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Not a lawyer but one thing I don’t understand is why NYC doesn’t just sentence him to jail. I already think they abused a lot of power. What’s doing another abuse of power and giving him 5 years.
I don’t even know how that would work. Would Trump just never leave Florida?
I think the smarter Democrats will quickly learn to see as a positive that lawfare is not paying out, because they could soon be the defendants. Though I have to say that the recent assassination attempt reduces the likelihood of Trump retaliating, I believe. (he wants his legacy to be that of a uniter, and the attack gave him a path to that if he acts the bigger man)
And in any case, if Democrats want to replace Biden and have a chance in the election they need the spotlight squarely set on them, not on Trump, especially when it's clearly not even damaging his chances at election. Any attention spent on the Trump sideshow is not used to pressure Biden to step down, and then not used to build up the replacement.
I don't even believe they have a path to a meaningful stepdown bar any end-of-life instant expiration issues.
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Does he want a legacy of unity? More than any other politician, I mean.
I’d say he wants a legacy of Winning. The people on his team should end up happier and more successful than they were at the start. That doesn’t require making up with the other guys.
Unity is one of those things which sounds nice once you’ve already taken charge. It’s not one that gets you into power.
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The short answer is that it would be almost immediately overturned on emergency appeal. What is more likely is that they sentence him to prison but delay the sentence pending appeal, preventing an emergency appeal and ensuring that he is a “convicted felon” through the election.
I didn't think they would be stupid enough to try and make him an obviously innocent "convicted felon", yet here we are. The black vote is going to explode with the court shenanigans and the shooting.
He is for sure not innocent. You can certainly argue that it was a politically motivated prosecution of the 10 felonies a day type but Trump really did commit a crime.
AFAIK they didn't even show evidence that Trump was the person who categorized the expense.
Let alone the necessity that the mis-categorization had to be "in furtherance of another crime," and that crime remained unspecified, untried, and jurors instructed that they could meet this requirement with anything.
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What crime? That he put "Legal Expenses" when he should have put "Settlement Payment" in his own ledger? That's a "crime" on the level of putting the wrong category in Quicken.
He’s correct it is a crime.
But every white color worker who has to document their work probably commits it every other day.
Putting the wrong category in quicken is a crime. Telling your co-worker she’s beautiful when she’s bummed a date went bad is a crime.
Technically it isn't. Allowing one co-worker to tell another that she's beautiful when she's bummed a date went bad is a tort on the part of the employer, but sexual harrassment laws are not criminal laws, and are not directly enforceable against non-manager employees.
Normally I wouldn't get this technical, but given that a large part of the "the NY prosecution is a stretch" is based on the distinction between different kinds of illegality, I think we should.
I think it turns into a crime if you make it a business record. If you say it on Skype where it is recorded then it’s part of the business record. If it’s a lie then it’s falsified. I don’t think in the statute it says it needs to be relevant to operations. But it would be a falsified record about the business. You described an employee who is ugly as beautiful which is false.
There is a requirement that it wasn’t intended to defraud. So false is not enough.
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And you have to have “intent to defraud.” I’m not sure legal expense is false but Im very sure there was no intent to defraud.
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Why do you say he’s “obviously innocent” when the jury unanimously found him guilty after being explained all the evidence? It sounds like you think “they” can simply control what the jury believes.
The thing is, Trump's so polarising that you'd expect most people to vote on the jury based on their opinion of Trump, rather than the facts of the case. And, well, Manhattan voted 90% Democrat in 2020, and ten peremptory strikes for each side easily suffice for an all-Democrat jury (even strikes for each side advantage whoever has a majority, because striking a minority juror will usually succeed at replacing the juror with one of the majority while striking a majority juror will usually just replace the juror with another one of the majority - this is the same way the South could ensure all-white juries until Batson declared race-based peremptory strikes to be unconstitutional).
Manhattan turnout was 65%. That means your jury pool is not 90% (actually 85%) Democrat-voting, it's 55%.
Sorry, the map I read had like five different shades of blue for different margins and Manhattan's pretty small.
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The people who don't vote for President are unlikely to show up for jury duty also. And they're still Democrats.
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The jury pool hates Trump.
No they didn’t get to hear “all the evidence.” The judge made many poor rulings allowing things in that should not have been permitted and prohibiting evidence that should’ve been allowed.
The judge’s instructions were faulty as a matter of law. That is, he gave the wrong law to the jury. Even a truly impartial jury (of which this was not) would probably convict based upon the faulty leading jury instructions.
The law Trump allegedly broke was impermissibly brought by the DA (ie even if all of the elements were proven NY under its own constitution and under federal preemption could not bring the case).
Huh, is there somewhere I could read about 2 - 4 explained in greater detail? I’m afraid I’m not well versed in legal proceedings.
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I believe the former federal elections commissioner wanted to testify saying it was not a crime. I don’t know rules of evidence that well but that sounds like a guy very qualified to explain the evidence.
The relevant rule of evidence here is that the judge is responsible for determining what the law is and instructing the jury accordingly. The parties can bring witnesses to testify about the facts of the case but they can't bring witnesses to make arguments to the jury about what the law is.
If the judge gets the law wrong, that's an appealable error.
The prosecution actually asserted it was a fact that there was a campaign finance violation. In addition, the judge permitted Michael fucking Cohen to testify about his understanding of FECA. So yes you are correct abstractly but wrong as it was applied in this case.
Once the judge allowed Cohen to say what he said the only effective curative would’ve been to allow Smith to testify or declare a mistrial.
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This is a distinction without a difference when the facts of the case hinge on what the law is in actual application, which thus shapes the facts of what intent should be on the part of the accused, which the witness forbidden to testify was the best able to speak to.
Googling this to refresh my memory. Turns out the judge didn’t bar the former FEC guy from testifying. The judged barred him from giving expert opinion on the law.
I guess for rules of evidence it’s probably legally correct. There is a bigger problem here because when cases get more complex judges become less of the expert on the law.
The felony case is a lot like the judge telling the jury that eating a ham sandwich is murder. And then they showed a picture of Trump eating a ham sandwich.
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They might do this in September.
It'd be terrible optics, of course, and Trump could just decide to stay in states with sympathetic governments(including Florida, but definitely not limited to it). And of course senator Vance is unlikely to be preferable to those with hardcore TDS.
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If it happened now, an emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court would likely quickly result in Trump being freed.
I think you're right, but I'm very curious as to what theory they would use to overturn it if they couldn't grasp at some idiosyncratic procedural glitch to spare themselves from having to confront the core question.
I've been a fan of the following theory. Donald Trump could not have entered into a quid pro quo arrangement (trading money for official acts) with Donald Trump by using his own money to pay for his own expense (regardless of whether the FEC's interpretation of 'private use' holds, though this would be a perfectly fine alternate theory), just because he used an intermediary for the transaction. Since the underlying crime referenced by the conviction is a federal crime, there is a substantial federal question, and prior Supreme Court precedent has established that the federal statutes in question can only withstand First Amendment scrutiny to the extent that they are interpreted in a tailored fashion so as to only address quid pro pro or the appearance thereof. Vacate and remand the question of whether the jury instructions were such that they can sustain the conviction, given that the federal crime alleged is actually not a crime.
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Many easy ones.
Jury verdict has to be unanimous. The idea that the key can pick and choose in a case that is not mallum in se is prohibited under the due process regime.
Federal preemption — congress vested sole authority in DOJ and FEC to enforce FECA because there was a strong interest in a uniform application of the law (in part because it conflicts with the first amendment and in part because it is a federal election). The state can’t use this federal law as a predicate because of preemption.
They could say the judge gave the wrong instructions not explaining FECA well (including botching the willfulness standard).
Evidence was obtained that the recent ruling likely says was inappropriately obtained.
These are probably the most straightforward at the scotus level but there are more.
But I’m not sure it goes to scotus. Trump’s team can pick an appellate judge to immediately hear an appeal to stay the order. There are many reasons to junk this case. I think the NY appellate stays any jail sentence immediately.
Yeah, all fine, but I am thinking of those as idiosyncratic procedural glitches. I mean, suppose that the state convicted him of some dumb white collar crime that he was definitely guilty of and tried to jail him via impeccable process. Obviously it's untenable for an elected president to be jailed by New York State. But what theory would the Supreme Court use to prevent it? Straight-up vertical separation of powers? It would be fun to find out.
If jailed legitimately and elected, then i believe the court would say that because the constitution requires the president to take care that the laws are faithfully executed and doing so is incompatible with being jailed, the supremacy clause tolls the jail time while the president is in office.
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There is no shortage of activist judges, so I have to imagine that there are powerful people holding back most of the farcical and nakedly partisan potential Trump prosecutions and who are only strategically letting some through in controlled, well-timed escalations. Otherwise I'm sure he'd already have a dozen prison sentences in random jurisdictions.
Alternatively, the establishment is trying not to let him get prosecuted because they're scared of backlash but lacks enough control to do it 100%.
I have long thought that it would have been completely reasonable for Biden to try to negotiate a pardon for Trump a la Ford pardoning Nixon in return for a back-to-normalcy sort of proposal. On the other hand Nixon was term limited and Trump was at least in a position to consider running again. Perhaps in return for retiring from political life? It was also a pretty unpopular decision by Ford at the time, but I think in hindsight was probably better for just moving on as a nation.
Although it's not even clear that Trump would have accepted it if offered -- he doesn't seem like one willing to retire quietly. Nor does Biden, who steadfastly refuses to consider dropping out, seem quite as much of a one-term caretaking administration as was perhaps originally advertised, so it may never have been under consideration to begin with.
Aside from that, it’d be illegal and have even worse optics than what Biden’s currently doing. Also there isn’t enough trust to do it, even if both sides wanted it.
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I expressed the same idea a while back and people thought I was crazy. Even if the Democrats/deep state were not so terrified of another Trump presidency (which they might not be, Trump is a moderate and after 4 years they should know by now he's not a madman either), the thought of losing to him in a rematch is unthinkable, because it means unmistakably that after having had an A/B comparison of a populist and of the rule of the enlightened, the population prefers the populist. And that means they can't spin the election as anything but a complete repudiation of the last four years; it cannot be dismissed as the people being dazzled by some fresh new candidate, it's "this was shit, give us back the guy we had before". To avoid that, I thought they would quickly embrace ANY option, even letting the Republicans win and sweep, as long as Trump is not the one to do it, and offering amnesty in exchange for retirement could have been an option.
It's also especially personal and insulting for Biden himself, to the extent he's aware of it; being behind the guy you were supposed to replace in the polls. I think he refuses to leave because the only two ways for his legacy not to be that of a failure, is to retire while he's ahead in the polls (in which case, he'll think "Do I really HAVE to retire then?") or beat Trump himself. Well, before he possibly could have made the offer to exchange amnesty for retirement and added his retirement on top, that would have avoided him the humiliation of being beat by Trump (or of retiring because he's polling behind Trump). Both of them could have made a cute gesture like playing a game of golf together and then their legacy would have at least the positive note that they put themselves aside to help the country heal from its division or something. But it's looking like it's too late for that, now Trump holds almost all the cards, save from election day shenanigans, so I don't think he'll be inclined to accept, yeah.
It's never gonna happen. Even if Biden thought that sort of a trade were beneficial (and I doubt he does), there's nothing like the sort of trust you would need to actually make a deal like that.
Plus, trading pardons for political favours is straightforwardly corrupt, even if it would be very hard to prosecute under the SCOTUS' new standard.
Presidential pardons don’t have any checks and balances. Offering that bargain would lose Biden the election(if he hadn’t already), but it’d be legal.
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Has anyone started taking bets on whether Biden pardons his son on (or before) his last day in office?
Shockingly, yes, people are mostly betting no.
https://polymarket.com/event/will-joe-pardon-hunter-biden?tid=1721237578763
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I suspect Trump would reject his overtures.
But more to the point, the President can't pardon state charges. That would have to be Governor Hochul, who does not seem so inclined.
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I could believe it.
I mean, it totally fits 1) the incompetence of this case and 2) the story the elite blue tribers tell themselves, where right wing backlash is actually terrifying.
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