dasfoo
1yr ago
But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.
One of the points pressed by the CNN panel was, "How did the DNC/Biden's campaign let him get this far without intervening?"
I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad. David Axelrod (who was oddly half-covered in water droplets for the first segment, like someone had thrown a cup of water at him right before cameras), Obama admin heavyweight, didn't know? Van Jones didn't know? It's their job to know. It's hard to buy the feigned shock from a bunch of high-level DC journos and politicos who surely never gossip.
As for Dr. Jill, if anyone knows, it's her, so it would be rich to assume that last night was some dam-breaking revelation for her. If she's let him get this far, it's either out of cynicism or a sense of entitlement, and I would guess neither of those states at this stage are penetrable by actual self-reflection or honest emotion.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Notably, slavery was a bit more existential to 19th century americans than abortion is to 20th century ones.
Abortion seems to have been pretty existential to the nearly 1 million Americans who were aborted last year, as they no longer exist. Who do you think had a higher mortality rate, 20th-Century aborted babies or 19th-Century slaves?
dasfoo
1yr ago
At around 10 pm the Fulton County people decided to call it for the evening and began packing up. They finished around 10:30 and people started to leave, including the media and observers. When they told the Secretary of State's office they were told that they were to continue counting through the night, at which point they went back in and began counting.
The facts as you present them, regardless of the water leak claim, is that vote counting continued after the observers, having been told that counting was finished for the night, left. That's substantively identical to the complaint that counting which dramatically flipped the result continued without bipartisan observation, no?
dasfoo
1yr ago
And then to get Trump, Bragg used a NY state law that hasn’t been used in god knows how long coupled with a very dubious theory of a questionable FECA violation as a predicate of the rarely used NYS law. Keep in mind the people with authority to prosecute FECA violations passed on this (both criminally and civilly). The prior DA passed. That should tell us something! It tells us about selective prosecution and show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.
AND, they had to first corner Cohen on other charges into accepting a plea deal in order to "establish" that a (uncharged, untried, undefended) crime had taken place which could then be used as the basis for charging Trump in such a convoluted manner.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Is this fear of Ukranaian Nazis genuine, or just an attempt to sap anti-Russian energy in the West by associating Ukraine with one of the past century's great villains?
There seems to have been a very convenient transfer of exaggerated fear of Nazis from the progressive left to the far right which took place right around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Historically it echoes how the American Left went from impassioned pacifists in the 1930s to hawkish anti-Nazis coinciding with the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
My far-right friends mocked the "punch a Nazi" drumbeat up until it became a weapon in Putin's rhetoric, so I have trouble accepting it at face value.
dasfoo
1yr ago
don’t get it. What’s the connection, here?
He's suggesting they'd be in prison if they were right-wing protesters rather than random criminals.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it.
Both far left and far right would likely agree on official policies of banning books and jailing opponents of the regime, whereas the middle left and middle right would likely oppose those policies as policies. Even in the case of Trump, I think the middle left is convinced that he broke the law and would not sanction a policy of government jailing opponents "without cause."
dasfoo
1yr ago
I think that if you were able to secure Morris' testimony that he paid Hunter's liabilities as part of an agreement with Joe Biden to prevent bad press that would hurt Joe Biden's election chances, it would be a comparable situation. Currently Morris is claiming he made the payments out of the goodness of his heart and with no electoral motive. I don't believe that for a second, but in order to successfully bring a prosecution you'd need some way to prove that Morris is lying.
I trust that the State of California is doing their best to trap Morris into a plea deal wherein he admits as much! As it is, he has nearly run out of money and can't afford to buy more than 11 of Hunter's paintings. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/15/hunter-biden-legal-defense-kevin-morris-money-00158237
dasfoo
1yr ago
- The reason for the description of the payments was to conceal Cohen's crime. Trump could hardly put "Reimbursement for unlawful campaign contribution" on the checks!
Do you think Trump would intentionally commit a crime to help Cohen? If so, you hold him in higher esteem than I do.
dasfoo
1yr ago
It doesn't look like everyone (or anyone, really) at Dominion is twirling their moustaches and cackling as they disenfranchise the American people. It looks like they run like a standard tech company, which is to say all over the place, constantly fighting fires and doing the needful to get their sales. I'm sure 2020 was a complete nightmare scenario for these guys, where suddenly all their customers are radically transforming their deployments and doing novel, untested, gigantic-scale absentee and mail balloting.
Since I got downvoted for this skepticism, I think this is key part of the above explainer. Yeah, it sounds like routine software company patchwork, but it's a big leap from there to actionable claims of fraud. "Stop the Steal" is as dumb a mantra as "Most Secure Election Ever." They aim to convince through emotional appeal backed only by weak insinuations. For the kind of election fraud claimed by Stop the Stealers, you do need to find a couple of moustache-twirling villains intentionally changing vote counts through illicit means, not just the implications-without-accusations listed above.
dasfoo
1yr ago
National review has basically said this is BS (but Trump did himself no favor with bad legal counsel). That is what establishment republicans think.
I'm essentially a NR republican of the Jonah Goldberg Remnant variety. I am anti-Trump in that I think he is cultural poison and I will(have) never vote(d) for him. I agree completely with the NR consensus on this.
The problem with the "This will kill Trump" viewpoint is that it sees Trump in a vacuum, as a uniquely corrupt outlier. My view is that is he is the "naked" exampled of the corruption already pervasive in elite politics. Everything he does or tries to do or wants to do is completely routine and no more dirty than what the Bidens/Clintons/Pelosis have been doing for decades. And probably the Bushes, Obamas, etc.
The difference that Trump offers is that he is simultanously pettier/dumber/incompetent at everything he does AND he has none of the friendly institutional cover afforded to the elite club and their competent lawyers and knowlegable operatives. They have a system that they know how to navigate, litigate and obfuscate, and Trump doesn't know that he needs to know how to work that system to succeed.
So, when the proposition comes up: Does this change your opinion of Trump? The answer to even mainstream Republicans is, "This makes no difference, because the other guys are just as bad, and maybe worse because they're good at being that bad and getting away with it."
If Trump going down is the draino that unclogs the swamp and he takes them all down, this maybe isn't so bad. If he's the only one who makes it through the drain, this is a sort of travesty of selective justice.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Hunter Biden is being prosecuted.
Only after a judge squashed the absurd plea deal that exempted him from all future prosecution.
It's a half-step removed, but isn't this guy paying Hunter Biden's back-taxes to benefit Joe Biden similar to Cohen paying Daniels to benefit Trump? Why isn't California coming down on this guy for FEC violations?
dasfoo
1yr ago
The most relevant point is made in several places and deserves its own discussion:
Trump is accused of using personal money for a campaign purpose.
And without getting into the sleazy details, this is something that every sentient person assumes every candidate does to some extent, and Trump is the only one signled out for it.
Talk to any small business owner/gig worker, and the lines between personal and business spending are sort of vaguely (mis)understood and largely unobserved. You should see the uncomfortable faces when the bookkeeper in our local small business circle talks about this subject. Everyone is bad at this this. At times, it seems almost impossible to dilligently keep track of these things in accordance with the law. The general assumption is that small, non-malicious fudging of that line will be overlooked. This kind of petty gotcha on Trump on this subject is unlikely to substantively move the needle for anyone already sympathetic to him.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Intent can't be proven in any of the three scenarios you put forward because buying paperclips isn't illegal, and legal impossibility is almost always a complete defense.
So "intent to conceal a crime," in your opinion, only occurs when there is a real crime to be concealed? And not when someone intends to conceal a crime but that crime doesn't actually exist? So the defendant would have to be aware of the reality of the crime and that their actions are intended to conceal a real crime?
My analogy was meant to get at one aspect of this that is blurry: What crime did Trump think he was attempting to conceal via the falsifications (jury instructions: don't think about this, just assume there was a crime)? My guess is that it's a wild overestimation of Trump's knowlege of FEC law to come to the conclusion that he was being mindful of the contorted violation to which Cohen pled in his deal (which may or may not even be a real crime).
In my model of Trump, he was only ever going to do something to conceal his own culpability, and certainly not Cohen's, who he was allegedly also planning on screwing out of reimbursement. Trump had to suspect that he was guilty of something that needed concealing, which would be what? Since he was not charged with concealing a crime with which he himself was charged or convicted, or to which he had pled -- all of which would have made the prosecution's case much easier -- I'm guessing it was something that was not actually a crime but which he mistook as something that might be illegal, like the payments to Daniels. the only other alternative, is that he was attempting to conceal something embarassing but not criminal, in which case there is no felony.
dasfoo
1yr ago
This is interesting, and I might be persuaded.
Scenario A:
Let's say I mistakenly think that some completely legal act is illegal, like buying paperclips. Every time I buy paperclips for my office, I intentionally misclassify these transactions as "legal services" because I don';t want the law to know that I bought paperclips.
In this scenario, I have committed a felony, because I was attempting to conceal a "crime," and therefore fool the state, regardless of the actuality of any crime being committed.
Scenario B
Let's say I think that buying paperclips is embarassing but not illegal. In this case, I would be committing only a misdemeanor by misclassifiying the purchases, as I was not trying to conceal what I thought was a "crime?"
Scenario C
I'm not sure if buying paperclips is a crime, so just to be safe, I'm never going to admit to buying paperclips on paper. I'm going to send my lawyer out to buy my paperclips for me with his own money, and since he's my lawyer, when I pay him back, I'm going to classify the expense as "legal services," because he's my lawyer. I think I have successfully avoided admitting to the actual act and insulated myself from any crime if any crime exists. What is this? I have created layers of insulation between my willful ignorance and reality. Can intent be proven here?
dasfoo
1yr ago
Thanks. I'll take a look. This sounds like another one of those data dumps that tries to impress by volume but which really contains very little actionable information. But the mere presence of it with the suggestion that it's important convinces motivated bystanders who never scrutinize it themselves. You would think that if there were damning evidence inside, someone would already be highlighting it, specifically.
dasfoo
1yr ago
If Trump were really sloppy as you allege, prosecutors would have been able to find more serious charges to bring against him.
Not necessarily. As we can see in this case, it can be really hard to create the semi-coherent appearance of a case out of a bunch of nonsense and make it just opaque enough to pay off. If a guy is racking up hundreds of little process violations because HDGAF about process, the trick is to turn those into a felony in one of the jurisdictions jaded enough to convict without ever questioning the premises. It's probably easier to charge and convict a smooth operator who is knowingly committing crimes because once you catch them in act with intent, you have your smoking gun. If someone is carelessly racking up violations by just not caring, it's going to be really hard to prove an intent that never existed.
dasfoo
1yr ago
But that’s the entire point. You needed to do it with an intent to defraud and commit another crime. If he wasn’t thinking at all about that, then that is proof he didn’t commit the crime.
Yeah, I agree. But Trump is his own worst enemy and creates most these problems for himself. It's hard to feel sympathy for him when he is essentially dooming himself by repeating the same mistakes over and over rather than adapting -- even though I think he is being unjustly persecuted in a way that really hurts the entire country. Even if he's the least-bad part of this whole debacle, I can only shake my head in pity at mess he's put himself in.
dasfoo
1yr ago
This is crazy! Why would Trump go out of his way to do things the illegal way if it were already legal?
Part of the problem with this whole thing is assigning intent to a guy who seems to wing it on instinct and never really bothers to do due dilligence to make sure he's doing things the proper way -- and who hires shitty, sleazy lawyers who are also incompetent at covering the legal bases. Trump is sloppy. Contrary to the memes, he's barely playing 1-D Chess. He follows the straight line from his desires to his ego. It's entirely possible given his apparent modus operandi that no one thought to check if there were any legal issues with anything related to the FEC or any other set of regulations, and "legal services" was written on the checks because Cohen was a lawyer, making anything he does "legal services."
I don't doubt that Trump is guilty of hundreds (if not more) of compliance violations, because he generally holds all rules and official processes in contempt. Felony convictions for details he likely never bothered to consider or understand seems harsh; but it does make a good case for why political parties should screen their candidates with a more serious sense of purpose.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I just did a search for "dar leaf dominion emails" and didn't find anything substantial. Care to share what you found?
dasfoo
1yr ago
The parties should be better gatekeepers, but they seem to be broken now in a desparate race to the bottom.
dasfoo
1yr ago
There was a Hollywood movie in the wake of the Clinton scandal, The Contender, about a woman who is chosen to replace a deceased Vice President. However, her confirmation becomes controversial when rumors of a college orgy surface. The Democrat-led argument 25 years ago was this private sexual conduct was wholly irrelevant.
Of course, the movie also pulls its punches by ultimately revealing the rumors to be baseless, drummed up by an Arlen Specter-like Senator played by Gary Oldman.
These are always arguments as kamikaze soldiers, to be used when convenient for maximum shock but with no real ideological committment to using them faithfully and responsibly.
dasfoo
1yr ago
But why would SCOTUS want to "squelch" this?
Because wide latitude for states to prosecute presidential candidates is going to be extremely chaotic and destabilizing. Ideally, yes, candidates who have committed crimes should be prosecuted without favor -- but you have to acknowlege that state party operatives are going to abuse this newly validated tool in cynical and destructive ways.
EDIT: One of my most important rules-of-thumb for politics is, "Do I want a candidate/party/official I don't like or trust to have this power?" If the answer is "No," then I don't want it for my team, either.
I think a convention replacement is actually the best possible world for Democrats. The trends over the last few election cycles suggest a couple of things:
Replacing Biden at the convention with some charismatic but relatively unknown upstart who will be boosted by an enthusiastic and fawning news cycle could produce a media honeymoon period that should last well into November, past the election. It will cure Biden panic and general campaign fatigue, which are the Democrat's two biggest obstacles.
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