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Lol now TheMotte is getting into trump assassination territory....Should I stop coming here and start watching fox news?
Putting a 77-year-old in prison unjustly (if that is indeed what is being attempted) is on par with assassinating him.
No, it’s not. And no, it isn’t.
Is it your belief the lawfare is just?
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
I’d say the Stormy Daniels prosecution is probably unjust in that it wouldn’t be happening but for Trump’s political status. Low confidence.
The classified documents, on the other hand? Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Trump was innocent, or that a random citizen could get away with doing the same thing. While I was surprised that it escalated to a trial, I don’t think it’s unjust.
What about the fraud case? Or the Rico case?
And have you read some of the unredacted statements coming up in the Florida case? It suggests some degree of set up (and typical Trump stupidity)
Which one is the fraud case? Hard to search.
Yes, I’ve been keeping up with the unredactions. Mostly to argue with people in the other subthread. I swear, when I started reading I didn’t look like such a partisan hack!
A few of the claims are very defensible. Then they’re used to argue something much more elaborate (and, of course, more favorable to Trump). Nothing about the document reordering changes the facts of the warrant or the charges. Translating “we acknowledge inconsistency with what we previously understood and represented to the Court” as “we are lying liars who got caught” is disingenuous.
That conclusion is propped up by thinner evidence. There’s a paragraph suggesting NARA gave Trump boxes at one point? That must mean they were the classified documents; it’s all a setup! News outlets ran with a misleading FBI photo? Psyop! Any time Politico or CNN says something uncharitable? Proof of the deep-seated conspiracy. Except when the judge postpones; clearly she’s the only rational, unbiased individual in this whole mess.
The biggest outlier is the claim about early DoJ/NARA collaboration, which is most likely to prove a political but-for. It’s also getting far less attention from Trump partisans. Is that because they aren’t sure about the timeline? Because they understand the difference between correlation and causation? Because they already assume the political motive is the only way? I don’t know. That’s the issue I’ll be following most closely.
Fraud is where he was hit with a 350m penalty for making allegedly fraudulent statements to the bank for a loan on which he paid every cent on the loan (which doesn’t mean there wasn’t fraud but disgorgement at best would be much smaller)
Oh, another NY case. Is this the one where he was inflating penthouse sizes?
I don’t know anything about fraud judgments, but I’m willing to believe the judge based that penalty on Trump’s politics.
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