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Trump Indicted: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/donald-trump-indicted-in-hush-money-payment-case.html
This is a major enough story that I think it goes beyond needing more than just a link.
Is that what this is about? I thought they at least had tax fraud receipts. What the fuck?
There's multiple possible indictments in the pipeline for Trump. This is the one that commentators seemed to think was the furthest along and likely to drop first.
The other main one is the Georgia election interference; here's the latest news article I can find on that, from just a few days ago. It mentions a May 1 deadline for some legal next step, so probably no major news coming out of that in the next few weeks, at least.
Not sure what others are going on exactly.
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His crime was winning the 2016 election. It was the crime that prompted two impeachments, and now an indictment. Trump cannot be allowed to get away with it, and so Democrats have overreached at every opportunity, grasping at straws, to get something, anything, to stick to him.
Hence many misdemeanors going unprosecuted in NY, while this particular misdemeanor gets up-jumped to a felony in order to finally charge Trump.
The mod team has discussed this comment in response to a couple of user reports. The result is mixed. I am explicitly not giving you a warning at this time--but I need to say a little more about that, because we are probably going to be dialing up the sensitivity on posts like this in the near future.
This is connected with @Amadan's moderation of @firmamenti and @cjet79's partial modhat comment about it. Since moving over from reddit, moderation has gotten both easier and more difficult in interesting ways. We have far fewer bad drive-by comments and much less brigading from trolls (although, importantly--not zero troll brigading!). We seem to have more users paying attention to AAQCs, both in terms of crafting them and in terms of nominating them, such that many excellent posts don't make the roundup simply because there are so many plausible nominations. These are positive developments!
On the downside, though, low effort comments from more regular users also seem to be turning up more frequently. There is a tendency to rely on shorthand arguments that are both low effort and obfuscatory for new users. This is understandable--as the community coheres it can often feel like certain individuals are just re-treading old ground. But that is something we want to try to mitigate. In this particular comment, your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.
I will be writing a longer top post about low-effort posts in the near-ish future, but it seemed worth mentioning here to get people thinking a bit about the problem, hopefully.
I'd like to give a defense of my comment here, since I [obviously] disagree with the idea that mine was a low effort/drive by comment.
The story and the thing that is here to be discussed is the story about Trump being indicted. This is a uniquely big story, and my "take" on this is going to serve (in my opinion) as a distraction from the main story. From my perspective, posting "Trump Indicted" and a clean link to the story (I intentionally chose CNBC as the most 'neutral' source I could find) is me being courteous to fellow forum users by not distracting from the topic of discussion.
I think that this sits in contrast to things like constant stories about trans people misbehaving, conservatives saying stupid things, etc. There is a functionally infinite number of those stories happening every single day, and so for those the requirement/expectation is that a user should add additional thoughts/context to raise the story above the noise floor.
However, "Trump Indicted" itself rises above that floor, and in fact posting a "lukewarm take" as one user called it will do nothing but bring the story closer to the background noise.
Another user implied that posting a simple story like this is a way of getting a dopamine rush, but again I think the opposite is true. I'm not posting this so that people can talk about me, or what I said, or my take, or even engage with me at all. I'm posting a huge story, then standing aside from it to allow the story to stand on its own, and due to the nature of the story, I think that it is able to do so. Me adding a take turns the post towards my take and not the story itself which, again, is large enough to rise above the noise floor in a way that something like trans people shut down a street doesn't.
If I wanted to post something like activist stands on car during Trans Day of Vengeance, then yes I absolutely need to write a post about why this matters, why we should talk about it, etc, since there are dozens of identical stories being posted on this topic ever day.
"Former president and presumptive presidential candidate criminally prosecuted by his political rivals ahead of election" is, at least for now, a unique story that is not happening constantly and a post about this is only made worse by an inclusion of my "take" on this.
In fact, just talking about forum etiquette, the best/most polite thing to do if I wanted people to talk about my take (instead of the story itself), and get the dopamine hits that somebody was talking about, would be to post a clean link "Trump Indicted" as an anchor/catchall/megathread type post, and then reply to myself with whatever take I had.
To summarize: I think this story is unique, I think it is courteous to stand aside from it, and I think that posting a place for discussion about this topic in a different way would have been rude and narcissistic. Posting the way I did was good forum behaviour and is the type of thing that should be encouraged, not threatened with banning.
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I'm of this view. If he had never successfully ran for president, then prosecutors would continue not wanting to charge him.
But he won and brought MAGA to us, so they now are looking for payback. They found the man, they merely need to find the crime.
Also Trump probably commits a lot of crimes throughout his life. So they'll find reasons.
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It's a campaign finance violation.
The suggestion is that Trump used campaign funds to pay the hush money.AFAIK, this is a civil thing, it happens not-infrequently in small local elections, and the punishment is usually that you pay some multiple of the amount of the violation.So like, if it's a 5x multiple, Trump will owe $500k or so.
I don't believe that has ever been the suggestion. In fact, I think it's the opposite. He used private funds hushing up Stormy Daniels, "in service of the campaign", without properly disclosing it as campaign spending. Through some arcane and novel interpretation, this has been goosed up to a felony.
It's not wholly novel, Jon Edwards was charged with a felony for the same thing and was acquitted.
The novelty is that a state is using an alleged (but never tried) violation of federal campaign finance law to create a state felony unrelated directly to campaign finance reform. So notwithstanding that those actually tasked with upholding campaign finance laws passed on this case, a state DA decided to effectively bring the case.
In short, it is a hard area to win, the facts are far from clear, and the DA is using a novel application of the law. Against a former president. Beyond idiotic.
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John Edwards was accused of using campaign contributions as hush money, which is not the same thing.
The money never came from an Edwards campaign fund, a major donor sent the money to a friend who sent it to Edwards assistant's wife and they paid off his mistress. Edwards says this a personal expense paid for with a personal gift. SC's Republican prosecutor said this was in service to the campaign and so an unreported campaign donations, just like what NY prosecutor says about Trump.
This is not correct for several reasons. Edwards was tried in a federal court in North Carolina, not a state court, or in South Carolina. Trump has not been charged with any federal crimes, and in fact the DOJ and FEC conducted their own inquiries into the same alleged offense and decided against charging him with anything. It also makes a significant difference as to whether the money comes from a donor - which places it in the realm of campaign contributions - or from the candidate's own pocket or business organization. The Edwards prosecution also cited fake invoices for nonexistent purchases that the donor listed as the reason they were giving money to Edwards, so that the money wouldn't have to be listed in FEC reports.
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As far as I can tell, under Bragg's theory, if you pay hush money it is a legitimate campaign expense.
What's that? Isn't that about x-ray diffraction?
Reading the article would have revealed that the prosecutor in this case is named Alvin Bragg.
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I believe Jon Edwards was charged with the opposite problem. He did in fact use campaign contributions to pay off a mistress, not his own personal money.
Which I've heard pointed out as a catch-22. If you are running for office and wish to make a private NDA with someone to not blab to the media about your embarrassing private matters, how legally can you do this?
Use your campaign funds and you are misusing them.
Use your private funds and you are sneakily concealing expenditures that benefit your campaign. That should be campaign funding since it benefits the campaign.
As a counter to this: making private NDAs with people to avoid scandal is something that happens regularly with all sorts of public figures, not just political candidates -- see SpaceX paying off a flight attendant. It seems plausible to argue that personal reputation (especially for a businessman with a penchant for oversized gold lettering of his name on buildings) is not merely a campaign item.
I heard on a radio show that private NDAs are common among celebrities. Hollywood types, etc. It is not very romantic to ask your new girl to sign an agreement to keep relationship details secret, but supposedly some major media figure do just that.
So yeah, people with no political ambition at all have these agreements. They are merely managing their brand. So please sign this agreement to not disclose personal information.
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I suppose the solution is merely to not be scandalous--but this would be quite a high bar for many politicians to clear.
That assumes that all people claiming XYZ are true. Maybe you are innocent but paying someone 10K is worth it.
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My understanding is that a major Edwards donor (Rachel Mellon) wrote personal checks to Edwards which he used to pay off his mistress. The prosecution said that since paying off his mistress was in the interest of the campaign these were illegal campaign donations not personal gifts.
I'm trying to untangle the specifics. It's plausible, but every source I've found over 6 articles or so just says they were campaign contributions. Illegal campaign contributions even, because they were in excess of the allowed amount. But they were also from, were they his campaign chair and campaign chair's wife?
I suppose in a sense it could be similar to Trump's problem, if the federal government came in after the fact and said "Wait wait wait, those checks with your name on them were actually campaign contributions! And big illegal ones at that!" Except in Trump's case it was just his own damned money.
The feds also totally FUBARed that prosecution from what I read. But who knows, maybe they'll coast in NYC on "Orange Man Bad" alone.
I scanned the indictment and they say there was a complex scheme where the major donor wrote checks to a friend who gave the money to the wife of Edwards assistant, and then she used it to pay the living expenses of Edward's mistress.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/legacy/2011/06/03/edwards-indictment.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjkybKe9IT-AhUSm2oFHVLIC5AQFnoECCAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1EMw9kIVnbJaWJLkYhos4K
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How do they know wasn’t his his money?
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Oh my god you're right. That is absolutely r-slurred beyond belief.
You can say Retard here, king.
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If I understand the allegations correctly, I believe the theory of the case is that because this payment benefited his presidential campaign, it should have properly been paid out of campaign funds. Since it was paid out of personal funds, this makes it an illegal undisclosed campaign contribution.
An illegal undisclosed campaign contribution…to himself?
This is a better argument for the simulation hypothesis than anything Bostrom ever came up with, that’s for sure.
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