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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37958 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.

I generally agree that this case is embarrassingly weak. Internal corporate accounting standards are way outside my pay grade, but how is hush money pursuant to an NDA not a legal expense though? If it's apparently illegal to label it as a legal expense, what exactly should it have been labeled?

On the other hand it would be an NYC jury, so my priors on it being a remotely fair trial are very low.

Right. The idea is to bring Trump up before a Democratic jury in a Democratic state with a Democratic court system, in a political prosecution based on a dubious technicality. The message being that Republicans had better watch out; if they don't stick to their role as genteel losers, they will be pursued to the ends of the earth.

New York doesn't allow felony convictions on a majority vote, so it only takes one MAGA juror to hang the jury. Manhattan voted 12% for Trump in 2020, and the 5 boroughs were 23%.

I predict the same result as the Edwards prosecution - unless the whole thing gets overtaken by more serious charges coming out of one of the other investigations (similar to the way the prosecution of Cohen for the same crime got overtaken by events when it turned out that he was also guilty of tax evasion and running a taxi medallion scam).

New York doesn't allow felony convictions on a majority vote, so it only takes one MAGA juror to hang the jury.

So they'll ensure there are none.

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