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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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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.

NYT article.

The prosecution’s star witness is Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who paid the $130,000 to keep Ms. Daniels quiet. Mr. Cohen has said that Mr. Trump directed him to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence, and that Mr. Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization, helped cover the whole thing up. The company’s internal records falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses, which helped conceal the purpose of the payments.

Although the specific charges remain unknown, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have zeroed in on that hush money payment and the false records created by Mr. Trump’s company. A conviction is not a sure thing: An attempt to combine a charge relating to the false records with an election violation relating to the payment to Ms. Daniels would be based on a legal theory that has yet to be evaluated by judges, raising the possibility that a court could throw out or limit the charges.

Really looking forward to more detail, because this sounds pretty contrived.

Ms. Daniels would be based on a legal theory that has yet to be evaluated by judges, raising the possibility that a court could throw out or limit the charges

The NYT is being overly dramatic. The law in question is falsifying business records, specifically that Trump recorded payments to Cohen as legal fees when they were actually reimbursements to Cohen for hush money paid to Daniels. That crime is a felony if done with the "intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” The supposedly new legal theory is that that applies to other federal crimes, not just state crimes. Courts have apparently not previously ruled on that particular question, but it is hardly a stretch, given the plain text of the law. But perhaps there are reasons to rule otherwise.

He is being charged with a state crime, not a federal one. The federal crime is re campaign donations .

Nice try to deflect. He is being tried with a state felony that rests on him committing the federal crime. The state needs to prove as a predicate the federal crime so in effect the state needs to prove the federal crime in order to get the state felony conviction.

No, they don't need to prove the other crime. They need merely get a jury to agree that the state crime was committed in furtherance of the other crime. The legal system is full of this kind of crap; another version of it is where sentencing for one crime can be based on commission of other crimes which were alleged but not proven or sometimes not even prosecuted.

There appears to be no requirement that they prove he actually committed another crime, but only that he intended to commit another crime.

You're just kicking the can down the road. They still have to prove that what they claim he intended was in fact a crime, when the relevant authority already said it isn't.

  1. No, the relevant authorities simply declined to prosecute.

  2. Only courts, not prosecutors, can definitively say whether something constitutes a crime. It is a separation of powers issue. Prosecutors' opinions are not binding on anyone.

  3. Regardless, OP is incorrect to say that the state is charging him with a federal crime. Even if the DA has to prove that he committed the federal crime, he is not charged with that crime. If he is convicted, judgment will be entered on the state crime alone, not the federal crime, and the punishment will be that imposed for the state crime. It is no different than when a person convicted of child molestation in TX moves to CA and is charged with frequenting playgrounds. The DA must prove that he committed the TX crime, but the DA is trying him for violation of a CA law, not a TX law.

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