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Breaking news. It looks like the jury convicted Donald Trump in the "hush money" case.
This verdict will likely galvanize voters come November – leading to record turnout among Republicans. I might even vote for the old rascal myself as I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
my enemies’ lawfare, my rule of law
It’s hard to take the lawfare accusations seriously.
there are tons of high level republicans who are not subject to prosecution, with the obvious explanatory difference being that they, you know, didn’t commit crimes
dem DOJs go after dem politicians for similar violations
the same DA goes after normal people for similar violations
This looks like a case of “man does crimes, gets prosecuted for said crimes.” The only remarkable thing is that this man is a former politician with a loser cult of personality.
Let me flip it around: can you honest to god hand on the Bible imagine a scenario in which Trump committed a crime and you don’t call the resulting prosecution “lawfare?”
Edit: I also suspect that the venn diagram of people calling for Trump to lock up Hillary over the made-up email thing and people calling the prosecution of Trump "lawfare" is close to a perfect circle.
No the obvious difference is that they never went to war with the establishment the way Trump did. Also, admittedly Trump is publicly a liar and sleazeball so that makes a lot of people think that he must be a criminal too, which creates a favorable environment for pursuing a prosecution.
No he did not commit a crime.
So to get a felony conviction here, the prosecutor, judge and jury had to introduce multiple unprecedented or ridiculous leaps:
Here is an establishment liberal explaining why this prosecution was so unprecedented: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html
Yes, of course.
The thing about Trump is that he is a sleazy guy who lies a lot, but he is ultimately a show-man Boomer business man who listens to his lawyers and doesn't do obviously criminal things. He is not mobbed up. His faults are those of a carnival barker, not of a Bernie Madoff. There has been an enormous media campaign to portray Trump has some kind of obvious fraudster criminal but that is not actually who he is.
I'm in the tiny sliver of people who thought Comey got it right. He was right to have the press conference explaining what she did wrong to the American people, but also right not to prosecute. Her violation wasn't serious enough to try warrant overriding the electoral process with a judicial process.
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime." Actually taking bribes, deliberately leaking secrets to enemy powers, executing opponents, etc, are all real crimes and should be prosecuted regardless of the person. But prosecuting high-level officials for technical crimes and gray-area crimes and crimes invented in the last 80 years gives far too much power to the bureaucracy.
This is the part that bugs me the most. How can a crime be asserted as a predicate fact in court when that crime has never been charged, tried or convicted?
If the argument is that the crime exists because Michael Cohen pled to it as part of a bargain, isn't that irrelevant with regard to Trump? AIUI, one person cannot be convicted by proxy of another person's trial; Trump would be entitled to his own defense.
Further, the insinuation that it is electoral fraud for a political candidate to mislead the public opens unlimited potential for lawfare fuckery. Does this mean it's possible to charge Joe Biden with Electoral Fraud for saying that his son's laptop was fake during a Presidential Debate? Or any other outright lie or even half-truth told in the course of any campaign?
I admit, seeing most active politicians from the past few decades jailed for dishonesty might be a nice corrective, but selective prosecution is not the way to go about it. It seems like this case is going to come back at the Democrats in severely unpleasant ways.
Would you feel any better if you found out that the referenced crime need not even have occurred? And that this has been the case for hundreds of years? Look at common law burglary, for example (modern statutes usually expand the definition, but we'll keep things simple). Unauthorized breaking and entering of a dwelling in the nighttime with the intent to commit a felony therein. Say Bill breaks into Tom's house at night. A neighbor sees him break in and calls the police. The police apprehend him and he's carrying a gun. Tom was not home at the time. A witness testified that Bill told him he was going to kill Tom. There's sufficient intent to prove burglary. The fact that he can't be convicted of murder is irrelevant. The fact that he can't even be convicted of attempted murder is irrelevant. The fact that it would have been impossible for him to even commit the intended murder is irrelevant. He's not getting this reduced to criminal trespass.
Attempt crimes always have allowed for mistake of fact and are not given the same sentence as the crime itself. Not only is this set of facts enough to prove burglary, it also would prove attempted murder.
This is not akin to the Trump case, because in your case we would know that the alleged felony that the burglar had the mens rea to commit was murder. But in the current case, we do have an exact crime. Instead the prosecution waved at a bunch of statutes and said its possible that Trump committed those crimes (while they and the judge didn't let Trump put on an expert witness who would have said he, in fact, did not violate those laws). This is a novel application of the law in many ways, so its not really serious to compare it to burglary.
Nor even something else like criminal conspiracy, where again you need not succeed in robbing the bank, but it is enough for your gang to buy guns and masks and bags with money signs on them, then drive to the bank, go into the bank, and if you get arrested at the front door, you still are guilty of conspiracy to rob the bank. Again, totally unlike the current situation.
Agreed (I make the point below that intent here is different from inferring intent in say “murder”).
What’s also become more and more a democrat playbook is they take law X and try to shoehorn it into an area it clearly was not meant for but say “the words say.”
Here, the business record falsification with intent to commit other crime was clearly about something like cooking the books to hide embezzlement or a Ponzi scheme et al. This case clearly was not what the law was about in any way.
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