Here is an analogy I thought of. Say my firm's database gets ransomewared. If I pay the ransom directly, that may be a particular way of accounting. But say, I pay McCohen Computer Associates to fix the problem. Why do I not book it as a computer expense? I am not an accountant but am curious how this works.
Also, booking something in the wrong accounting category, doesn't seem like a very convincing charge. On the other hand, Tax and election violations are very serious.
In the end, this is important though as we already have convictions that his company was committing tax fraud but those don't go back to him personally because the CFO was non-cooperative (and Trump probably wasn't directly involved enough to be convicted).
The campaign finance part though is definitely personally handled by him. He allegedly used money donated by people to his campaign to pay his lawyer who then used the money to pay Stormy Daniels. That money was billed as legal expenses for the campaign. That's more than accounting fraud - it's tax fraud and it's fraud against our democracy.
Cohen really got a raw deal from the prosecutor and basically got threatened with more charges, and his wife getting charged, unless he pleads guilty within a day or so. That's why the quality of the individual charges in that plea deal can't be taken for granted.
No, he hasn't. He pled guilty to seven unrelated financial charges and to one charge related to the payment to Stormy Daniels: making an excessive campaign contribution.
That last charge doesn't apply to Trump, who is allowed to contribute as much as he wants to his own campaign.
And Cohen's plea tells us nothing about whether recording the payment as "legal expenses" is a crime.
Assuming the charges are limited to the Daniels payment, you're correct. It's a weak case. They have to prove the misdemeanor accounting charge, then to elevate to a felony, the DA must prove that crime was used to cover-up some other more serious crime (likely campaign finance related).
The last time a similar case was brought, it was against John Edwards (who took money to pay for housing for his mistress, or something like that). He was acquitted.
But, it appears the indictment has 34(?) charges. If they're counting each check to Cohen as a charge, that's 11(?), so there's something else there. Some of that could be conspiracy charges, but we don't know.
Say my firm's database gets ransomewared. If I pay the ransom directly, that may be a particular way of accounting. But say, I pay McCohen Computer Associates to fix the problem. Why do I not book it as a computer expense? I am not an accountant but am curious how this works.
The two-step payment through Cohen is only illegal if it's done to cover up other illegal activities or it's in violation of some other law.
In this case, it's likely the hush money was funneled through Cohen to keep it off the campaign books - that's what makes it illegal.
So, regardless of what you think of the case. Leaving out that somebody was already successfully convicted of this exact crime is a significant omission.
We do not know the charges yet of course. The most significant are likely to be campaign finance related with details of falsified records and hush money payments providing supporting evidence of those crimes as much as they are crimes themselves.
The fact that Cohen is a lawyer would seem to indicate that the case was solid enough that he was concerned he would lose on merit. However, a friend of mine who is managing partner in a legal firm says that "Once a trial goes to a jury, it's approximately a coin flip as to who will win, and the odds only go down from there." That's mainly because if the case is black-and-white, then there will be some settlement/plea deal prior to a trial.
However, Trump has put himself into a corner where he probably cannot accept any plea deal other than one that would drop the criminal charges but keep any misdemeanor charges. I'm not sure that the NY DA, Alvin Bragg, would be willing to do that unless the case starts falling apart. But in the case Trump will push for an aquial rather than a plea deal so that he can use it to rile up his base.
CNN, at least, is reporting that he's facing 30 charges. If that's the case, it's probably charges related to the Trump Org's shenanigans that the corp was found guilty of. The organization's indictment had a lot of shady stuff and a lot of stuff that looked like flat out fraud. Lots of criminal looking behavior that plausibly can be directly tied to Trump himself.
There is no restriction on a candidate for the US presidency vis-a-vis current or former incarceration. Anyone could constitutionally run a presidential campaign or even serve while in jail. This is because the Supreme Court has held that only the Constitution can set qualification requirements. [0]
The sole, debatable exclusion seems to be the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president and cabinet (or the president themselves) to shift presidential powers to the vice president when "the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." [1]
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/03/30/donald-trump-can-still-run-fo...
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/debs-received-millio...
Maybe it'll be an impetus to create a clearer path for convicted felons who served their time and don't reoffend to regain their voting rights. Probably not, but it would be nice.
This i the crux I think - It's clearly a crime, but should he be held accountable or not due to notoriety? personally, I think public figures (especially politicians) should be held to a higher standard than mere-mortals; but many seem to believe the opposite.
You don't want your <insert political candidate> arrested/prosecuted? Don't elect a morally ambiguous one then. Higher standards, not lower.
I think people should be seen as equals before the law. Having one set of standards[law] for one group and a different set for another group is antithetical to rule of law which is purportedly a common American value FWIW.
What, exactly, is "clearly a crime"?
The accounting issue is at worst a misdemeanor, unless the DA can show that the payment to SD was a campaign finance violation.
But if it was "clearly" a campaign finance violation, why haven't federal prosecutors charged him with that?
Bragg is a motivated prosecutor trying to find a way to prosecute Trump for a charge he has no jurisdiction over, while the prosecutors who do have jurisdiction don't think it's worth prosecuting.
And that's dangerous. Prosecutions should not be motivated by politics.
He's going to lie (because he can't help it) and that opens him up to perjury charges.
But there are bizarre aspects to this case. One is that Trump associates like Giuliani and Deripaska were raided, but there don't seem to have been any subsequent charges.
Another is that there's so much on Trump - from tax dodging, to Jan 6, to links to suspect foreign money - that it seems like a strange case to highlight.
Democrats are banking on the fact that he won't be able to mount an effective primary or general campaign if he's under investigation. The democratic opponent will be able to just say "my opponent is under investigation!"
The Republicans are banking on two things: This case is flimsy and will fall apart, then the line will be "look at how the dems are doing political prosecutions". The other thing they are banking on (and polls have indicated this), that if Trump were prosecuted, his base would vote for him overwhelmingly and effective give him the nomination.
For the democrats there's also the "5D Chess" aspect where they want trump to win the nomination because biden already beat him once (this is a dangerous bet for dems though).
From my perspective reading the news I think the Republicans have the 2024 election in the bag. It's going to either be Desantis or Trump, the democrats just don't have the same kind of figure on their side. The democrats are going to be banking on running an effective "negative" campaign like they did in 2020 (no one voted for Biden because they liked the guy, they voted against Trump).
I know this is a pipe dream but I'm hoping that Vivek Ramaswamy gets elected. He seems the lest slimey and most pragmatic among the pack. TBH I need to go live on an island because I'm just so done with the sesspool that is American Politics.
Desantis and Trump will burn each other for the nomination and if Trump wins that he'll lose. The youth are going to be all over the anger is seething. I can't even look at a Trump supportor without getting angry, first time I've cared about politics.
This will be the death of the republican party and they deserve it
Exactly. It's not that this particular case isn't worth prosecuting, but there's so much more that's far worse, and not much seems to be moving on those other fronts. I don't understand why it took so long and why this is the first one to finally go to trial. Was January 6 not reason to arrest him? What about those classified documents in his basement? Those sound like more urgent cases to prosecute, though admittedly a lot more recent.
This is what I don't get. This is a guy who has sketchy real estate deals around the world, many of them large enough that he's probably in bed with the Mob in New York City and with God knows what other organizations -- supposedly he's mixed up with the BJP for his Indian developments, and I strongly suspect he's done shady stuff in Ukraine as well. Surely there's something there? There've been years to carry out an investigation, why has none of this been chased to ground?. I feel like The Economist got more dirt on him, around 2017 or so, than I'm seeing here.
By comparison to all that substantive stuff, the current charges have a "Clinton got a blowjob" air about them. I guess the phrase "hush money to a porn star" focus-grouped well, but why should I really care? Does it make the guy look kind of sad and pathetic? Certainly. Does it make him look evil? No.
The Hunter Biden stuff was similar, but the other way around. The Republicans released those photos, acting like they were damning. But they weren't. They just made me feel sorry for Hunter Biden -- and more sorry for Joe Biden, for having to hold shit together for his loser son (doesn't every family have problems?). In a strange way it increased my respect for Joe Biden, because there he was, a guy who'd been through a lot, caring for his family. To me it just made the Republicans look bad -- like, who the fuck are you, to gloat about his son's problems like this?
My sympathy for Trump is nowhere near as high in this case as it was for Biden in that one, but there's a little bit of an overlapping feeling. Like -- congratulations, you discovered that the man is a weakling with bad taste who gives in to really lame temptations. So what? This almost humanizes him. I feel like I'm watching Better Call Saul.
It just feels like playground back and forth over irrelevant sex-taboos (we still have those? I thought there were parades every year). I don't care. It just makes me lose respect for everyone involved, including the prosecution. Makes me feel that our leaders, of whatever stripe, simply are not worthy. There's no dignity in any of it.
The aspect that matters to national politics is possible interference with the electoral process. Did that happen? Then I would sure as hell want to know.
Instead it's kindergarten bickering.
And you know what I really want? Stop talking about where a decrepit wrestling heel put his wrinkly old cock, and instead spend some time on --
-- why the fuck can't people I care about get health insurance?
-- why, when there's a shortage that's going to make an economy car cost me an extra six grand than it's supposed to, are all the automakers closing ranks to reduce output?
-- why do two highly-educated adults need to work their asses off and never see their kids (like they have any), to maintain a lifestyle that within living memory could be held down by one man with a nine-to-five?
-- why, when the ice caps are apparently melting, and money is flowing to things marked "ESG", do I see nothing but lumbering SUVs and F-150s around me, and big stupid McMansions, and new strip malls getting built, for the zombies to drive to?
The phrase "profoundly unserious" echoes in my mind.
We keep saying that we care, but I only see a bunch of chimps screeching.
Would Bernie Sanders spend this much time talking about Trump's peccadilloes? Or would he answer in half a sentence and then say, "but we should really be talking about the working people in this country"? We all know the answer.
Get the paid actor off my television screen and try organizing people to do something useful.
In my view, the only reason to jail anybody is because they violated the law. If somebody that violated the law is subsequently jailed, it feels pretty dishonest to say that it was done “just to take them off the ballot”. Not only that, it is inaccurate. Jailing somebody does not take them off the ballot. However, not prosecuting them DOES put them above the law.
Perhaps we have different ideas about the real problems described above.
This is why we can't have nice things. None of the charges have been disclosed so why even opine on this yet? It's all speculation at this point.
It wreaks of some type of attempt to politically assassinate him before the next election.
Like I said, not a fan, just kind of seems suspicious.
If the economy is weak, I think they’d rather run against Trump (who has a base that’s fiercely loyal but more narrow) rather than a GOP candidate who will pull the majority of Trump’s base but also a wider swath from the “center” population by hammering on the economy.
If the economy is strong, historically it doesn’t matter much who the incumbent runs against.
Meanwhile the economy and government budget regularly do better under Democrats but noooooo only Democrats have to face the """"economy is doing poorly"""" nonsense.
That's Trump's real accomplishment—complain so loudly that the idea of being held accountable for your crimes makes you look like a hero.
Isn't it fine if this just hits Trump with a small fine or 3 days in jail or something? A fair punishment for a misdemeanor would be fine with me for this case. That's like the whole point of justice, that even the former president should have to follow the fine details.
In my state, our Democrat governor was accused of being a tyrant because of some minor paperwork she didn't do during emergency covid meetings. She still paid the fine because she committed the "crime" (procedural violation?) and that's how it should be. Politicians should not be immune to the little stuff. If they are speeding, they should get a ticket. If they shoplift, they should face a fine. If they forget to report a W2 to the IRS, they should get a pleasant letter telling them their mistake and they owe a few hundred dollars.
I consider that a GOOD thing
