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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Nope.

An inaccurate business record recorded with innocent intent (eg as a joke or by mistake) is not a crime.

An inaccurate business record recorded with intent to defraud is a misdemeanor.

An inaccurate business record recorded with intent to defraud in the furtherance of another crime is a felony.

You are not a felon because you put a joke on a venmo.

Who did he defraud?

Ok so I am a felon too like Trump. I’ve sent mislabeled Venmo’s because I did not want Venmo to know what I’m doing.

So, how does New York State law define the “intent to defraud” for the criminal offense of falsifying business records? A long line of New York state court cases supports an expansive conception with respect to § 175.00 crimes – namely, that intent can be established when a defendant acts “for the purpose of frustrating the State’s power” to “faithfully carry out its own law.” People v. Kase, 76 A.D.2d 532, 537–538, 431 N.Y.S.2d 531, 534 (N.Y. App. Div., 1st Dept. 1980), aff’d, 53 N.Y.2d 989, 441 N.Y.S.2d 671, 424 N.E.2d 558 (1981).

Trump acted with intent to defraud the state of New York by frustrating its power to faithfully carry out its own law.

You did not mislabel your Venmos (as far as I know) with the intent of preventing the state of New York from executing its law, so you are not guilty of falsification of business records (assuming your Venmos are even business transactions).

Where is the evidence that Trump was thinking about NY executing its own laws? If you don’t need scienter, then you’ve eliminated intent from the statute.

I believe the law in question is Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.

So to break it down my understanding (which could be wrong, I'm just some bloke on the other side of the world who isn't even a lawyer) of how the technical legal theory of the case works is:

  • Trump falsified business records with the intent to defraud the state of New York by preventing them from executing their laws.
  • He intended to prevent them from executing their laws by concealing the fact that he had participated in a conspiracy to promote his election to public office by unlawful means.
  • The unlawful means in question were Cohen making a payment to Stormy Daniels in order to conceal her story from the public in order to prevent it from damaging Trump's election chances.
  • This is unlawful because it's against federal election law to contribute more than a certain amount to a political candidate, and making a transaction on their behalf counts as a contribution.

Or if you're just making the narrow point of asking how the court could know his state of mind, I think the standard rule is that a jury is allowed to infer that a person intended the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions.

I think you're making good and accurate points and it's a shame you're getting downvoted. But there's one point I disagree on.

The unlawful means in question were Cohen making a payment to Stormy Daniels in order to conceal her story from the public in order to prevent it from damaging Trump's election chances.

I don't think this should actually be considered a crime. As I understand it, Cohen pled guilty to it. I think that was part of a plea deal and he just took it because the way plea deals work is that he wouldn't actually receive a better outcome by trying to insist that one, but only one, of the things he was being charged with was false.

But looking at the actual law, the idea that concealing information which could damage Trump's campaign is a campaign contribution is silly. If you're that loose with the standards, practically anything would be a campaign contribution.

I agree that it's kind of a dumb standard to have, but it appears to be the one that exists. If these same events had occurred in Australia the NDA payment would have clearly fallen outside the definition of "electoral expenditure", and this is one of many areas where I think Australian law is better than American law. But Trump is an American, and he has to follow American law.

I don't think that's normally how American law is applied, but admittedly I don't know much about it. But where most people seem to blame an anti-Trump conspiracy, I blame him for losing his case. He intimidated witnesses on social media, so the judge gave him a gag order, then he violated the gag order repeatedly. He didn't stand for the jury like the rest of the court. He's been terrible to many previous lawyers so he was pulling from the bottom of the barrel for his defense.

I think Trump deserved to be proclaimed Not Guilty. But the adversarial legal system is designed around the defendant actually putting a half decent effort into defending themselves. I can sympathize with all the poor folk out there who don't understand what the legal system expects them to do and get screwed on that front, but I have no sympathy for a billionaire. If Trump wasn't a narcissist, I think he could've won the trial.

I don't think that's normally how American law is applied, but admittedly I don't know much about it.

I'm open to being corrected, but as far as I can tell, it is. It's the standard that's laid out in the legislation, and as far as I know there's no case law on the books saying that those particular words don't mean what they appear to mean. The legal podcasts I listen to (Prosecuting Donald Trump, Serious Trouble) have asserted that's the standard that applies (and sure, I'm willing to buy that e.g. Andrew Weissman is biased against Trump, but I don't buy that he's intentionally misrepresenting what the law is). None of the lawyers I've seen arguing against the verdict have raised the definition of "campaign expenditure" as incorrectly applied (e.g. Steve Calabresi argues that campaign finance limits on hush money payments are unconstitutional, but he doesn't dispute that the statute purports to limit them).

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There are a few things things wrong with your post.

  1. Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen. The prosecutors treated TO and Trump as the same. Therefore Trump turned the payment by Cohen (which is limited) into a payment by Trump. Trump is allowed to make unlimited contributions to his own campaign. See Buckley v Valeo.

  2. It is far from clear that the payment to Stormy constitutes a campaign contribution. Indeed, the law is designed to limit the ability for candidates to use campaign funds for mixed motive expenses (eg a suit) since the opportunity for abuse is obvious.

  3. So it isn’t clear under either reading that there was a campaign finance violation. Moreover, it is clear that if properly structured (ie Trump himself made the payment) there is no criminal FECA violation (at worst there was a reporting obligation in 2017).

  4. Now we get to intent. Yes, you can generally infer from actions what intent was. For example, if Person A points a gun at B and pulls the trigger, it is reasonable to infer he intended to shoot B as that is a natural consequence of the action. This is different. There is a requirement as an element that the false records were intended to in this case to avoid FECA. This seemingly suggests there needs to be more than the normal case; it seems to require that Trump knew what he was doing was to break a law.

First, no info was offered that Trump was thinking of any law.

Second, even if you don’t think Trump needs to think he was breaking the law (which seems really hard here) it is not a reasonable inference from the action (ie filing the records a certain way) that there was an intention to violate FECA (especially since it is far from clear there was a violation). Even worse, it is really clear Trump could’ve easily structured the transaction to avoid any FECA issue. So we are supposed to believe that Trump knew what he was doing was a FECA obligation, and either had the choice to slightly restructure the transaction (without changing economics) or he decided to break FECA and falsify business records. Does the latter even sound reasonable? Reasonable enough to get past reasonable doubt? No way.

  1. It isn’t clear that unlawful means something that is illegal under laws other than the US. What if there was some action a campaign did wherein business records were falsified and it hid say a violation of Russian law. Would that be captured? What if it was Alaskan law?

  2. Finally the records were internal records. How would Trump think these records would ever be requested in relation to NY somehow regulating a federal election?

Fantasy football payments would seem to qualify. That is a business - someone makes money. Whoever won probably did not pay taxes so there is the coverup of another crime.

So yes I am a felon.

And for proportionality reasons my $500 fantasy football buy-in is equivalent to Trumps 750k to a hooker.

You did not mislabel your Venmos (as far as I know) with the intent of preventing the state of New York from executing its law

Assuming he's in New York, yes he did: he knew those transaction records could be subpoenaed for a variety of reasons, and mislabeled them anyways. This is clear intent to frustrate the state carrying out its laws.

This is nonsense -- you could argue that any mislabeled record was mislabeled with "intent to defraud the state". That's what makes this egregious: the crime Trump is charged with isn't a crime unless you investigate it as though it is a crime!

Yep. It renders intent meaningless which (1) is a no-no when construing statutes and (2) moreso in criminal context.

You can argue anything. Proving intent beyond a reasonable doubt is however a fairly high bar to clear.

Here there was literally zero evidence of intent offered. So clearly not a high bar to a heavily biased jury.

Not when the jury and judge are stacked against you!

The jury went through voir dire, and Trump's lawyers participated in that process. Potential jurors who would not be impartial were struck. This is standard practice.

What a bullshit argument. If you stack a jury group where it is 90-10 against the defendant couple with limited strikes and an adverse judge you won’t get a fair jury.

My question to you is do you think Trump would’ve been found guilty in WV with the same exact facts?

TBH I'm not sure that a second New York jury would get to the same verdict. I think the verdict is correct, but it's clearly the weakest of the cases against him and I was not confident he would be convicted.

But regardless, I think it's disingenuous to describe Manhattan as being 90-10 against Trump in this context. That's true of the voting population, but something like 40% of the people there didn't vote in 2020 (can't be arsed to look up the exact figures). I do not believe that it is particularly challenging to find 12 impartial jurors among a population where somewhere between a third and a half of them voted neither for nor against Trump. Believe it or not, there's a LOT of people who sincerely find politics tremendously uninteresting and are not at all invested in the success of one side or the other.

Bryant and Milam didn't lynch Emmet Till, because a jury found them not guilty.

OJ Simpson didn't kill Nicole Brown, because a jury found him not guilty.

Come on, voir dire isn't some magical process that produces impartial jurors where none exist. Miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions happen all the time, and falling back on "but the jury was impartial" is either extremely naive, or a refusal to come up with an actual opinion of your own.

I doubt that for one simple reason: I have been on multiple juries. I am not impartial. I was not stricken.

It's very easy. All you have to do is give the right answers.

Yeah it is quite the slippery slope. It is one of the problems when you criminalize pretty much everything.

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