I get that. But I think it is unlikely that he would be facing 34 felonies if he wasn't running next year.
Trump attacks judge and prosecutor hours after being told to stop doing that News Flash: Trump appears to not be able to control himself. What is the under/over for when Trump gets slapped with a gag order?
Trump has skated on so many crimes his entire life, that you may be right, The DA would have to consider whether it was worth it to spend 10+x the resources to try Trump versus letting him skate with a sternly written letter.
Bragg, in his public annoucement yesterday, said said that other crimes include alleged election law violations. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/explainer-charges-does-trump-face-235922186.html Trump's one-time fixer pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges of causing an unlawful campaign contribution and making an excessive campaign contribution tied to the scheme. The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan has not charged Trump, who it referred to in its charging document against Cohen as "Individual-1," with any crime. this is about Trump, the presidential candidate, using his money and influence to silence potentially damaging stories that might make voters choose another candidate, particularly as Trump's reputation was suffering at the time from comments (Access Hollywood tape) he'd made about women.
Honestly, I think it would not be pursued. So, in that sense, I'm glad he's running because indictments against him ought to be pursued. The choice to not indict would be politically motivated -- the desire to avoid conflict with politically powerful people who could ruin your career. If Trump retired, prosecutors could too easily rationalize taking the easy path and saying it's better to let sleeping dogs lie, that it's "not worth it" to spend that much money and cause that much unrest over a crime that doesn't matter anymore, but in so doing would leave the precedent of presidential impunity. That Trump is running means that prosecutors aren't let off the hook of their civic responsibilities. Prosecutors doing their jobs isn't political; prosecutors intimidated or enticed to not do their jobs is political. The construct of your question suggests you're thinking about this whole case backwards. If the DA suspected someone of murder but then the suspect became quadriplegic, the DA wouldn't say to himself, 'well, he probably can't murder again so I'll just let it alone.' No, he prosecutes the crimes committed in the past. The courts, in their sentencing, can consider the chances of re-offending or whatever else is in their rubric. But that's for the court; the prosecutor prosecutes. I doubt it. I think it really takes this damned long to bring a white collar crime to trial.
Don't get me wrong, I am not upset at the indictment. But most people agree that if he wasn't running, he would not have been indicted. That by definition is a form of election interference.
Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich https://ethicsalarms.com/2023/04/05/apparently-donald-trump-is-a-ham-sandwich/
That's not a felony. If he used campaign money to do that, then it'd be a felony. Trump should be in prison, but for Georgia, not this. This is DA overcharging and legal stretching for fame/security/values/whatever.
here is the McCarthy essay: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/braggs-indictment-even-fails-as-an-indictment/ Bragg’s ‘Indictment’ Even Fails as an Indictment By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY April 4, 2023 10:02 PM What a disgrace. It’s always possible to be surprised. The indictment brought by Manhattan’s elected Democratic district attorney Alvin Bragg against Donald Trump is even worse than I’d imagined. Bragg’s indictment fails to state a crime. Not once . . . but 34 times. On that ground alone, the case should be dismissed — before one ever gets to the facts that the statute of limitations has lapsed and that Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce federal law (if that’s what he’s trying to do, which remains murky). Bragg’s indictment charges 34 counts, just as we said it would, based on media reporting that clearly came from illegal leaks of grand-jury information — a crime, you can be sure, that goes in the overflowing bucket of serious offenses that Bragg refuses to prosecute. The 34 counts are arrived at by taking what is a single course of conduct and absurdly slicing it into parts, each one of which is charged as a separate felony carrying its own potential four-year prison term. Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen in monthly installments during 2017 for the $130,000 paid to p*rn star Stormy Daniels right before the 2016 election for her silence about an alleged affair. That, in reality, is a single transaction: Trump paying back a debt to Cohen. Yet, because Trump paid in installments and each installment includes an invoice from Cohen, a bookkeeping entry by the Trump Organization, and a payment to Cohen by check, Bragg not only charges each monthly installment separately; he subdivides the installments into installments (as if the invoice, book entry, and check were independent criminal events). Voilà, one transaction becomes 34 felonies! As I observed a few days ago, this is exactly the sort of abusive behavior that rogue prosecutors engage in, and thus that the Justice Department admonishes federal prosecutors to avoid. Here — from the Manhattan DA’s office that the legendary lawman Robert Morgenthau led for 34 years, no less — we now have as egregious an example of this low tactic as one can find. In a real prosecutor’s office, the district attorney is the adult who makes sure his inexperienced young subordinates don’t abuse their enormous power this way. In the Manhattan DA’s office, Bragg is the exemplar of abuse. The tactics only further demonstrate the shoddiness of the case. A prosecutor holding a weak hand tries to hoodwink the jury into believing the defendant must be an incorrigible criminal, despite the lack of evidence; hence the dozens of counts. A prosecutor holding a weak hand also hedges his bets in this way: The jury may flush most of the indictment down the drain, but the unscrupulous prosecutor knows if he can secure a single guilty verdict, even with 33 acquittals, he has achieved his objective of branding his target a felon. The worst due-process abuse of Bragg’s indictment, however, is that . . . it’s not an indictment. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantees that Americans may not be accused of a serious crime — essentially, a felony — absent an indictment approved by a grand jury. The indictment has two purposes. First, it must put the defendant on notice of exactly what crime has been charged so that he may prepare his defense. Second, the indictment sets the parameters for the defendant’s closely related right to double-jeopardy protection, also set forth in the Fifth Amendment. That is, by stating the crime charged, the indictment enables the defendant to claim a double-jeopardy violation if the prosecutor attempts to try him a second time on the same offense. Here, the indictment fails to say what the crime is. Bragg says he is charging Trump with felony falsification of records, under Section 175.10of New York’s penal code. To establish that offense, Bragg must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump caused a false entry to be made in his business records, and did so with an intent to defraud that specifically included trying to “commit another crime or aid or conceal the commission” of that other crime. Nowhere in the indictment does the grand jury specify what other crime Trump fraudulently endeavored to commit or conceal by falsifying his records. That is an inexcusable failure of notice. The indictment fails to alert Trump of what laws he has violated, much less how he violated them. If any prosecutor were ever daft enough in the future to accuse Trump of falsifying records to conceal, say, a federal campaign-finance crime, Bragg’s indictment would be useless for double-jeopardy purposes because it doesn’t specify what criminal jeopardy Trump is in. We needn’t speculate why Bragg is being so coy about this. He doesn’t have another crime. At his press conference, be blathered about federal campaign-finance law, but he knows he lacks jurisdiction to enforce federal law. He further mumbled something about state election laws, but those — as you might imagine — apply to elections for state office, not the presidency. And the DA’s stream of consciousness about Trump’s intent to defraud tax authorities is belied by the fact that he does not accuse Trump of evading taxes — despite having already prosecuted the Trump organization for tax evasion, a case that neither named Trump as a defendant nor cited the hush-money scheme as a source of tax crimes. Here’s the thing, though: Prosecutors don’t get to be coy with the grand jury. The district attorney is the grand jury’s legal adviser in the indictment process. Consequently, he has the duty to instruct the grand jury on the law applicable to the charges proposed. So . . . what crime did Bragg’s office instruct the grand jury that Trump was trying to commit or conceal by falsifying business records? There has to be one, at least in theory. But if Bragg did not spell it out, then the grand jury cannot have found probable cause of the crime charged, which is the grand jury’s function. I’d like to think a prosecutor would not make so basic an error as failing to advise the grand jury of the alleged crime at issue. But if Bragg had properly instructed the grand jury, then surely the crime in question would have been explained in the indictment. It’s not. Moreover, the document Bragg has the temerity to label his “statement of facts,” filed with the court in tandem with the no-notice indictment, is itself a work of fiction. He alleges that Trump falsified his records to conceal “damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.” But every one of the 34 acts that Bragg charges as felonies happened after the 2016 election — from February through December 2017. Bragg would like to be able to charge Trump with keeping unflattering information from the voting public. But all candidates for public office (no doubt including the progressive Democrat elected to the Manhattan district attorney’s post) try to airbrush unfavorable information — that’s electoral politics. Bragg’s problem is that it is not a crime to pay people for their silence: Nondisclosure arrangements are not just legal, they are a staple of the civil-justice system. The nondisclosure arrangements are the only relevant events in the case that occurred before the 2016 election. They are not crimes, but Bragg is hellbent on accusing Trump of crimes, so he is left to suggest — because he cannot prove — that Trump skirted campaign-finance laws. Put aside, though, that Bragg does not have the nerve to actually charge the federal crimes he is coyly intimating. To show how moronic this is, let’s pretend that these hush-money deals were in-kind campaign expenditures, that Trump decided to regard them as such, and that Trump’s campaign disclosed them to the Federal Election Commission as Bragg’s fantasy version of the law mandated. Even if all that were true, the law would not have required the Trump campaign to disclose the expenditures until the next reporting period after they occurred, sometime months into 2017. That is, such disclosures would not possibly have influenced the 2016 election. What a disgrace.
Most people should be agreeing that “if Republicans impeached” he would have not been indicted for this crime. Why do people keep letting Republicans off the hook in this debate?? When Republicans decided not to impeach they put prosecutors in a bind where they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. A president is supposed to be held to account by Congress first and foremost for high crimes and misdemeanors. Much less felonies.
This is the part that I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND. Jan 6th was the perfect opportunity for the GOP to all jump ship and finally move on from that buffoon. But they didn't. They actually doubled down. I guess I was a naïve Republican who always assumed most of the GOP was just supporting Trump to get what they wanted and would quickly discard him after he was out of office. Bad on me for overestimating the GOP. #WontHappenAgain
brutal the case has to be thrown out by a higher court, because the Manhattan judge/jury/DA will all be blindly anti-Trump
The judge scheduled the next hearing for December, which seems an obvious violation of the right to a speedy trial.
Wow, just f*cking wow. This is not a serious opinion. Try again. Trump wants the trial as quick as ... spring next year when it would take place in the heat of the primaries.
Makes sense. Look, Trump undermines justice all the time. It's very reasonable to believe that's he's a criminal who puts himself above the law. That stated, this case doesn't help imo other cases, but undermines the justice system, divides the country even more (yes, Trump does so himself), and opens a can of worms. Do all of the above for a good case that has real legal grounding, like Georgia. The deluded Trump world will just brush off Georgia as another political stunt because of this political stunt.
