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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28099 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Mostly because he doesn't think that laws apply to him in the way they do to little people.

They don't, actually, because these charges have never been used against anybody before in the history of the world.

Err wot? Falsifying business records is charged in almost every white-collar criminal indictment in New York.

See here or here for surveys on the issue, or here for an example of a criminal defence firm which holds out this kind of charge as an important practice area.

I agree that there is a bit of a reach to get to felony falsification in this case - the point I was making was that Donald Trump clearly committed a misdemeanour completely unnecessarily (and may have committed a felony depending on a legal technicality he didn't feel the need to ask a competent lawyer about) because he didn't care.

There is a real question of whether the record was in fact false. If my contractor builds my deck and pays out of pocket for materials, would it be a false record if I label my payment to him as construction expense even if it reimbursed in large part those expenses?

I think the Trump defense mangled this argument a bit but we don’t have to.

Trump has been doing business in New York for 40 years and the only crime they can charge him on is something nobody has ever been charged for before -- "falsifying records" is one thing, this is falsifying records used totally for internal purposes, as though he committed fraud upon himself (this has been discussed to death in other comments in this thread by now).

There is no one who has ever been charged with anything similar to this. You want to make it sound as though Trump is contemptuous of law because he described money paid to his lawyer as legal expenses, for arranging an NDA, which is legal, with a porn star, which is legal. If Trump was as contemptuous of law as you suggest, maybe there would be other bookkeeping crimes to charge him with that don't involve felony upcharges on underlying crimes that are not specified.

Trump has been doing business in New York for 40 years and the only crime they can charge him on

The business-related crimes Trump has been successfully bought to justice as a result of the NY AG-led investiagtion include:

I am not including the stuff that is plausibly "three felonies a day bullshit" like housing discrimination, SEC penalties for improper disclosures when one of Trump's companies was publically traded, antitrust litigation, or ordinary commercial litigation of the type any sufficiently large company gets involved in regularly.

The Trump University scam probably isn't a crime, and it looks like Letitia James brought the loan fraud allegations in civil fraud because she couldn't prove mens rea against individual Trump org executives beyond reasonable doubt. But that is 3 and a half serious crimes of which someone in the Trump organisation is factually guilty, and the evidence points to it being the boss.

The District Attorney’s press office and its flaks often proclaim that falsification of business records charges are “commonplace” and, indeed, the office’s “bread and butter.” That’s true only if you draw definitional lines so broad as to render them meaningless. Of course the DA charges falsification quite frequently; virtually any fraud case involves some sort of fake documentation.

But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: the charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor – in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere – has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html)

((It's not clear that the underlying crime was actually the federal campaign finance matter; the jury instructions just reference 17-152, which itself requires "unlawful means", and the judge verbally instructed the jury to pick any combination of FECA, other paperwork record violations, or state tax laws.))

Those surveys tend to back this up: the lightest or attempted theft in this page is still 300 USD in Ramirez, Murray in the multiple thousands, Kirkland for 350k USD(!). I can't find exact numbers for Freeland or Holley, but napkin math puts even a short duration puts it around 200 USD/month and Freeland covering multiple months, and Holley's insurance fraud claims are almost certainly closer to Murray than Ramirez. In this case, the erroneous classification probably increased, rather than decreased, Trump's final tax payment.

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