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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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So what's the actual takeaway? I see people following each step of the legal process closely, and I can understand how that's interesting for the law-watchers, but it all sounds like a lot of handwavey bullshit to a layman like me. Does anyone have a good sense of what the actual odds of prosecution are?

If I hear "the walls are closing in" based on possessing some document that I don't care about or asking another politician a question one more goddamned time without there being any material payoff, I'm going to lose it.

It's not a prosecution, it's a civil suit. The worst that can happen is that Trump et al. will have to pay a huge award and reincorporate all their businesses in another state (though that may be easier said than done). As for the likelihood of success? It's hard to say until we see the Trump team's response, but there's been a 3 year investigation by the AG and AGs in general don't take these matters lightly, so I'm going to assume the court is going to find at least some fraud. The real question is how much the award will be and whether the fraud was pervasive enough to merit ending Trump's ability to do business in New York.

My priors were:

  • because of the vagueness of laws, every business that actually does anything can be found to have violated some rule by an aggressive enough official

  • Trump's businesses seemed especially likely to cross both the letter and the spirit of the law so it would not be that hard to find something

And it took three years of specifically investigating Donald Trump's businesses to come up with something? This is extremely low performance.

It does, however, fit my favorite hilarious conspiracy theory: Trump and Trump Co have always been undercover law enforcement honeypots for mobsters and bad lawyers, designed to look corrupt as hell but never actually crossing into criminality.

This theory would have him originally run by Giuliani to catch NYC mafia concrete mobsters, then shifted over to the NSA to expose vote rigging by the FBI/CIA deep state.

(The rare “good guys are secretly protecting you” conspiracy theory.)

The court document does mention federal referrals for criminal prosecution, and state AGs have used this sort of legal action to find evidence or compel testimony that happened to make such charges easier in the past. I don't think it's very likely here, for a variety of reasons, though.

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