to deprive voters of information which could change the outcome an election isn’t exactly a minor crime, and it’s at least as bad for a democracy to have people everyone knows are guilty skate free because of their political power. I think the idea that no man is above the law is highly important so the correct path here should be having those cases be meaningful and carefully prosecuted, as was the case here.
> But for better or worse, people in power have some kind of immunity,
Varies a lot by country.
> especially for minor things.
Interestingly it's almost always intended to only apply to official actions taken as part of the duty of office, although it's often watered down and extended.
eg: "A sitting president of the United States is granted immunity for Official Acts taken as President."
however "It is under legal dispute whether he also enjoys immunity from criminal liability or prosecution."
and " Neither civil nor criminal immunity is explicitly granted in the Constitution or any federal statute".
It's certainly not the case that US founders intended to extend immunity to random US citizens who are merely running for POTUS, nor that immunity should be extended backwards in time should they end up as POTUS.
In other contexts, eg: Australia, the matter of Executive Immunities leads with
It is a fundamental tenet of the rule of law that no one is above the law. This principle applies to the government, its officers and instrumentalities: their conduct should be ruled by the law.
and goes on to describe why there are exceptions for the "big stuff" and not for minor things (shoplifting is still a crime).
How was it politically motivated? He was guilty. If anything is politically motivated it's the Florida judge appointed by Trump delaying his secret document stealing trial past the election.
This very much reminds me of my home Russia. Like that time when Navalny was sentenced for fraud and stealing all the lumber, and Putin's press secretary remarking that courts in our country are fully independent and it is absurd to insinuate that the verdict was politically motivated.
This seems like an odd story to base that on. Laws being fairly applied following centuries of legal precedent isn’t exactly a civil war, although the reaction could be if someone tried to break him out of jail or something like that. Fair trials of political leaders is a hallmark of functioning democracy.
> Fair trials of political leaders is a hallmark of functioning democracy.
Yet this is the first time a US president has ever been brought to trial.
And one could argue that the case against him was based on a legal technicality, where the crime itself is hard to define (and the prosecution wasn't required to fully define it, or the jurors required to agree on it).
The crime was very cut and dry. What might confusing is that the felony level escalation could be triggered by any one of several crimes and those don’t have to be committed by the same person: it could have been related to the tax evasion or attempted election influence but since Michael Cohen had already plead guilty to violating campaign finance laws as well as tax fraud, all prosecutors had to do was show that this crime was committed in part to cover up Cohen’s uncontested crimes. I doubt they’d have had trouble getting an additional conviction on election interference since it’s so clear that was his concern (c.f. Trump’s stated fears about alienating women voters) but a prosecutor is almost always going to take a given rather than having to risk something going wrong.
> The crime was very cut and dry. What might confusing is that the felony level escalation could be triggered by any one of several crimes and those don’t have to be committed by the same person
Yeah, so not cut and dry.
And the "confusing" part is required to arrive at a guilty verdict. The falsifying records charge cannot stand on it's own because the statute of limitations (2 years) has passed. Prosecutors had to engineer the charges into a felony via accusing Trump of violating NY election law (or maybe tax law?), which is anything but cut and dry.
But the only way the jury could find him guilty of the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records was to conclude that Trump had done such falsification with the goal of committing another (second) crime.
And my point is, he was not tried or convicted of that second crime. Rather, the prosecution gave the jurors options to select from, and it was up to each juror to conclude that he was guilty of one of them. The prosecution didn't have to demonstrate that he was guilty of a specific crime, and the jurors didn't have to agree with eachother on the second crime.
Not saying the jurors got it wrong. They probably determined (or were instructed) that if they believed he had the affair and they believed that he didn't want the public (or the IRS) to know about it then that's enough to require a guilty verdict.
"They probably determined (or were instructed) that if they believed he had the affair and they believed that he didn't want the public (or the IRS) to know about it then that's enough to require a guilty verdict."
Because it was, based on the criteria and definition of the charge, as another member has kindly linked you. Full stop.
From the moment Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced charges against Trump more than one year ago, people doubted his unconventional strategy.
“It cheapens the term election interference to call this election interference,” says Richard Hasen, a professor of law at UCLA. Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, called the case “an embarrassment” that pushed the boundaries of prosecutorial ethics.
It is not illegal to pay someone “hush money.” On its face, Bragg’s evidence pointed to 34 misdemeanor counts of falsifying business records, for all of which the statute of limitations had passed. Bragg’s novel approach bumped each of those misdemeanors up to first-degree felony charges by alleging they were all committed to bolster another crime related to violating election laws, but Bragg didn’t have to prove that second crime.
Prosecutors allege that Trump falsified the records to hide a violation of New York Election Law Section 17-152 – a rarely used law that prohibits groups from using unlawful means to influence an election.
Yeah, yeah. Trump's supporters swore on a stack of Bibles that there would be civil war if he was convicted. They've been making threats since Jan. 6th.
Well I guess now that the gauntlet's been thrown they'll just have to pull up or shut up.
I've already erased several snarky, gloating replies because I would like to see discussion of this proceed in something like a civil manner.