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Notes -
The law in question has been used many times against other people and businesses, including Exxon Mobil, Juul, and Martin Shkreli. It's not as if they dug up some long dormant statute.
It also doesn't perturb me that the unlawful conduct in this case is common. The law is designed for addressing "repeated" and "persistent" fraudulent activity - and while it's possible for a type of fraud to be "persistent and repeated" without it being "common", you'd have to expect there to be a good amount of overlap. In other words, it seems to me that this statute is designed to be used for addressing exactly these types of crimes that people have gotten used to thinking they can get away with.
Which just leaves us with the fact that Trump is a politician. Personally I'm of the view that it's entirely right and appropriate for politicians to come under unusually harsh scrutiny, as long as the laws are applied appropriately. They are unusually powerful people, so it's in the public interest that they also be unusually law-abiding. So the horror scenario that some people hold up, that Joe Biden or other Democrats might be subjected to retributive criminal investigations, seems to me like a win-win. I'm very happy for the Trumps and the Menendezes and the Santoses all to get shipped off to prison and if sufficient evidence can be found to lock up the Bidens and the Clintons and the McConnells along with them, all the better.
No Substack or Twitter I'm afraid - my particular flavour of obnoxious ranting is a Motte exclusive.
Thanks for the response. Also, I want to say it feels downright criminal you're not getting more upvotes, and often even downvotes, for explanations of the case. The most clear cut case of themotte's rightwing bias I've seen in a long time. Just ridiculous that I'd have 10 upvotes and you'd have 0 when my comment was just trying to poke a couple holes in your informative analysis.
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