It’s why they didn’t stick him on emoluments, nepotism, tax dodging - even “improperly storing classified documents” somehow turned out to be a brush too broad.
So now Alvin Bragg is (supposedly) indicting him for campaign finance violations. Okay. He’s probably guilty. But both Obama and Hillary paid fines for the exact same crime. So did John Edwards, for a VERY similar situation to the Stormy Daniels thing iirc.
This isn’t whataboutism - my point is that, if this indictment goes forward with the rumored rationale, every single politician will now have to watch their ass on campaign funds for the foreseeable future lest the opposing party find out.
That’s a good thing for America and a very obnoxious thing for the entire political class. I suspect Alvin Bragg is getting many angry phone calls tonight from folks who would otherwise like to fire Trump into the sun.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/08/22/election-law-violatio...
Potentially we could see several other indictments. Such as the Federal cases for the classified documents and the Georgia case for interfering with an election.
This is just the first one. Doesn’t have to be the last nor does it mean he is instantly ruled guilty and is going to prison or paying a fine. He will have his chance in court to make a case for his innocence in the face of these specific charges.
The United States has many local prosecutors that operate independently within their jurisdictions and are not bound to hold their charges in deference to some other charges that may be more serious coming later.
They very clearly have the capability to coordinate the entire media apparatus, law enforcement, etc to cuff a sitting Governor and quickly send him to a federal pit and down the memory hole for essentially the exact same sort of quid pro quo that was underpinning the first Trump impeachment.
Trump isn’t Phoenix Wright, he’s only still a free man because the Blob either can’t come to a consensus on “Blago’ing” him - or else the constant “The walls are closing in on Drumpf THIS time” drama is serving a larger purpose.
It's not the job of all those intelligence agencies to do that. This is a law and order question, which must be handled by the legal system, not the NSA and CIA.
The alleged crime happened 8 years ago by now. Some more recent misdeeds might still yield more indictments.
The jurisdiction is New York state, where Trump's status as former president is irrelevant (unlike insurrection related issues, which I guess are federal, and therefore for which his status as sitting president would've made impeachment the remedy rather than criminal prosecution).
There is a cooperating witness spilling the beans on this one. On his mini coup attempt, maybe they were a bit better at containing associates.
I'm sorry, I'll try to reword it to come across differently. My whole question is: Why hasn't he been indicted of bigger/harsher crimes already?
I think that's a perfectly reasonable question. The basic answer I'd give is that the bigger/harsher a crime is the longer it takes to build as a case.
The bigger or harsher a crime is, it usually has more protections and requirements in order to prove. It takes longer to gather the relevant evidence, longer to put together a theory of the case, and longer to button everything down and present to a grand jury.
It's kind of like asking why it takes developers longer to build the biggest/coolest features in a video games. It's a lot more work!
This was also a question that came up quite frequently when the first Jan 6th defendants were charged. The first wave of defendants were charged with things like "trespassing" and other fairly mild charges. A lot of people were upset about that. But they just came first because they were much easier cases to proves and make. Eventually more serious charges such as "assault with a deadly weapon", "obstructing congress" and "seditious conspiracy" were later charged and convicted in front of a jury.
So, I generally wouldn't be surprised to see the easier/simpler cases come before more complicated cases. That's not to say that he will be charged with bigger/harsher crimes. Maybe the facts won't bear those cases out, and they won't be charged. But the ordering doesn't seem like it should be particularly surprising.
Prosecutors in their respective jurisdictions should look for crimes and prosecute if they see malfeasance. In the case of NY, these are the charges that were at the top of the priority list for that one prosecutor. Multiple other prosecutors are looking at crimes in other jurisdictions and I would expect Trump to be facing charges in at least 2 and maybe 3 or 4 courtrooms on entirely independent indictments.
They will do ANYTHING to stop him out of fear, anger, arrogance etc. The problem here is Trump is an expert at reflection. This HAS ALREADY empowered his base, and strengthened Ron Desantis.
I think the hardest part to accept is nearly half the nation DOES NOT AGREE with progressive principles at their very core.
It's like if your baseball team lost a game and saying "yeah, but they had the fewest batters struck out!" OK... but that's not how the winner is determined, and both teams would have played differently if it were. We can't know what the outcome would have been, in that case.
Also, broadly speaking, being progressive means wanting change and being conservative means being more comfortable with the status quo. It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote, more of those would be latent conservatives. Or at least, it’s very hard to see a progressive majority in there.
I'll do it too:
Republicans have won 8 out of the past 14 elections, and won the popular vote as well as the electoral college in six out of eight [1].
Or, looking at it another way, of the past 14 elections, republicans won the popular vote by an average of 7.42%, while democrats only won by 5.28%, which if you took that pointless cherry picked data seriously could convince you that on average republican candidates are significantly more popular than democrats.
The fact is, this country is split fairly evenly along the nonsensical left/right axis.
A more interesting evaluation would be along the authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian axis. I think a much larger percentage of Americans fall along the antiauthoritarian axis, and that the noise in the left/right false dichotomy is a result of that more than anything.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
There's a reason we don't do popular vote; California and New York would pretty much pick the president every election.
Take a look at the geographic distribution of red v blue by county in the 2020 presidential election [1].
Relying on only the popular vote could devolve the country into a hunger games type dystopian hellscape where 90% of the country is controlled by a few dense urban clusters.
ANYTHING, eh? Please tell me, what did they do? Trump won an election (thanks to the mechanics of the Electoral College), he served as president, he passed laws (some of which the courts overturned, as happens with most presidents), he handed out pardons (some wise, some not), and then he lost an election.
What is this "ANYTHING" that has been done to stop him?
Attempting to take a popular political figure out by blatant abuse of the legal abuse is a bit more concerning.
I assume murder. What else?
