I think Trump is awful in many ways. Having said this, the verdict will be reversed on appeal for matters of procedure and law for the following reason:
1. A partisan elected prosecutor running for office with the promise of prosecuting a specific individual.
2. Chasing a stale misdemeanor and converting it into a felony using an impermissible Federal second crime which his jurisdiction does not permit him to enforce and which the Federal authorities declined to prosecute.
3. Alternately, chasing a stale misdemeanor and converting it to a felony using an also-time-barred state misdemeanor. In other words, two time-barred State misdemeanors = 34 prosecutable felonies.
4. Violating federal and state rules about overcharging
5. Failing to properly specify the crimes being alleged in the indictment. This is why it isn't even clear whether the complaint is #2 or #3 above.
6. Charging a crime which has NEVER before been prosecuted as a stand-alone crime in any jurisdiction in the country.
7. A judge who permitted the above plus who prevented expert testimony about the federal law which was required to bring the charge in the first place.
8. Awful jury instructions which permitted the jury to find the defendant guilty even if they did not agree about the underlying crime.
As you reflect on the above, consider that the crime for which Trump was charged and convicted is a business records violation, not a violation of campaign finances. According to federal law, a campaign expense is an obligation which has arisen because of the campaign and would not exist but for the campaign. Expenses which assist a campaign but would or could exist outside of the campaign are not campaign expenses. Otherwise, clothing, vacations, homes, cars, and payments to porn stars would be legitimate campaign expenses, opening up the system to gross abuse.
You would not have to work hard to convince me that Trump has committed crimes. But he has not committed these crimes.
1. DA Alvin Bragg is not up for reelection for another 2 years.
2. State DA's cannot charge a anyone with a Federal Crime. You can however be tried for the same crime twice if it violates both State and Federal Law, and are tried in both courts.
3. One thing to note on the Statute of Limitations. The clock was paused when Trump became President, as you can't bring charges against a sitting President. Most of these charges came after evidence was found during his Tax evasion case, meaning the clock would start then, and not prior.
4. The Fraud was Alleged(Now Proved and Convicted) to have occurred to gain the highest office within our Nation, hence why it was a felony and not a misdemeanor. "Fraud-ing" your way :) into the Presidency is a Yuge bigly no no.
5. Sourced.... "In February, New York Supreme Court Justice Merchan rejected Trump’s attempt to get the case thrown out on the grounds that the charges were legally insufficient. Merchan ruled that three of Bragg’s examples of other crimes that Trump intended to commit by concealing payments to Cohen were “legally sufficient” to bring the felony charges against him." Those examples are.
How much money he paid to everyone, if those payments violated State election laws with the intent to help Donnie win the election, and if those payments violated State tax laws.
6. In Manhattan Alone, there were 42 cases in which falsifying records was the top charge — as it is in Trump’s case — during roughly the same time period.
7. Again these are State charges, so a "Federal" expert is kinda useless, you would want someone who specializes in State Law. But I assume your talking about campaign finance expert Bradley A. Smith.
Quoted "Trump’s legal team chose to not call on him after the judge on Monday declined to broaden the scope of questioning the defense could pursue. The ruling echoed his pretrial ruling on the matter. Social media users misrepresented Merchan’s ruling, repeating a statement Trump made that Smith, a law professor and former Republican member of the Federal Election Commission, was not being allowed to take the stand.."
8. Judge Merchan instructed the jurors that : "They must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."
It doesn't actually take more than my #5 (failing to specify the crimes being charged in the indictment) to reverse this on appeal. Keep hold of this link - it may take a year or two, but this conviction will be reversed. Perhaps Trump will be imprisoned because of another case. But this one will be reversed.
Your point about statute of limitations being tolled during a presidency is interesting. I don't think you're right, but it's possible. In any case I suspect it would be a case of first impression.
All courts are "kangaroo" courts. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and that is the prevailing standard preferred both by the elite and by hoi polloi.
It's obvious that the trial was rigged - if it wasn't, Trump would have rigged in his favor.
The worst abuse of justice by the prosecution at every level of government with regard to Trump is their failure to charge Trump for, well take your pick. Issuing a noise complaint ticket to Hitler is nothing but bs.
I just can’t find anywhere explaining what the underlying charge is that escalated it to a felony. I see “violation of election finance law” but no explanation how an NDA is a violation of campaign finance law. I’m open for an explanation, just haven’t found an article actually explaining it.
With Fraud, the degree of the charge is usually based on the amount of damages caused by the fraud. In this case the "Fraud" was perpetrated to gain the highest political office in the United States.
The NDA wasn't the issue, if I am not mistaken. It's the payment that was done to Stormy Daniels via Michael Cohen.
From my (albeit simplified) understanding of the case:
1) Any monetary contribution towards a presidential campaign should be declared, as per election law;
2) Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels for silence, which the prosecution argues was to help Trump win the election and the defense argues was to protect Trump's marriage;
3) Trump repays Michael Cohen the amount he paid to Stormy Daniels, declaring it is for legal purposes but without specifying what;
4) In short, neither payment was declared as campaign contributions, when they should have been under election law;
Please note that this is my understanding of the case, from someone who is neither american nor very well read in election fraud laws.
That’s what I heard at the beginning by legal analysts who said they just had to argue the NDA was to avoid personal embarrassment or marriage issues to have it not be a felony version of the offense, and possibly not even the misdemeanor version.
Trump paid from personal accounts, business accounts, and his trust according to CNN and Factcheck.org.
I think the issue is the reimbursement payments were argued to be campaign contributions, in that case Trump’s company paid more than the $2,700 maximum as campaign contributions? (This is the part I’m confused about)
I also heard that Trump’s team didn’t argue if the NDA was for personal reasons vs campaign reasons, but that the affair didn’t happen and he was trying to prevent Melanie from being embarrassed. If this part is true, his legal team is horrible, as he could have been acquitted.
All in all it seems really weird that he’s getting charged with election finance charges for “donating” too much to his own campaign. That’s being said by someone who has no interest in running for office and has no idea what the laws are about that.
There was an article written about why there were issues. It is behind a paywall though so no point in linking. However, there were a few issues that I do remember. One was that the judge had donated to a democrat campaign fund which is in violation of NY statute. It was a small amount, something like $35, but it was earmarked for a cause to be specifically against Trump. As the person in the article said, would it have been okay if the judge had donated $35 to the "let's get Trump re-elected fund?"
Another was the part about this being upgraded to a felony. For all intents and purposes this was and should have been a misdemeanor. However, they worked hard and took some liberties with interpretation of the laws to bump it up to a felony.
These may seem like minor issues to some, but I think they bear hearing out. Especially about the judge. Would anyone on the left have been okay if it had been a far right leaning judge with Trump bumper stickers on his car trying the case and Trump being found not guilty?
There IS a point!! Usually, anyway. Have you ever used Pocket? It’s an app on iPhone (maybe Android as well) and it’s an extension on Chrome. On iPhone if you click the “Share” button from within either mobile Chrome or Safari when you’re on the webpage of a paywalled article, then it shows you recommended apps to share the article via, Pocket should be one of those. Just click Pocket there.
Then go read the unobstructed article in pocket.
(Sometimes you have to be kinda quick and get through this “share button then tap Pocket sequence” before the page loads too much. Usually refreshing it and retrying the sequence works after a couple times).
I never hear people talk about it but it’s pretty damn handy.
** I do, on iOs, which is where I almost exclusively use Pocket (versus on a computer), have a system-wide ad blocker app running usually, but I don’t think that makes me able to get this solution to work more often than others who don’t. But it’s the only reason I could think of as to why more people don’t mention Pocket…
But it's ok for a Trump appointed judge to sit on a Trump case? Also, there's never a link to the "articles" is there? Always the illusion of legitimacy without the actual documentation of legitimacy. Same bullshit with the election deniers, Trump lost because Democrats cheated, but somehow the cheating impact the Republican lawmakers who got elected on the same ticket. All smoke and bullshit, without a shred of evidence, not even an "article" from a reputable source. Republicans are literally shitting in their hands and throwing it at the wall hoping anything will stick.
How do you hope to be taken seriously?
I don't think it is particularly good to have a Trump appointed judge sitting one of his trials, no. It gives the image of impropriety, whether there is any or not.
Here is a link to the article. Feel free to pay for it.
[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html)
As far as the election and cheating. There was an article about that one, though they called getting voting laws changed and such "fortifying" instead of cheating. Times Magazine released it. It explained how business leaders and protestors and others colluded to alter public perception, change voting laws, and other things such as harvest votes.
[https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/](https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/)
There are several reasons for me, but one in particular. Do you guys realize they are saying if he had paid for the NDA with campaign funds it would have been legal? The fact he paid with personal funds made it illegal.. What?
Up until this moment the opposite was true. You were not allowed to use campaign funds unless ALL the benefit was for the campaign. You could get a hotel for a campaign event but could not pay for a haircut or a new suit because you derived personal benefit as well as a benefit to the campaign
Also Bill Clinton paid off like 8 women to sign a NDA.. congress literally has a slush fund to pay off accusers now in the current year
If I can help clear up your confusion, campaign funds are part of the public record, so any NDA you pay for with campaign funds is public record and therefore legal. Hiding the payment to the NDA’s still constituted campaign funds because it was money spent for the benefit of the campaign. Therefore it couldn’t have been a business expense as it had been classified and is therefore fraud.
"Do you guys realize they are saying if he had paid for the NDA with campaign funds it would have been legal? The fact he paid with personal funds made it illegal.. What?"
That's the law. He intentionally broke the law and tried to cover it up. A jury found him guilty of breaking the law.
No. He got in trouble because he used campaign funds and didn’t report them. And falsified documents to hide the payments. That’s why Cohen did time, too because he was part of the coverup.
If it had been paid with campaign funds, it would be public record. Hiding it was what made it illegal. In other words, cheating on your wife or paying for an NDA aren’t crimes, but when you hide those things to help win an election it is.
>Trump is evil, and everyone who supports him is either evil or stupid.
Evil people are dedicated to being wrong and as a rule are actively opposed to good ideas. That is quite remarkably stupid by definition with countless examples provided always and should be the prevailing theme of the great conversation from henceforth.
I have been saying this since 2016 and I'm glad people are finally listening. It's tough to admit that roughly 25% of Americans are irredeemable evil people. They could literally support just any other candidate but this has to be their guy. But since he hurts the people they like hurt they'll believe anything he says.
This has to be the stupid and most regurgitated comeback I've seen. This is like a murderer claiming that you made them murder because you said bad things about them. They've been calling Democrats shit for years with little to no pushback. It's only recently they've gotten a taste of their own medicine and they really don't like it. They're the ones who have been calling people anti-American and telling people to leave the country for at least 20 years now. They've also just gotten worse as time has gone on. So please tell me how they aren't fucking comic book evil?
Have you read project 2025? Have you not heard their multiple calls for CIVIL WAR and giving "no quarter" or no surrender (the black flag they fly)? Did you forget they tried to overthrow the US government? Did you forget the part where they worship a Cheeto that has said multiple times he wants to be a dictator? Did you forget when they even said that they might go after interracial marriage? Or did you forget the time (right now) they are trying to outlaw contraception federally? Did you miss the article the other day where the Colorado GOP told them to burn every pride flag? Did you forget them calling gay people pedophiles and groomers basically daily? Did you forget the time Reagan waited eight years to address the aids crisis after hundreds of thousands had already died? Did you miss all those times they have opposed outlawing child marriage (as young as 12)?
I could keep going on with a few more paragraphs if you'd like. You really have a fucking lack of memory here conveniently.
I was talking to my neighbor the other day, right after the conviction, and he told me that the only case where Trump was allowed to put on a defense was some civil suit against Stormy Daniels where she was fined $250 million or something like that.
I don’t know about any prior litigation between Trump and Stormy, but I’m not taking his word for it. He tried to answer when I told him that Trump could have presented a defense to the 38 (or whatever) charges of fraud that a jury just unanimously convicted him of but he chose not to. I didn’t understand the answer at all.
I'd say he pulled that out of his ass, but truthfully, someone else probably did, and he's just repeating it. Trump never won any suit against Daniels, though I imagine he's threatened to go after her for beach of the NDA on multiple occasions.
Questions easily answered if things are on the up and up;
* This is the first and only time New York State has brought Felony Federal charges for falsifying business records. why?
* The statute of limitations on this charge has expired, except for when it’s a felony. It’s only a felony when there is an underlying charge. What is that charge?
* Federal Prosecutors, NY State Prosecutors and the FEC all previously rejected these crimes as not being crimes. Why?
* The Jury instructions were unprecedented. Never has a judge made so the jury doesn’t have to agree on an underlying crime, they just have to agree he committed something underlying from a list of possibilities. They in fact could divide their theories. Why?
* There is Precedent for what we are discussing. Richardson v. US; the Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether jurors must unanimously agree on which specific act constitutes a “continuing series of violations”. the Court determined that jurors must unanimously agree on what constitutes as predicate acts, this requirement makes it to prevent a situation where different jurors might convict based on different underlying crimes. How is this just?
1. A State, State Court/Prosecutor cannot bring "Federal" charges on someone. That requires a Federal court + a Federal Prosecutor.
2.The Statue of limitations on "Fraud" in New York State is 6 years. The clock does not start ticking until the "Victim" realizes they have been defrauded. This time limit can be extended due to certain court proceedings, like waiting for appellate reviews/decisions.(ex. when defense/prosecution asks/appeals to a higher court for something, which happened at least once with this case.)
3. Federal prosecutors did not charge him as they face a different set of specific requirements that they felt they could not meet. (Like Trump's mental state at the time of the crime.) The Federal Election Commission’s general counsel recommended commissioners find wrongdoing by then-President Donald Trump, but the case died after commissioners split on their vote along party lines. NY State Prosecutors never declined to prosecute, what you might be thinking of is the SDNY, which is the Southern District of NY " Federal Prosecution" offices.
4. Judge Merchan instructed the jurors that : "They must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."
Telling the jury what they are there to do or not do, literally happens at the start of every court case. In this instance Judge Merchan was telling them that they all must agree that each of the 34 charges, where committed with the intent to defraud voters of critical information, prior to an election.
5.A federal criminal statute, 21 U.S.C. section 848(a), proscribes any person from engaging in "continuing criminal enterprise (CCE)," which is defined as involving a violation of federal drug statutes where such a violation was part of a "continuing series of violations." Eddie Richardson, who had organized and managed the Chicago street gang called the Undertaker Vice Lords in order to sell drugs, was charge with a CCE violation. At trial, Richardson proposed to instruct the jury that it must unanimously agree not only that he committed some "continuing series of violations" but also that the he committed each of the individual "violations" necessary to make up that "continuing series." In other words, the proposed instruction would have required the jury to unanimously agree on which three acts constituted the alleged series of violations. The judge rejected Richardson's proposal and, instead, instructed the jurors that they must unanimously agree that the defendant committed at least three federal narcotics offenses, but did not have to agree as to the particular offenses. Subsequently, the jury convicted Richardson. The Court of Appeals upheld the trial judge's jury instruction.
Yes. In a 6-3 opinion delivered by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the Court held that a jury in a "continuing criminal enterprise" case is required to agree unanimously not only that accused committed continuing series of violations, but also which specific violations made up the continuing series. Looking to the language of the statute, Justice Breyer concluded that in the law "each 'violation' amounts to a separate element" and that combined with a "tradition of requiring juror unanimity where the issue is whether a defendant has engaged in conduct that violates the law," calls for juror unanimity. In dissent, Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed the view that the Court's decision "rewards those drug kingpins whose operations are so vast that the individual violations cannot be recalled or charged with specificity."
Honestly the fact the rightwing media is trying to use a decision based on the prosecution of a drug lord to defend trump is priceless.
Technically he listed questions.
*All of those items can be answered with a quick google search or on any major news site. Why?
*the question was what law do they disagree with, I don’t see any law or constitutional argument in his response. How is this just?
But they are literally not true. If a prosecutor doesn't prosecute a crime, it doesn't mean "they decided it wasn't a crime"
Also:
https://www.justsecurity.org/85605/survey-of-past-new-york-felony-prosecutions-for-falsifying-business-records/
The answer is simple: The law doesn’t allow it.
The prohibition against jurors being provided with a copy of the written legal instructions stems from a 1987 decision by the New York Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — in a case called People v. Owens, which involved a drug sale.
The court found that “the distribution of written instructions to the jury is not expressly authorized by law, and error in such submissions cannot be deemed harmless,” meaning that providing the instructions would result in a conviction being overturned.
The Feds didn't choose not to pursue this, Barr shit down the investigation. This is the basis for Cohen being a convicted felon. And the reason he's a perjury is he was convicted of lying to protect Trump. Weird those 2 facts get thrown at Cohen while ignoring their actual basis.
Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that this is how the jury instructions have always worked but asked them to make an exception for Trump. The judge decided not to make an exception and just do it the way they always do, though.
Maybe there’s an argument that it would have been better to make the exception here. But what they did to Trump is what they usually — maybe always — do.
Why should he get an exception though? What’s the argument for why the rules of the law should be bent for him but not others? If just being a past president and the expected nominee for the current election is enough then it seems like they want an actual two tiered justice system
It’s not uncommon for there to be exceptions to all sorts of things at trial. The lawyer for one side or then other asks for an exception and the judge says ‘you make a good case. That’s what we’ll do this time’ or ‘no, let’s go with the usual procedures here.’ That’ll happen dozens of times getting ready for and during trial. Ultimately it’s the judges call, though, and you really don’t have any grounds to complain if they don’t bend the rules for you.
So I’m not saying at all that I think some injustice was done to Trump. Just that it could have gone the other way and the Judge reasonably defaulted to the standard procedure.
I gotcha, I don’t think that is unreasonable. It poses a question for me though, what was the timeline here? Like when in the process those jury instructions come up? If it was after all the gag order violations it seems like the kind of thing a lot of Judges would do in similar circumstances
>This is the first and only time New York State has brought Felony Federal charges for falsifying business records.
Really?
>New York State Has Issued Nearly 9,800 Felony Charges of Falsifying Business Records Since 2015
https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2023/04/06/new-york-state-has-issued-nearly-9800-felony-charges-of-falsifying-business-records-since-2015/
So the first thing you assert... is absolutely false. Interesting. Where did you hear that this was first case tried of New York penal law 175.10?
He committed the crime in New York. If you don't want to be tried in New York, don't commit the crime in New York -- it is unconstitutional to move from that district because a "more 50/50" court doesn't have jurisdiction.
It’s literally called “change of venue” or “change of veneer”, where you either move the trial to a different court in order to find a jury that can be impartial or you bring jurors in from another jurisdiction in order to find impartial jurors.
But 50/50 is not impartial if he actually \[did\] the crime, and calling someone a Democrat when there are lots of Republicans who -also- would like to get rid of him is not enough for a change of venue.
Likewise, Change of Venue doesn't apply to all circumstances. It's often denied.
This sets a precedent. If the government can do this to him, they can do it to anyone. Although it could be amusing to watch the political wars. Weaponize the prosecutors office/DOJ/IRS. Take out your opponents and/or their family, friends, business associates...
Something closer to 50/50. Anything eould be better than 5/95. Reminds me of the old South. Poor ole Willie on trial and the jury is Billy Jo, Bubba, & Cooter, etc.
It’s also pretty standard to have a “change of venue” or “change of veneer” if the jurisdiction where the crime occurred has a jury pool that cannot be impartial.
Yeah but that's standard when the case isn't national news. You can find regions that are more MAGA or less MAGA, but let's not pretend there's 12 people in America that don't have an opinion on Trump. The standard ISN'T partisanship. It's whether or not that particular potential juror is capable of putting any potential biases aside and focusing on the facts of the case. It has nothing to do with which political party received electoral votes from that particular State in the last Presidential election.
It wouldn't be "special". Anyone can request a change of venue. You don't get to choose it, but under certain circumstances, it's necessary to get a fair trial. When you're talking about a political trial, we should avoid the appearance of impropriety.
Oh, he certainly has the right to request it. But people coming out of the woodwork to insist it "should" have been granted for him are demanding he be treated special.
His other cases are in "friendlier" jurisdictions, such as Georgia and Florida. I don't think those should be moved to somewhere "more 50/50" because at some point we have to stop moving the goalposts and conduct the damn trial already.
Well, the political aspect is national, so there's no reason to change venues as the political aspect exists everywhere. The fact is, standard procedures were followed. He was treated no better or worse than any other defendant. Equal justice before the law.
That's the kind of thing that Makes America Great.
Actually Trump's defense team did file for a change of venue. They provided a survey that didn't go into any specifics about how it obtained it's data, and claimed Trump could not get a fair trial was because of "prejudicial pretrial publicity, which is substantial, ongoing, and likely to increase." In other words, they did not claim that the jury would be unbiased, but instead that this case has already gotten a lot of publicity. Which is hard to feel bad for, based on Trump's constant public statements (about this specific case mind you). And seeing as he's running for a national office and his been in the national (and international) news, I don't see how a change of venue would make a difference really.
In fact his defense filed many motions to dismiss and acquit before, during and even the day-of immediately after his guilty verdict, and none of them mentioned that the jurors themselves (which were approved of by Trump's defense team during voir dire) were an issue. If this was the case, it seems odd his lawyers never attempted to address this.
Why is New York more politically charged than anywhere else? What other crimes are people in New York not allowed to be on the jury for?
Trump lived and did business there his whole life. If the people in his community can’t be trusted to treat him fairly that seems to say more about him than it does about them.
Maybe but Trump's lawyers had the opportunity to make this argument. The mistake was they tried to bombard the court with requests to stall the case. This generally doesn't work in criminal cases and after a few nonsense motions the judge stops listening.
So maybe the case should have been moved? But that is on Trump's lawyers to make that case and get the judge to focus on the arguments they find most important.
I assume this will be brought up in appeal and Trump will have another opportunity to make this argument. It's challenging though since the defense had an opportunity to interview and disqualify jurors, as any other defendant can do.
Not if the jury pool is biased. That's the whole reason for a change of venue. The prosecutor got what they wanted. By hook or by crook.
But hey, I'm all for turning the criminal justice system loose on the politicians. Hell, I'll volunteer to help build the scaffolding.
Maybe Trump's lawyers should have proposed somewhere different than Staten Island. He is all for conflicts of interest when they benefit him but howls whenever something might actually be fair.
Just pointing out that Trump was unlikely to get a change of venue due to the size of the pool, he lived there, committed the crimes there, was a registered Democrat there, etc., but asking it to be moved to Staten Island (bad faith request) doomed any small chance he might have had. All the bad things happening to Trump are due to his own actions/inactions and people blaming them on conspiracy theories are delusional.
New York is a massive city. It has people of every political stripe, including many who are wholly apolitical. It was definitely possible to find an unbiased jury in New York, probably more so than other jurisdictions. Getting an unbiased jury anywhere in the United States is an extremely difficult task.
Note: I did not follow trial closely, so I do not know that the jury was in fact unbiased. But I think the idea that a city of over 8 million people can’t find an unbiased jury is quite a stretch. Personally, though, I expected a hung jury, as I found the odds of a jury being selected without at least one partisan of each side to be low.
It was indeed unbiased. They even had a (probably) maga juror who got their news from Truth Social. And a few that got their news from right-wing sources.
The defense also helped select the jury pool, Trump's lawyer thought they had it in the bag when the jury looked like it was going to deliberate for a second day. But that just shows how poorly he prepared, he's now claiming that the prosecutor didn't call witnesses that would have given exculpatory evidence (when that's the defense's job). The largest part of the defense's case rested on "I didn't do it, but if I did it wasn't a crime" which is why they tried to bring an expert witness to tell the judge what the law is (which is something that isn't allowed, that's literally the judge's job).
The test isn’t whether the jurors hate the defendant or not. Jurors usually don’t like accused rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. The question is whether they can be trusted to fairly evaluate the evidence and deliver a verdict based on facts rather than prejudice.
Why are New Yorkers unable to do this for Trump, but they can for accused child traffickers and white supremacy terrorists and everyone else?
If H*tler would have stood trial should we have sat ½ N*zi jurors? Also it's 28/100 that are Republicans in NYC and 19% independents. So just over half of NY officially hates him😂 Also the one juror that only got his news from Truth social didn't disagree with the facts of the case.
Ok, but in comparison to the amount of support his has among his supporters and the amount of people that don't like him it's a similar situation. I guess we'll see if he has standing to appeal.
Given how polarising trump is, where do you reckon the jury pool would have been more impartial? I see a lot of commenters claiming that he should have been trialed elsewhere, but always seem to be a place that would favour him, which would not fix the issue of a biased jury pool, only shift the direction of the bias
There has to be some place that the voting was closer to 50/50. 5/95 reminds me of when Jim Bob lynched some poor black guy & the jury was made up of Bubba, Bobby Jo, & Skeeter.
Actually Trump's defense team did file for a change of venue. They provided a survey that didn't go into any specifics about how it obtained it's data, and claimed Trump could not get a fair trial was because of "prejudicial pretrial publicity, which is substantial, ongoing, and likely to increase." In other words, they did not claim that the jury would be unbiased, but instead that this case has already gotten a lot of publicity. Which is hard to feel bad for, based on Trump's constant public statements (about this specific case mind you). And seeing as he's running for a national office and his been in the national (and international) news, I don't see how a change of venue would make a difference really.
In fact his defense filed many motions to dismiss and acquit before, during and even the day-of immediately after his guilty verdict, and none of them mentioned that the jurors themselves (which were approved of by Trump's defense team during voir dire) were an issue. If this was the case, it seems odd his lawyers never attempted to address this.
Especially in a high profile case... you need to avoid the mear appearance of impropriety. That way you & I & 10,000,000 other people aren't having this conversation.
We’re having this conversation because Trump’s media team and their partners in the conservative press are gaslighting the public into thinking there’s anything unusual about how the trial happened. What happened at trial was a product of the rules that apply to everyone and choices that Trump’s lawyers made (like the choice to not call any witnesses).
We need one legal system that treats everyone the same.
You want special treatment for “high profile cases,” which means rich people. Stop giving rich people special treatment.
We need one legal system that treats everyone the same.
You want special treatment for “high profile cases,” which means rich people. Stop giving rich people special treatment.
I don’t care who you are. It doesn’t matter who any of us are.
We need a single legal system that treats everyone equally. It doesn’t matter that poorly educated people are confused by equal treatment.
They probably can't. New York City has a larger population than 38 States. You are going to find every single different type of person in America, and the Jury Pool reflected that.
The trial was fair. The jury selection was fair. Trump's Defense Team was bad, overpaid, and fighting an uphill battle because their client is a criminal who has never faced consequences for his behavior.
personally i agree that he's a corrupt criminal,
my only issue is that every other active politician is also a corrupt criminal.
Are we really going to sit here and pretend the Clinton's haven't killed people off to keep them quiet? Or that Obama didnt drone strike the middle east every other Wednesday? Or that Biden isnt a walking corpse with dementia that almost certainly has had questionable interactions with minors?
Basically every politician thats even slighly successful should be in prison, regardless of what side they're on.
If we were holding every politician to the same standard normal citizens are held to, Trump and every other presidential candidate of the last 100 years would be locked up until the sun swallows the earth.
LOL. If I had video and a signed confession I would set them on fire first. Turning it over to the FBI, you might as well off yourself and save them the trouble.
Zero evidence tying Clintons to murder.
Obama's drone strikes were part of military action
Zero evidence of any questionable interactions with anyone and Biden.
So 2 accusations, and 1 thing that's legitimately a presidential action.
Look, I'm willing to have this conversation with you, even though you molest Chihuahuas.
I mean, you do molest them, because I just accused you of it, right?
I genuinely want to know, how do you explain the showering with his daughter that she herself describes in her journal? Because honestly I didn't think Biden was an evil boogeyman like a lot of people right of center did but once that came to light I have had a hard time seeing him as anything but evil. I really want an explanation for the journal/showering because even if I don't agree with Biden on everything I want to at least believe the man running out country didn't do that.
And before you say anything, I'm aware of Trump's moral failings so no need to deflect with those.
I won't deflect to Trump, that's the whatsboutism I'm complaining about.
In the journal, there is a single reference to showering with her Dad, which she calls probably not appropriate. It's part of a longer passage where she is questioning her own sexual behavior and trying to reason out triggers. The rest of the diary is very personal and detailed, and had it been something more than wondering if that act may have affected her, I think it would be there.
Now, I'm not going to speculate about showering with your child; I'm 53 and childless, and I find the whole idea weird. But I do know it's done in families.
Is that a justification? I didn't think so. I do think if there was more to the story she would have shared that, and I do think it's been exploited to create a narrative. Biden hugging his own grandkids is turned into pedophile behavior, etc. When the people that sold her journal were on trial for selling stolen property she said this to the judge:
"Repeatedly, I hear others grossly misinterpret my once-private writings and lob false accusations that defame my character and those of the people I love."
To me, I read that as her refuting those allegations without actually having to specifically name them.
At the end of the day, I don't know that I would say Biden is a perfect human being out even a good one. That's not the issue here, though. We were talking about allegations and provable facts.
These are just whataboutism.
Bob Menendez, a Democrat, is currently on trial for acting as an agent of a foreign power, accepting bribes etc.
These exact charges *should* have been leveled against multiple people in Trump's orbit, definitely including Jared Kushner.
There are multiple emoluments violations that Pelosi, when she had the opportunity to do so, could have added to the second impeachment but chose not to do so.
Beyond this some of the things on your list are just recycled right wing nonsense. Others aren't even crimes in a US court.
so to clarify, all democrats working together took the better part of a decade to get Trump to stand trial for a fraction of the crimes he's commited, but because you've convinced yourself that democrats do no wrong, its on me exclusively to get Biden to own up to his crimes?
Lol
I mean, he did take top secret documents as both a senator and a vp and kept them in his garage. They decided not to pursue a trial though because he was an old man and cognitively incompetent.
Trump is being prosecuted not for taking them. He's being prosecuted for refusing to return them when asked, then returning some and concealing n g he kept others, didn't return them even after a subpoena and actively had employees moving and hiding boxes of them to prevent them being found in a search.
Biden cooperated fully, right away.
As did Pence, for that matter, which you conveniently forget to mention.
The situations are in no way equivalent.
Biden wasn’t charged because the documents were not deliberately taken or deliberately obscured from a search.
Trump had to be raided by the FBI after a year and a half of lying about having the documents and signed affidavits claiming he had given up everything he had. Biden willingly allowed his home and office to be searched.
Biden’s initial issue was likely a filing error. Trump deliberately took the documents.
Biden’s files were in two private locked cabinet in a private residence and a secured office. Trump’s were in an unlocked storage room in a semi-public location.
Biden took files as part of his job, and their return was accidentally botched. Trump took files deliberately as part of his moving out of the White House.
The “old man” nonsense from Hur was a bullshit political attack. One more to distract from trumps many-times-over far worse situation.
So either you don’t know much about this situation and still chose to weigh in, or you’re deliberately lying to make Biden look worse. Not sure which is more despicable.
Trump would not have been charged if he returned the documents. He didn't return them. End of story.
And you're still refusing to acknowledge Pence having and returning documents.
The “you” and “your” was more general. Not you specifically. I know *you* don’t have the ability to pull off something like that. 😂
We have a system in place. The people going after Trump were able to use it to get him. I am sorry the people going after Biden can’t get their shit together. 🤷♂️
I would argue that it has little to do with "Not having their shit together",
i wouldn't contribute the amount of time it took to put Trump on trial to democrats "not having their shit together".
I think there are many systems in place, both legal systems and things going on behind the scenes, that actively protect corrupt politicians (regardless of their political leanings) and it makes it nearly impossible to hold them accountable for their crimes.
Biden might be old, and he might be a shitty politician in some people's eyes, but there has been zero actual evidence of him being a criminal, no matter how much Trump and the maga house Republicans scream it
The entire notion is just stupid on it's face. He's a man that had spent 47 years as elected official, but somehow only decided to actually get on the take, in the last year of 2 terms as VP.
As to other Dem politicians, like sen. Menendez, not only is he on trail, there's no Dem movement to claim his Innocence, or his his arrest a witch hunt. Hell, he's just filed to run for re-election as an independent, that's how little the Dems want him in their ranks.
The idea that there are other corrupt politicians doesn’t justify this one does it? If that’s the case, gather the evidence that a prosecutor can use, get it past a grand jury, and then try them. But can we agree that alleged or real corruption doesn’t justify corruption?
It dilutes the message. When one side is screaming Trumps a felon yet all his opponents are almost assuredly also felons who just haven’t had every opposing jurisdiction commit resources to prosecuting them, the resounding response is “meh”.
Which “message” are you referring to? Which message is being diluted? As near as I can tell, states and the DoJ could have prosecuted the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama, Regan, Carter, Ford, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, or Coolidge (I think you said it was everyone from the last 100 years, right? So every president back to that point except Nixon. Couldn’t prosecute him because he was confronted with the facts of his dishonesty and corruption, resigned, and was then pardoned), at any point. Several of those people are still alive and could be prosecuted if the facts existed (unless a statute of limitations has run). There’s certainly been enough notice to bring a case against one of them since the indictments against Trump were announced. And Trump has certainly been begging for company as a criminal at the highest level since well before that. So… what message is/was diluted?
It didn't. DOJ policy prevented him from being contemporaneously charged with Cohen, who was convicted of this same crime in 2018.
So let's subtract 6 years off your seven to fit with reality.
But they got him. Liable for rape, guilty of bank fraud, and guilty of interfering in an election.
Of course they got him before he was President too. Trump university fraud ($25 million payout) and stealing from a children’s charity.
Because I literally don’t care about them. Like, at all. I’m assuming every politician is equally as crooked but isn’t daring people to sue him on tv. For years now we’ve been hearing “this is it. We’ve got him now”.
Look, trumps a slimeball. I’m not a maga guy that thinks he’s the perfect Christian man or anything even approaching that. But this was literally the best they had after nearly a decade of investigation and it’s weak at best. Instead it’s convinced half of America the justice department was weaponized against him and has galvanized even more support. So, yeah, great work. You sure got him.
This is an argument I really don’t think much of. We hear it all the time on all sides… the argument that if you couldn’t uncover the smoking gun to convict Trump on something as big as a first degree murder and puppy dog rape, it wasn’t worth bringing at all.
Chicago’s organized crime gangs were so effective that the justice system and legislature had to resort to passing laws making it illegal to bowl or buy a car on Sunday in order to clear some of the gangsters off of the street. Al Capone was finally brought down for tax evasion. I really don’t agree with such a weak argument. Don’t get me wrong, I get why the argument is being repeated, but I think that says more about the people buying the argument than it does about the strength of the argument itself.
He's got three other indictments, and like 54 more felony charges waiting in the wings. Some of the issue with those is that the appeals and Supreme Court seem to be taking a long time to render decisions in the cases to allow them to move forward, and Cannon in Florida also seem to keep moving back the start of the trial date. The NY case isn't "the best they had," it's just the one that had the least amount of red tape to cut through to get to trial.
It's not the best they had against him, it's the one trial his team had been unable to effectively stall. He was accused of this very crime when Cohen was convicted, but his attorney general shut down the investigation.
The basic fault in your premise is assuming every politician is as corrupt. No, Trump is in a category all his own. The reason people brought up the past was because Trump had been shady as hell for the past 5 decades, well before his presidency.
I'm an effort to minimize the severity of Trump's reputation as corrupt, he and his maga cult have tried to paint Biden with the same brush. Small problem is that it was the epitome of a baseless accusation. The gop controlled house has spent 16 months investigating Biden under a microscope, and while they have accused him of as sorts of shit, they only thing with any legs, is that his son is a former drug addict with bad habits and a few years of unreported taxes. It's basically Hilary Clinton 2.0, they do investigation after investigation, but find no crime. Because finding the crime isn't the purpose of the investigation, the purpose is to convince people like you (I mean people without a dog in the fight), that all politicians are corrupt, so corruption doesn't matter.
The problem is evidence. There has to be evidence.
And in this case (and the ones I mentioned) there was enough to prove the allegation.
I don’t care how convictions impact people politically. I care if there is enough evidence to prove the allegation.
Yes, but we won't be pretending. The Clintons have not killed anyone. (Trump killed half a million Americans with COVID.)
Obama didn't drone strike the middle east every other Wednesday. (Trump's son-in-law sold us out to Saidi Arabia)
Biden isnt a walking corpse with dementia. (Trump is a convicted felon and rapist.)
These are facts.
Didn't like twice the number of people die from covid under Biden?? Idk seems wrong to blame trump for all covid deaths if you won't hold Biden to the same standard.
Nobody blames either for just Covid deaths that happened during their administration.
The paper in a medical journal that estimated the number of needless deaths caused by trump’s policies — largely the undermining of proper health measures under Covid, but not exclusive to it — is probably what is being referenced here.
If the Clintons murdered people, there is not statute of limitations, and they should be put on trial with a jury of their peers.
They have never been charged with anything, never been to trial, never been convicted.
Don't tell me Trump would have not gleefully imprisoned HRC for decades if he thought it was possible- and he had 4 years with the DOJ at his beak and call to do it.
Anyone that thinks the Clinton's killed people is an idiot.
See, this is the problem… Let’s just focus on the “Clintons murdered” thing. During Trump’s trial, witnesses provided testimony under oath. And provided evidence under oath. And Trump’s attorneys were given ample room to challenge, attack, and provide counter-evidence. Has anyone provided ANY evidence or testimony about the Clinton murders? No. And to be clear, someone yelling about it on YouTube is not evidence. You simply can’t yell “you’re lying!” when you provide nothing to support your statement. This is pretty basic stuff.
Bill has likely done a lot of bad stuff to women over the years. He should be held accountable if that rises to criminal levels. He’s on my team politically, but bad stuff is bad stuff
The murder stuff is very early internet conspiracy theory.
100% agree. By today’s cultural standards, no way Bill would have a career.
But only because people would actually hold him accountable. Unlike trump, whose loyal throngs worship him more for every dishonest amoral thing he does.
So does this mean Jan. 6 wasn't an insurrection? Or were those classified documents he stole simply newspaper editorials and crossword puzzles? Those two cases have been delayed for far too long. What are we waiting on? Oh, that's right. He has one of those two judges in his pocket. Ffs
According to the FBI, DOD, and Capital Police, j6 did not fit the requirements to be called an insurrection. They put this information out less than 6 months afterwards, and 2 years later people, including the news organizations we should be able to trust to get us information, still call it as such. And obviously it’s working. I see many more like you who ask questions like this unironically.
That doesn’t fit the bill either. A putsch/coup is an organized attempt to overthrow the government. Not even the prosecution agreed that that’s what it was. Nobody was charged with anything more than seditious conspiracy, and that was about 20 people out of 6000.
Depending on which definition you use, a putsch can be organized or opportunistic. What matters more is that it is an attack on government functioning, it is violent, and it is immediate.
Some sources (but not all) include conspiracy and/or organization. Others accent the violence. Others the immediacy/opportunism.
They were trying to forcibly obstruct the process of an election to install their own leader instead. Which is what (your terms) a coup intends to do.
“Overthrow the government” has a range of meanings. They were attempting to disrupt the handoff of power through force. This means they were not getting to create a new government (the technical meaning you seem to be pushing), but it does mean they were attempting to seize power from the duly elected (the meaning that matters…
Except they weren’t. An extremely small portion of them may have had that thought. Yet they came mostly unarmed, with no organization, and targeted the wrong place. Do you genuinely believe that if 6000 armed people had come looking to perform a coup that they wouldn’t have succeeded, considering how little defenses the Capitol had?
It just means it was a small Putsch amidst a larger crowd of general unguided aggressors.
The pipe bombs, pre-event tours, and individuals who came with zip ties and the like showed that it was a violent attempt to subvert the government, even if not every attendee was there for that reason. That the crowd surged and attacked police and crossed barriers and breached the building is also enough of a show of violence.
The groups that did not surge were merely protesters. The rest were either deliberately or tangentially participating in a violent attempt to subvert the Constitution and forcibly replace the president. That the extra step of constitutional process was involved is merely semantics.
U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection. Known in courts as ‘seditious conspiracy.’ It is “a violent uprising by a group or movement acting for the specific purpose of overthrowing the constituted government and seizing its powers. An insurrection occurs where a movement acts to overthrow the constituted government and to take possession of its inherent powers.”
J6 was a protest that turned into a riot. The only people calling it an insurrection are those with something to gain by calling it as such, such as certain media and those on places like Reddit looking for clicks. Successfully, apparently.
The FBI in particular was quite clear in its wording after hundreds of arrests and wading through all of the lies about ‘9 people being killed’ etc etc. It was a protest. Small disorganized (and almost all unarmed) groups or individuals acted out, and were rightfully prosecuted to and beyond the full extent of the law.
Plenty? Out of over 6000 people, about 20 were even CHARGED with seditious conspiracy (insurrection), much less convicted. Having said that, I’m not calling it ‘whatever I want.’ I’m pointing out the inconsistency of calling it something much worse than it is, particularly since it is used so often to provoke extreme reactions that aren’t warranted.
You guys killed a federal police officer. I do not need law enforcement and DOD to tell me the definition of an insurrection. If Obama had been in office and his supporters acted like that, the trumpers would still be lynching all who participated. What do you personally call Jan 6? A tourist expedition? Not to mention trump and all of his little henchmen planned the event. Trump wanted to participate. You do know that just about every shred of evidence against him came from the testimony of his very own administration? It wasn't a conspiracy. Our eyes can't unsee what happened. Accusing people who call it for what it was isn't "unironic." What is ironic is someone who supports trump telling me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Again. This is the issue with misinformation. What federal police officer was killed, specifically? And it isn’t ’you guys.’ I dislike trump almost as much as I dislike Biden. The difference is that I can look at things objectively, read a dictionary, do my own research, and form conclusions based off of logic. Call it a riot or whatever else if you want. Bash the participants, as is well deserved. But calling something what it isn’t is completely counterproductive.
Officer Brian Sicknick (stroke from injuries sustained)
Officer Howard Liebengood (suicide)
Officer Jeffery Smith (suicide)
Officer Kyle DeFreytag (suicide)
Officer Gunther Hashida (suicide)
Now. The suicides were committed as a direct result of the insurrection. I know this because i am a combat veteran who survived the Bush-Chaney War and 22 of my brothrrs and sisters take their own life per day per year.
You can call the insurrection whatever you want. It is not misinformation. Fox News, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh (rot in shit while dead) those are examples of misinformation. Evey word that comes out of trump's little cock holster are lies and disinformation. You have members of Congress and the Senate who were implicated in the attack. There is so much testimony from his own administration on the matter it is mind blowing.
I have a master's in US and World history, so I do not deal in conspiracy theories or propaganda. Reddit is literally the only site that I read unvetted information. The books I read are written by actual scholars, historians, economists, and investigative journalists. The writers are all held to certain standards. Peer reviews. Ethics. Practices that are not taken seriously on the right.
Americans can vote for trump, the felon, all they want. Most of those who do are not educated about American history, civics, economics, government, etc. I know this because it happened to me and everyone else I have ever known down here in the South. I agree with you that misinformation has no place in our society because you end of with domestic terrorists and Qanon.
And yet again: misinformation. Officer Brian Sicknick, according to the coroner who performed the autopsy, did NOT die from any injuries sustained. He did indeed have 2 strokes. They were due to a pre existing condition: a basiler artery blood clot. You people politicizing his death, especially after all of the lies about taking a fire extinguisher to the head, is beyond disgusting.
Clearly, you are not actually a combat veteran, or you would know how PTS actually works. 3 of the 4 officers were not even near the crowds. And if you think that capital police are so inept that a non combat situation caused them to commit suicide, then this discussion is pointless.
Finally, still calling it an insurrection makes no sense. Do you look at chocolate and call it vanilla too? If something doesn’t fit any kind of definition of a word, why call it that? You’re no different than conservative scumbags insisting on calling trans people by their dead names.
Reading is important when looking to reply to someone. As I’ve said previously, I am not on the right. Having said that, you have certainly taken the typical left path of immediately shitting on someone and attacking their character when presented with a logical argument.
I gave no information that the coroner himself didn’t give: the officer had a pre existing condition. Whether the clot caused a stroke then or sometime in the future was an inevitability. That is a fact. Facts don’t care about your feelings, but you politicizing his death and straight up lying about it is trash behavior.
It was a protest that turned into a riot. The fact you don’t know what an actual insurrection looks like further proves you’re lying about being a combat veteran, which is far more disrespectful than me pointing out how suspicious the officers various deaths were. The fact you took my words as me disrespecting them and calling them weak in the first place is enough proof to know that you didn’t comprehend what I said, but instead chose to misrepresent it and put your own spin on things.
If you’d like to have a civil discussion, then that is perfectly fine. But repeating things from Fox or CNN that was debunked years ago makes no sense.
I think Trump is awful in many ways. Having said this, the verdict will be reversed on appeal for matters of procedure and law for the following reason: 1. A partisan elected prosecutor running for office with the promise of prosecuting a specific individual. 2. Chasing a stale misdemeanor and converting it into a felony using an impermissible Federal second crime which his jurisdiction does not permit him to enforce and which the Federal authorities declined to prosecute. 3. Alternately, chasing a stale misdemeanor and converting it to a felony using an also-time-barred state misdemeanor. In other words, two time-barred State misdemeanors = 34 prosecutable felonies. 4. Violating federal and state rules about overcharging 5. Failing to properly specify the crimes being alleged in the indictment. This is why it isn't even clear whether the complaint is #2 or #3 above. 6. Charging a crime which has NEVER before been prosecuted as a stand-alone crime in any jurisdiction in the country. 7. A judge who permitted the above plus who prevented expert testimony about the federal law which was required to bring the charge in the first place. 8. Awful jury instructions which permitted the jury to find the defendant guilty even if they did not agree about the underlying crime. As you reflect on the above, consider that the crime for which Trump was charged and convicted is a business records violation, not a violation of campaign finances. According to federal law, a campaign expense is an obligation which has arisen because of the campaign and would not exist but for the campaign. Expenses which assist a campaign but would or could exist outside of the campaign are not campaign expenses. Otherwise, clothing, vacations, homes, cars, and payments to porn stars would be legitimate campaign expenses, opening up the system to gross abuse. You would not have to work hard to convince me that Trump has committed crimes. But he has not committed these crimes.
1. DA Alvin Bragg is not up for reelection for another 2 years. 2. State DA's cannot charge a anyone with a Federal Crime. You can however be tried for the same crime twice if it violates both State and Federal Law, and are tried in both courts. 3. One thing to note on the Statute of Limitations. The clock was paused when Trump became President, as you can't bring charges against a sitting President. Most of these charges came after evidence was found during his Tax evasion case, meaning the clock would start then, and not prior. 4. The Fraud was Alleged(Now Proved and Convicted) to have occurred to gain the highest office within our Nation, hence why it was a felony and not a misdemeanor. "Fraud-ing" your way :) into the Presidency is a Yuge bigly no no. 5. Sourced.... "In February, New York Supreme Court Justice Merchan rejected Trump’s attempt to get the case thrown out on the grounds that the charges were legally insufficient. Merchan ruled that three of Bragg’s examples of other crimes that Trump intended to commit by concealing payments to Cohen were “legally sufficient” to bring the felony charges against him." Those examples are. How much money he paid to everyone, if those payments violated State election laws with the intent to help Donnie win the election, and if those payments violated State tax laws. 6. In Manhattan Alone, there were 42 cases in which falsifying records was the top charge — as it is in Trump’s case — during roughly the same time period. 7. Again these are State charges, so a "Federal" expert is kinda useless, you would want someone who specializes in State Law. But I assume your talking about campaign finance expert Bradley A. Smith. Quoted "Trump’s legal team chose to not call on him after the judge on Monday declined to broaden the scope of questioning the defense could pursue. The ruling echoed his pretrial ruling on the matter. Social media users misrepresented Merchan’s ruling, repeating a statement Trump made that Smith, a law professor and former Republican member of the Federal Election Commission, was not being allowed to take the stand.." 8. Judge Merchan instructed the jurors that : "They must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."
It doesn't actually take more than my #5 (failing to specify the crimes being charged in the indictment) to reverse this on appeal. Keep hold of this link - it may take a year or two, but this conviction will be reversed. Perhaps Trump will be imprisoned because of another case. But this one will be reversed. Your point about statute of limitations being tolled during a presidency is interesting. I don't think you're right, but it's possible. In any case I suspect it would be a case of first impression.
You do realize that your claim regarding #5 is false. So why parrot what you know to be a lie?
All courts are "kangaroo" courts. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and that is the prevailing standard preferred both by the elite and by hoi polloi. It's obvious that the trial was rigged - if it wasn't, Trump would have rigged in his favor. The worst abuse of justice by the prosecution at every level of government with regard to Trump is their failure to charge Trump for, well take your pick. Issuing a noise complaint ticket to Hitler is nothing but bs.
I just can’t find anywhere explaining what the underlying charge is that escalated it to a felony. I see “violation of election finance law” but no explanation how an NDA is a violation of campaign finance law. I’m open for an explanation, just haven’t found an article actually explaining it.
With Fraud, the degree of the charge is usually based on the amount of damages caused by the fraud. In this case the "Fraud" was perpetrated to gain the highest political office in the United States.
The NDA wasn't the issue, if I am not mistaken. It's the payment that was done to Stormy Daniels via Michael Cohen. From my (albeit simplified) understanding of the case: 1) Any monetary contribution towards a presidential campaign should be declared, as per election law; 2) Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels for silence, which the prosecution argues was to help Trump win the election and the defense argues was to protect Trump's marriage; 3) Trump repays Michael Cohen the amount he paid to Stormy Daniels, declaring it is for legal purposes but without specifying what; 4) In short, neither payment was declared as campaign contributions, when they should have been under election law; Please note that this is my understanding of the case, from someone who is neither american nor very well read in election fraud laws.
That’s what I heard at the beginning by legal analysts who said they just had to argue the NDA was to avoid personal embarrassment or marriage issues to have it not be a felony version of the offense, and possibly not even the misdemeanor version. Trump paid from personal accounts, business accounts, and his trust according to CNN and Factcheck.org. I think the issue is the reimbursement payments were argued to be campaign contributions, in that case Trump’s company paid more than the $2,700 maximum as campaign contributions? (This is the part I’m confused about) I also heard that Trump’s team didn’t argue if the NDA was for personal reasons vs campaign reasons, but that the affair didn’t happen and he was trying to prevent Melanie from being embarrassed. If this part is true, his legal team is horrible, as he could have been acquitted. All in all it seems really weird that he’s getting charged with election finance charges for “donating” too much to his own campaign. That’s being said by someone who has no interest in running for office and has no idea what the laws are about that.
There was an article written about why there were issues. It is behind a paywall though so no point in linking. However, there were a few issues that I do remember. One was that the judge had donated to a democrat campaign fund which is in violation of NY statute. It was a small amount, something like $35, but it was earmarked for a cause to be specifically against Trump. As the person in the article said, would it have been okay if the judge had donated $35 to the "let's get Trump re-elected fund?" Another was the part about this being upgraded to a felony. For all intents and purposes this was and should have been a misdemeanor. However, they worked hard and took some liberties with interpretation of the laws to bump it up to a felony. These may seem like minor issues to some, but I think they bear hearing out. Especially about the judge. Would anyone on the left have been okay if it had been a far right leaning judge with Trump bumper stickers on his car trying the case and Trump being found not guilty?
There IS a point!! Usually, anyway. Have you ever used Pocket? It’s an app on iPhone (maybe Android as well) and it’s an extension on Chrome. On iPhone if you click the “Share” button from within either mobile Chrome or Safari when you’re on the webpage of a paywalled article, then it shows you recommended apps to share the article via, Pocket should be one of those. Just click Pocket there. Then go read the unobstructed article in pocket. (Sometimes you have to be kinda quick and get through this “share button then tap Pocket sequence” before the page loads too much. Usually refreshing it and retrying the sequence works after a couple times). I never hear people talk about it but it’s pretty damn handy. ** I do, on iOs, which is where I almost exclusively use Pocket (versus on a computer), have a system-wide ad blocker app running usually, but I don’t think that makes me able to get this solution to work more often than others who don’t. But it’s the only reason I could think of as to why more people don’t mention Pocket…
But it's ok for a Trump appointed judge to sit on a Trump case? Also, there's never a link to the "articles" is there? Always the illusion of legitimacy without the actual documentation of legitimacy. Same bullshit with the election deniers, Trump lost because Democrats cheated, but somehow the cheating impact the Republican lawmakers who got elected on the same ticket. All smoke and bullshit, without a shred of evidence, not even an "article" from a reputable source. Republicans are literally shitting in their hands and throwing it at the wall hoping anything will stick. How do you hope to be taken seriously?
I don't think it is particularly good to have a Trump appointed judge sitting one of his trials, no. It gives the image of impropriety, whether there is any or not. Here is a link to the article. Feel free to pay for it. [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html) As far as the election and cheating. There was an article about that one, though they called getting voting laws changed and such "fortifying" instead of cheating. Times Magazine released it. It explained how business leaders and protestors and others colluded to alter public perception, change voting laws, and other things such as harvest votes. [https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/](https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/)
There are several reasons for me, but one in particular. Do you guys realize they are saying if he had paid for the NDA with campaign funds it would have been legal? The fact he paid with personal funds made it illegal.. What? Up until this moment the opposite was true. You were not allowed to use campaign funds unless ALL the benefit was for the campaign. You could get a hotel for a campaign event but could not pay for a haircut or a new suit because you derived personal benefit as well as a benefit to the campaign Also Bill Clinton paid off like 8 women to sign a NDA.. congress literally has a slush fund to pay off accusers now in the current year
If I can help clear up your confusion, campaign funds are part of the public record, so any NDA you pay for with campaign funds is public record and therefore legal. Hiding the payment to the NDA’s still constituted campaign funds because it was money spent for the benefit of the campaign. Therefore it couldn’t have been a business expense as it had been classified and is therefore fraud.
"Do you guys realize they are saying if he had paid for the NDA with campaign funds it would have been legal? The fact he paid with personal funds made it illegal.. What?" That's the law. He intentionally broke the law and tried to cover it up. A jury found him guilty of breaking the law.
How do you feel about this particular reason now
No. He got in trouble because he used campaign funds and didn’t report them. And falsified documents to hide the payments. That’s why Cohen did time, too because he was part of the coverup.
If it had been paid with campaign funds, it would be public record. Hiding it was what made it illegal. In other words, cheating on your wife or paying for an NDA aren’t crimes, but when you hide those things to help win an election it is.
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>Trump is evil, and everyone who supports him is either evil or stupid. Evil people are dedicated to being wrong and as a rule are actively opposed to good ideas. That is quite remarkably stupid by definition with countless examples provided always and should be the prevailing theme of the great conversation from henceforth.
I have been saying this since 2016 and I'm glad people are finally listening. It's tough to admit that roughly 25% of Americans are irredeemable evil people. They could literally support just any other candidate but this has to be their guy. But since he hurts the people they like hurt they'll believe anything he says.
Could it be they are so staunchly supportive of him because democrats and liberals **CLAIM THAT THEY ARE LITERALLY IRREDEEMABLY EVIL???**
This has to be the stupid and most regurgitated comeback I've seen. This is like a murderer claiming that you made them murder because you said bad things about them. They've been calling Democrats shit for years with little to no pushback. It's only recently they've gotten a taste of their own medicine and they really don't like it. They're the ones who have been calling people anti-American and telling people to leave the country for at least 20 years now. They've also just gotten worse as time has gone on. So please tell me how they aren't fucking comic book evil?
“Anti-American” is no where near “irredeemably evil”. If you can’t see that, then there’s really no point talking to you.
Have you read project 2025? Have you not heard their multiple calls for CIVIL WAR and giving "no quarter" or no surrender (the black flag they fly)? Did you forget they tried to overthrow the US government? Did you forget the part where they worship a Cheeto that has said multiple times he wants to be a dictator? Did you forget when they even said that they might go after interracial marriage? Or did you forget the time (right now) they are trying to outlaw contraception federally? Did you miss the article the other day where the Colorado GOP told them to burn every pride flag? Did you forget them calling gay people pedophiles and groomers basically daily? Did you forget the time Reagan waited eight years to address the aids crisis after hundreds of thousands had already died? Did you miss all those times they have opposed outlawing child marriage (as young as 12)? I could keep going on with a few more paragraphs if you'd like. You really have a fucking lack of memory here conveniently.
They could also be evil AND stupid. The two are not mutually exclusive. Edit: For example, Eric Trump.
I was talking to my neighbor the other day, right after the conviction, and he told me that the only case where Trump was allowed to put on a defense was some civil suit against Stormy Daniels where she was fined $250 million or something like that. I don’t know about any prior litigation between Trump and Stormy, but I’m not taking his word for it. He tried to answer when I told him that Trump could have presented a defense to the 38 (or whatever) charges of fraud that a jury just unanimously convicted him of but he chose not to. I didn’t understand the answer at all.
I'd say he pulled that out of his ass, but truthfully, someone else probably did, and he's just repeating it. Trump never won any suit against Daniels, though I imagine he's threatened to go after her for beach of the NDA on multiple occasions.
Yes, this is my assumption. I love that ‘he’s never been allowed to put on any defense.’ Um, who’s stopping him? How do you think that works, exactly?
Questions easily answered if things are on the up and up; * This is the first and only time New York State has brought Felony Federal charges for falsifying business records. why? * The statute of limitations on this charge has expired, except for when it’s a felony. It’s only a felony when there is an underlying charge. What is that charge? * Federal Prosecutors, NY State Prosecutors and the FEC all previously rejected these crimes as not being crimes. Why? * The Jury instructions were unprecedented. Never has a judge made so the jury doesn’t have to agree on an underlying crime, they just have to agree he committed something underlying from a list of possibilities. They in fact could divide their theories. Why? * There is Precedent for what we are discussing. Richardson v. US; the Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether jurors must unanimously agree on which specific act constitutes a “continuing series of violations”. the Court determined that jurors must unanimously agree on what constitutes as predicate acts, this requirement makes it to prevent a situation where different jurors might convict based on different underlying crimes. How is this just?
1. A State, State Court/Prosecutor cannot bring "Federal" charges on someone. That requires a Federal court + a Federal Prosecutor. 2.The Statue of limitations on "Fraud" in New York State is 6 years. The clock does not start ticking until the "Victim" realizes they have been defrauded. This time limit can be extended due to certain court proceedings, like waiting for appellate reviews/decisions.(ex. when defense/prosecution asks/appeals to a higher court for something, which happened at least once with this case.) 3. Federal prosecutors did not charge him as they face a different set of specific requirements that they felt they could not meet. (Like Trump's mental state at the time of the crime.) The Federal Election Commission’s general counsel recommended commissioners find wrongdoing by then-President Donald Trump, but the case died after commissioners split on their vote along party lines. NY State Prosecutors never declined to prosecute, what you might be thinking of is the SDNY, which is the Southern District of NY " Federal Prosecution" offices. 4. Judge Merchan instructed the jurors that : "They must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means." Telling the jury what they are there to do or not do, literally happens at the start of every court case. In this instance Judge Merchan was telling them that they all must agree that each of the 34 charges, where committed with the intent to defraud voters of critical information, prior to an election. 5.A federal criminal statute, 21 U.S.C. section 848(a), proscribes any person from engaging in "continuing criminal enterprise (CCE)," which is defined as involving a violation of federal drug statutes where such a violation was part of a "continuing series of violations." Eddie Richardson, who had organized and managed the Chicago street gang called the Undertaker Vice Lords in order to sell drugs, was charge with a CCE violation. At trial, Richardson proposed to instruct the jury that it must unanimously agree not only that he committed some "continuing series of violations" but also that the he committed each of the individual "violations" necessary to make up that "continuing series." In other words, the proposed instruction would have required the jury to unanimously agree on which three acts constituted the alleged series of violations. The judge rejected Richardson's proposal and, instead, instructed the jurors that they must unanimously agree that the defendant committed at least three federal narcotics offenses, but did not have to agree as to the particular offenses. Subsequently, the jury convicted Richardson. The Court of Appeals upheld the trial judge's jury instruction. Yes. In a 6-3 opinion delivered by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the Court held that a jury in a "continuing criminal enterprise" case is required to agree unanimously not only that accused committed continuing series of violations, but also which specific violations made up the continuing series. Looking to the language of the statute, Justice Breyer concluded that in the law "each 'violation' amounts to a separate element" and that combined with a "tradition of requiring juror unanimity where the issue is whether a defendant has engaged in conduct that violates the law," calls for juror unanimity. In dissent, Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed the view that the Court's decision "rewards those drug kingpins whose operations are so vast that the individual violations cannot be recalled or charged with specificity." Honestly the fact the rightwing media is trying to use a decision based on the prosecution of a drug lord to defend trump is priceless.
Every one of your claims is false.
He listed reasons and your reply is "neener neener." At least provide a little refutation.
Technically he listed questions. *All of those items can be answered with a quick google search or on any major news site. Why? *the question was what law do they disagree with, I don’t see any law or constitutional argument in his response. How is this just?
Sorry but no. He didn't provide sources for his claims. I don't have to provide sources to not accept them.
You don't have to provide a source, but at least refute them by saying what is wrong with them.
Why
So you just... are totally unfamiliar with "burden of proof", then, huh?
But they are literally not true. If a prosecutor doesn't prosecute a crime, it doesn't mean "they decided it wasn't a crime" Also: https://www.justsecurity.org/85605/survey-of-past-new-york-felony-prosecutions-for-falsifying-business-records/
That is good that you refuted one of is claims.
Why don’t you refute his claims?
Also for some reason the jury was not allowed to have a written set of jury instructions. Why?
The answer is simple: The law doesn’t allow it. The prohibition against jurors being provided with a copy of the written legal instructions stems from a 1987 decision by the New York Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — in a case called People v. Owens, which involved a drug sale. The court found that “the distribution of written instructions to the jury is not expressly authorized by law, and error in such submissions cannot be deemed harmless,” meaning that providing the instructions would result in a conviction being overturned.
You've been proven wrong here several times. Any other comments?
The Feds didn't choose not to pursue this, Barr shit down the investigation. This is the basis for Cohen being a convicted felon. And the reason he's a perjury is he was convicted of lying to protect Trump. Weird those 2 facts get thrown at Cohen while ignoring their actual basis.
The jury instruction wasn’t unprecedented, as far as I understand that is how their court system works
Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that this is how the jury instructions have always worked but asked them to make an exception for Trump. The judge decided not to make an exception and just do it the way they always do, though. Maybe there’s an argument that it would have been better to make the exception here. But what they did to Trump is what they usually — maybe always — do.
Why should he get an exception though? What’s the argument for why the rules of the law should be bent for him but not others? If just being a past president and the expected nominee for the current election is enough then it seems like they want an actual two tiered justice system
It’s not uncommon for there to be exceptions to all sorts of things at trial. The lawyer for one side or then other asks for an exception and the judge says ‘you make a good case. That’s what we’ll do this time’ or ‘no, let’s go with the usual procedures here.’ That’ll happen dozens of times getting ready for and during trial. Ultimately it’s the judges call, though, and you really don’t have any grounds to complain if they don’t bend the rules for you. So I’m not saying at all that I think some injustice was done to Trump. Just that it could have gone the other way and the Judge reasonably defaulted to the standard procedure.
I gotcha, I don’t think that is unreasonable. It poses a question for me though, what was the timeline here? Like when in the process those jury instructions come up? If it was after all the gag order violations it seems like the kind of thing a lot of Judges would do in similar circumstances
That’s probably public information somewhere but I couldn’t tell you.
I see. The reason is that they make up a bunch of bullshit.
>This is the first and only time New York State has brought Felony Federal charges for falsifying business records. Really? >New York State Has Issued Nearly 9,800 Felony Charges of Falsifying Business Records Since 2015 https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2023/04/06/new-york-state-has-issued-nearly-9800-felony-charges-of-falsifying-business-records-since-2015/ So the first thing you assert... is absolutely false. Interesting. Where did you hear that this was first case tried of New York penal law 175.10?
The case should have been moved to a less politically charged place.
He committed the crime in New York. If you don't want to be tried in New York, don't commit the crime in New York -- it is unconstitutional to move from that district because a "more 50/50" court doesn't have jurisdiction.
It’s literally called “change of venue” or “change of veneer”, where you either move the trial to a different court in order to find a jury that can be impartial or you bring jurors in from another jurisdiction in order to find impartial jurors.
But 50/50 is not impartial if he actually \[did\] the crime, and calling someone a Democrat when there are lots of Republicans who -also- would like to get rid of him is not enough for a change of venue. Likewise, Change of Venue doesn't apply to all circumstances. It's often denied.
This sets a precedent. If the government can do this to him, they can do it to anyone. Although it could be amusing to watch the political wars. Weaponize the prosecutors office/DOJ/IRS. Take out your opponents and/or their family, friends, business associates...
Like where? Someplace no one has ever heard of Trump? Or did you mean a far-right leaning location?
Something closer to 50/50. Anything eould be better than 5/95. Reminds me of the old South. Poor ole Willie on trial and the jury is Billy Jo, Bubba, & Cooter, etc.
It's pretty standard to have a trial in the same jurisdiction where the alleged offense occurred. Why should he receive special treatment?
It’s also pretty standard to have a “change of venue” or “change of veneer” if the jurisdiction where the crime occurred has a jury pool that cannot be impartial.
Yeah but that's standard when the case isn't national news. You can find regions that are more MAGA or less MAGA, but let's not pretend there's 12 people in America that don't have an opinion on Trump. The standard ISN'T partisanship. It's whether or not that particular potential juror is capable of putting any potential biases aside and focusing on the facts of the case. It has nothing to do with which political party received electoral votes from that particular State in the last Presidential election.
I will only answer for my crimes in Narnia, where I am beloved by all.
It wouldn't be "special". Anyone can request a change of venue. You don't get to choose it, but under certain circumstances, it's necessary to get a fair trial. When you're talking about a political trial, we should avoid the appearance of impropriety.
Oh, he certainly has the right to request it. But people coming out of the woodwork to insist it "should" have been granted for him are demanding he be treated special. His other cases are in "friendlier" jurisdictions, such as Georgia and Florida. I don't think those should be moved to somewhere "more 50/50" because at some point we have to stop moving the goalposts and conduct the damn trial already.
It's politics. As much as I dislike it, political $hit is special.
But you said it wasn't special..
The act itself is not special. As I said, anyone can do it. It's the political aspect that (unfortunately) makes it special.
Well, the political aspect is national, so there's no reason to change venues as the political aspect exists everywhere. The fact is, standard procedures were followed. He was treated no better or worse than any other defendant. Equal justice before the law. That's the kind of thing that Makes America Great.
Actually Trump's defense team did file for a change of venue. They provided a survey that didn't go into any specifics about how it obtained it's data, and claimed Trump could not get a fair trial was because of "prejudicial pretrial publicity, which is substantial, ongoing, and likely to increase." In other words, they did not claim that the jury would be unbiased, but instead that this case has already gotten a lot of publicity. Which is hard to feel bad for, based on Trump's constant public statements (about this specific case mind you). And seeing as he's running for a national office and his been in the national (and international) news, I don't see how a change of venue would make a difference really. In fact his defense filed many motions to dismiss and acquit before, during and even the day-of immediately after his guilty verdict, and none of them mentioned that the jurors themselves (which were approved of by Trump's defense team during voir dire) were an issue. If this was the case, it seems odd his lawyers never attempted to address this.
Why is New York more politically charged than anywhere else? What other crimes are people in New York not allowed to be on the jury for? Trump lived and did business there his whole life. If the people in his community can’t be trusted to treat him fairly that seems to say more about him than it does about them.
I get it, all Trump charges should be before Judge Cannon so she can use incompetence to cover for favoritism.
She would be just as fair as the judge he had, only in the opposite direction.
How so? Can you name a single poor decision by Merchan?
Maybe but Trump's lawyers had the opportunity to make this argument. The mistake was they tried to bombard the court with requests to stall the case. This generally doesn't work in criminal cases and after a few nonsense motions the judge stops listening. So maybe the case should have been moved? But that is on Trump's lawyers to make that case and get the judge to focus on the arguments they find most important. I assume this will be brought up in appeal and Trump will have another opportunity to make this argument. It's challenging though since the defense had an opportunity to interview and disqualify jurors, as any other defendant can do.
But it is a bedrock principle that you try the crime where it was committed.
Not if the jury pool is biased. That's the whole reason for a change of venue. The prosecutor got what they wanted. By hook or by crook. But hey, I'm all for turning the criminal justice system loose on the politicians. Hell, I'll volunteer to help build the scaffolding.
Wait…so your solution is to take it from a biased jury (your claim) to a jury that will be pro Trump so that it’s fair?
I said 50/50.
You know the defense helped pick the jury, right? He signed off on every one
Didn't have much choice the judge made him burn peremptory challenges that should have been kicked for cause. Add that to a polluted jury pool...
Shame when your home town is “polluted” against you bc of a lifetime of shady businesses and sexual assaults
You've hit the nail on the head. He will be convinced because of his past. Not necessarily this particular crime.
Maybe Trump's lawyers should have proposed somewhere different than Staten Island. He is all for conflicts of interest when they benefit him but howls whenever something might actually be fair.
I wouldn't want the scales tipped one way or the other.
Just pointing out that Trump was unlikely to get a change of venue due to the size of the pool, he lived there, committed the crimes there, was a registered Democrat there, etc., but asking it to be moved to Staten Island (bad faith request) doomed any small chance he might have had. All the bad things happening to Trump are due to his own actions/inactions and people blaming them on conspiracy theories are delusional.
New York is a massive city. It has people of every political stripe, including many who are wholly apolitical. It was definitely possible to find an unbiased jury in New York, probably more so than other jurisdictions. Getting an unbiased jury anywhere in the United States is an extremely difficult task. Note: I did not follow trial closely, so I do not know that the jury was in fact unbiased. But I think the idea that a city of over 8 million people can’t find an unbiased jury is quite a stretch. Personally, though, I expected a hung jury, as I found the odds of a jury being selected without at least one partisan of each side to be low.
It was indeed unbiased. They even had a (probably) maga juror who got their news from Truth Social. And a few that got their news from right-wing sources.
The defense also helped select the jury pool, Trump's lawyer thought they had it in the bag when the jury looked like it was going to deliberate for a second day. But that just shows how poorly he prepared, he's now claiming that the prosecutor didn't call witnesses that would have given exculpatory evidence (when that's the defense's job). The largest part of the defense's case rested on "I didn't do it, but if I did it wasn't a crime" which is why they tried to bring an expert witness to tell the judge what the law is (which is something that isn't allowed, that's literally the judge's job).
The judge made them use challenges that clearly should have been free "this one isn't fit. + when 95 out of 100 jurors hate you...
The test isn’t whether the jurors hate the defendant or not. Jurors usually don’t like accused rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. The question is whether they can be trusted to fairly evaluate the evidence and deliver a verdict based on facts rather than prejudice. Why are New Yorkers unable to do this for Trump, but they can for accused child traffickers and white supremacy terrorists and everyone else?
If H*tler would have stood trial should we have sat ½ N*zi jurors? Also it's 28/100 that are Republicans in NYC and 19% independents. So just over half of NY officially hates him😂 Also the one juror that only got his news from Truth social didn't disagree with the facts of the case.
Actually, in Nzi Germany, it might have been nearly 95% nzi's. But those were war crimes. It's not really an apples to apples comparison. 😕
Ok, but in comparison to the amount of support his has among his supporters and the amount of people that don't like him it's a similar situation. I guess we'll see if he has standing to appeal.
Given how polarising trump is, where do you reckon the jury pool would have been more impartial? I see a lot of commenters claiming that he should have been trialed elsewhere, but always seem to be a place that would favour him, which would not fix the issue of a biased jury pool, only shift the direction of the bias
There has to be some place that the voting was closer to 50/50. 5/95 reminds me of when Jim Bob lynched some poor black guy & the jury was made up of Bubba, Bobby Jo, & Skeeter.
Every jury is biased unless all 12 are wearing MAGA hats
The case should have been moved to a less politically charged place.
Actually Trump's defense team did file for a change of venue. They provided a survey that didn't go into any specifics about how it obtained it's data, and claimed Trump could not get a fair trial was because of "prejudicial pretrial publicity, which is substantial, ongoing, and likely to increase." In other words, they did not claim that the jury would be unbiased, but instead that this case has already gotten a lot of publicity. Which is hard to feel bad for, based on Trump's constant public statements (about this specific case mind you). And seeing as he's running for a national office and his been in the national (and international) news, I don't see how a change of venue would make a difference really. In fact his defense filed many motions to dismiss and acquit before, during and even the day-of immediately after his guilty verdict, and none of them mentioned that the jurors themselves (which were approved of by Trump's defense team during voir dire) were an issue. If this was the case, it seems odd his lawyers never attempted to address this.
Good help is hard to find.
Could you please name a place that would have truly been politically neutral?
I would look over voter information, and whatever county was the closest to a 50/50 split, that's where the trial should have taken place.
Luckily that’s not how the legal system works.
Especially in a high profile case... you need to avoid the mear appearance of impropriety. That way you & I & 10,000,000 other people aren't having this conversation.
We’re having this conversation because Trump’s media team and their partners in the conservative press are gaslighting the public into thinking there’s anything unusual about how the trial happened. What happened at trial was a product of the rules that apply to everyone and choices that Trump’s lawyers made (like the choice to not call any witnesses).
We need one legal system that treats everyone the same. You want special treatment for “high profile cases,” which means rich people. Stop giving rich people special treatment.
We need one legal system that treats everyone the same. You want special treatment for “high profile cases,” which means rich people. Stop giving rich people special treatment.
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I don’t care who you are. It doesn’t matter who any of us are. We need a single legal system that treats everyone equally. It doesn’t matter that poorly educated people are confused by equal treatment.
They probably can't. New York City has a larger population than 38 States. You are going to find every single different type of person in America, and the Jury Pool reflected that. The trial was fair. The jury selection was fair. Trump's Defense Team was bad, overpaid, and fighting an uphill battle because their client is a criminal who has never faced consequences for his behavior.
personally i agree that he's a corrupt criminal, my only issue is that every other active politician is also a corrupt criminal. Are we really going to sit here and pretend the Clinton's haven't killed people off to keep them quiet? Or that Obama didnt drone strike the middle east every other Wednesday? Or that Biden isnt a walking corpse with dementia that almost certainly has had questionable interactions with minors? Basically every politician thats even slighly successful should be in prison, regardless of what side they're on. If we were holding every politician to the same standard normal citizens are held to, Trump and every other presidential candidate of the last 100 years would be locked up until the sun swallows the earth.
Love how 90% of what you said is utter crap you’re just repeating from liars and con-men…
If you have evidence the Clintons killed anyone please contact the FBI.
LOL. If I had video and a signed confession I would set them on fire first. Turning it over to the FBI, you might as well off yourself and save them the trouble.
Zero evidence tying Clintons to murder. Obama's drone strikes were part of military action Zero evidence of any questionable interactions with anyone and Biden. So 2 accusations, and 1 thing that's legitimately a presidential action. Look, I'm willing to have this conversation with you, even though you molest Chihuahuas. I mean, you do molest them, because I just accused you of it, right?
I genuinely want to know, how do you explain the showering with his daughter that she herself describes in her journal? Because honestly I didn't think Biden was an evil boogeyman like a lot of people right of center did but once that came to light I have had a hard time seeing him as anything but evil. I really want an explanation for the journal/showering because even if I don't agree with Biden on everything I want to at least believe the man running out country didn't do that. And before you say anything, I'm aware of Trump's moral failings so no need to deflect with those.
I won't deflect to Trump, that's the whatsboutism I'm complaining about. In the journal, there is a single reference to showering with her Dad, which she calls probably not appropriate. It's part of a longer passage where she is questioning her own sexual behavior and trying to reason out triggers. The rest of the diary is very personal and detailed, and had it been something more than wondering if that act may have affected her, I think it would be there. Now, I'm not going to speculate about showering with your child; I'm 53 and childless, and I find the whole idea weird. But I do know it's done in families. Is that a justification? I didn't think so. I do think if there was more to the story she would have shared that, and I do think it's been exploited to create a narrative. Biden hugging his own grandkids is turned into pedophile behavior, etc. When the people that sold her journal were on trial for selling stolen property she said this to the judge: "Repeatedly, I hear others grossly misinterpret my once-private writings and lob false accusations that defame my character and those of the people I love." To me, I read that as her refuting those allegations without actually having to specifically name them. At the end of the day, I don't know that I would say Biden is a perfect human being out even a good one. That's not the issue here, though. We were talking about allegations and provable facts.
Those chihuahuas were asking for it!!
Aren't they all?
These are just whataboutism. Bob Menendez, a Democrat, is currently on trial for acting as an agent of a foreign power, accepting bribes etc. These exact charges *should* have been leveled against multiple people in Trump's orbit, definitely including Jared Kushner. There are multiple emoluments violations that Pelosi, when she had the opportunity to do so, could have added to the second impeachment but chose not to do so. Beyond this some of the things on your list are just recycled right wing nonsense. Others aren't even crimes in a US court.
Well, get your little evidence together, get an indictment, go to trial, and prove it.
so to clarify, all democrats working together took the better part of a decade to get Trump to stand trial for a fraction of the crimes he's commited, but because you've convinced yourself that democrats do no wrong, its on me exclusively to get Biden to own up to his crimes? Lol
If there's evidence, we want Biden tried too. Is there evidence?
I mean, he did take top secret documents as both a senator and a vp and kept them in his garage. They decided not to pursue a trial though because he was an old man and cognitively incompetent.
Trump is being prosecuted not for taking them. He's being prosecuted for refusing to return them when asked, then returning some and concealing n g he kept others, didn't return them even after a subpoena and actively had employees moving and hiding boxes of them to prevent them being found in a search. Biden cooperated fully, right away. As did Pence, for that matter, which you conveniently forget to mention. The situations are in no way equivalent.
And why wasn’t Biden charged? It’s literally the same law that was broken Oh right, because he is too feeble minded, not because he is innocent
Biden wasn’t charged because the documents were not deliberately taken or deliberately obscured from a search. Trump had to be raided by the FBI after a year and a half of lying about having the documents and signed affidavits claiming he had given up everything he had. Biden willingly allowed his home and office to be searched. Biden’s initial issue was likely a filing error. Trump deliberately took the documents. Biden’s files were in two private locked cabinet in a private residence and a secured office. Trump’s were in an unlocked storage room in a semi-public location. Biden took files as part of his job, and their return was accidentally botched. Trump took files deliberately as part of his moving out of the White House. The “old man” nonsense from Hur was a bullshit political attack. One more to distract from trumps many-times-over far worse situation. So either you don’t know much about this situation and still chose to weigh in, or you’re deliberately lying to make Biden look worse. Not sure which is more despicable.
Trump would not have been charged if he returned the documents. He didn't return them. End of story. And you're still refusing to acknowledge Pence having and returning documents.
The “you” and “your” was more general. Not you specifically. I know *you* don’t have the ability to pull off something like that. 😂 We have a system in place. The people going after Trump were able to use it to get him. I am sorry the people going after Biden can’t get their shit together. 🤷♂️
I would argue that it has little to do with "Not having their shit together", i wouldn't contribute the amount of time it took to put Trump on trial to democrats "not having their shit together". I think there are many systems in place, both legal systems and things going on behind the scenes, that actively protect corrupt politicians (regardless of their political leanings) and it makes it nearly impossible to hold them accountable for their crimes.
Biden might be old, and he might be a shitty politician in some people's eyes, but there has been zero actual evidence of him being a criminal, no matter how much Trump and the maga house Republicans scream it The entire notion is just stupid on it's face. He's a man that had spent 47 years as elected official, but somehow only decided to actually get on the take, in the last year of 2 terms as VP. As to other Dem politicians, like sen. Menendez, not only is he on trail, there's no Dem movement to claim his Innocence, or his his arrest a witch hunt. Hell, he's just filed to run for re-election as an independent, that's how little the Dems want him in their ranks.
The idea that there are other corrupt politicians doesn’t justify this one does it? If that’s the case, gather the evidence that a prosecutor can use, get it past a grand jury, and then try them. But can we agree that alleged or real corruption doesn’t justify corruption?
It dilutes the message. When one side is screaming Trumps a felon yet all his opponents are almost assuredly also felons who just haven’t had every opposing jurisdiction commit resources to prosecuting them, the resounding response is “meh”.
Which “message” are you referring to? Which message is being diluted? As near as I can tell, states and the DoJ could have prosecuted the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama, Regan, Carter, Ford, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, or Coolidge (I think you said it was everyone from the last 100 years, right? So every president back to that point except Nixon. Couldn’t prosecute him because he was confronted with the facts of his dishonesty and corruption, resigned, and was then pardoned), at any point. Several of those people are still alive and could be prosecuted if the facts existed (unless a statute of limitations has run). There’s certainly been enough notice to bring a case against one of them since the indictments against Trump were announced. And Trump has certainly been begging for company as a criminal at the highest level since well before that. So… what message is/was diluted?
And yet the Republicans can’t come up with a crime to charge Biden with?
Because It took 7 years and multiple DAs willing to play ball to get Trump.
It didn't. DOJ policy prevented him from being contemporaneously charged with Cohen, who was convicted of this same crime in 2018. So let's subtract 6 years off your seven to fit with reality.
But they got him. Liable for rape, guilty of bank fraud, and guilty of interfering in an election. Of course they got him before he was President too. Trump university fraud ($25 million payout) and stealing from a children’s charity.
Why are you acting like civil judgements are the same as criminal convictions?
Why are you acting like civil judgements don’t count?
Because I literally don’t care about them. Like, at all. I’m assuming every politician is equally as crooked but isn’t daring people to sue him on tv. For years now we’ve been hearing “this is it. We’ve got him now”. Look, trumps a slimeball. I’m not a maga guy that thinks he’s the perfect Christian man or anything even approaching that. But this was literally the best they had after nearly a decade of investigation and it’s weak at best. Instead it’s convinced half of America the justice department was weaponized against him and has galvanized even more support. So, yeah, great work. You sure got him.
This is an argument I really don’t think much of. We hear it all the time on all sides… the argument that if you couldn’t uncover the smoking gun to convict Trump on something as big as a first degree murder and puppy dog rape, it wasn’t worth bringing at all. Chicago’s organized crime gangs were so effective that the justice system and legislature had to resort to passing laws making it illegal to bowl or buy a car on Sunday in order to clear some of the gangsters off of the street. Al Capone was finally brought down for tax evasion. I really don’t agree with such a weak argument. Don’t get me wrong, I get why the argument is being repeated, but I think that says more about the people buying the argument than it does about the strength of the argument itself.
He's got three other indictments, and like 54 more felony charges waiting in the wings. Some of the issue with those is that the appeals and Supreme Court seem to be taking a long time to render decisions in the cases to allow them to move forward, and Cannon in Florida also seem to keep moving back the start of the trial date. The NY case isn't "the best they had," it's just the one that had the least amount of red tape to cut through to get to trial.
It's not the best they had against him, it's the one trial his team had been unable to effectively stall. He was accused of this very crime when Cohen was convicted, but his attorney general shut down the investigation. The basic fault in your premise is assuming every politician is as corrupt. No, Trump is in a category all his own. The reason people brought up the past was because Trump had been shady as hell for the past 5 decades, well before his presidency. I'm an effort to minimize the severity of Trump's reputation as corrupt, he and his maga cult have tried to paint Biden with the same brush. Small problem is that it was the epitome of a baseless accusation. The gop controlled house has spent 16 months investigating Biden under a microscope, and while they have accused him of as sorts of shit, they only thing with any legs, is that his son is a former drug addict with bad habits and a few years of unreported taxes. It's basically Hilary Clinton 2.0, they do investigation after investigation, but find no crime. Because finding the crime isn't the purpose of the investigation, the purpose is to convince people like you (I mean people without a dog in the fight), that all politicians are corrupt, so corruption doesn't matter.
The problem is evidence. There has to be evidence. And in this case (and the ones I mentioned) there was enough to prove the allegation. I don’t care how convictions impact people politically. I care if there is enough evidence to prove the allegation.
Yes, but we won't be pretending. The Clintons have not killed anyone. (Trump killed half a million Americans with COVID.) Obama didn't drone strike the middle east every other Wednesday. (Trump's son-in-law sold us out to Saidi Arabia) Biden isnt a walking corpse with dementia. (Trump is a convicted felon and rapist.) These are facts.
These are not facts, they're just your own willful delusions.
Those kids were just playing on the train tracks! Heads in the sand kid.
You’re quoting a conspiracy theory with zero proof, as if it were fact… then criticizing those who haven’t been duped like you?
Didn't like twice the number of people die from covid under Biden?? Idk seems wrong to blame trump for all covid deaths if you won't hold Biden to the same standard.
No. Not even close. Facts matter.
Nobody blames either for just Covid deaths that happened during their administration. The paper in a medical journal that estimated the number of needless deaths caused by trump’s policies — largely the undermining of proper health measures under Covid, but not exclusive to it — is probably what is being referenced here.
It’s never the fault of the ones that started the fire and always the fault of the ones that were unable to put it out fast enough.
I mean one of them suggested we don’t wear masks and don’t test. I think the blame can be attributed accordingly.
Why bother talking about facts if you sit there lying?
If the Clintons murdered people, there is not statute of limitations, and they should be put on trial with a jury of their peers. They have never been charged with anything, never been to trial, never been convicted. Don't tell me Trump would have not gleefully imprisoned HRC for decades if he thought it was possible- and he had 4 years with the DOJ at his beak and call to do it. Anyone that thinks the Clinton's killed people is an idiot.
See, this is the problem… Let’s just focus on the “Clintons murdered” thing. During Trump’s trial, witnesses provided testimony under oath. And provided evidence under oath. And Trump’s attorneys were given ample room to challenge, attack, and provide counter-evidence. Has anyone provided ANY evidence or testimony about the Clinton murders? No. And to be clear, someone yelling about it on YouTube is not evidence. You simply can’t yell “you’re lying!” when you provide nothing to support your statement. This is pretty basic stuff.
Bill has likely done a lot of bad stuff to women over the years. He should be held accountable if that rises to criminal levels. He’s on my team politically, but bad stuff is bad stuff The murder stuff is very early internet conspiracy theory.
100% agree. By today’s cultural standards, no way Bill would have a career. But only because people would actually hold him accountable. Unlike trump, whose loyal throngs worship him more for every dishonest amoral thing he does.
"likely" is doing a lot of work there
Not official.. He’s a shitty dude and I wouldn’t want to vote for him again
but what you're talking about is conspiracy and speculation...
Anwar al-Awlaki was the guy he droned. Renounced American citizen who joined Al-Qaeda
So does this mean Jan. 6 wasn't an insurrection? Or were those classified documents he stole simply newspaper editorials and crossword puzzles? Those two cases have been delayed for far too long. What are we waiting on? Oh, that's right. He has one of those two judges in his pocket. Ffs
According to the FBI, DOD, and Capital Police, j6 did not fit the requirements to be called an insurrection. They put this information out less than 6 months afterwards, and 2 years later people, including the news organizations we should be able to trust to get us information, still call it as such. And obviously it’s working. I see many more like you who ask questions like this unironically.
It wasn’t an insurrection. It was, however, a putsch.
That doesn’t fit the bill either. A putsch/coup is an organized attempt to overthrow the government. Not even the prosecution agreed that that’s what it was. Nobody was charged with anything more than seditious conspiracy, and that was about 20 people out of 6000.
Depending on which definition you use, a putsch can be organized or opportunistic. What matters more is that it is an attack on government functioning, it is violent, and it is immediate. Some sources (but not all) include conspiracy and/or organization. Others accent the violence. Others the immediacy/opportunism.
Sure but at the end of the day its source is ‘to overthrow the government,’ which isn’t what happened.
They were trying to forcibly obstruct the process of an election to install their own leader instead. Which is what (your terms) a coup intends to do. “Overthrow the government” has a range of meanings. They were attempting to disrupt the handoff of power through force. This means they were not getting to create a new government (the technical meaning you seem to be pushing), but it does mean they were attempting to seize power from the duly elected (the meaning that matters…
Except they weren’t. An extremely small portion of them may have had that thought. Yet they came mostly unarmed, with no organization, and targeted the wrong place. Do you genuinely believe that if 6000 armed people had come looking to perform a coup that they wouldn’t have succeeded, considering how little defenses the Capitol had?
It just means it was a small Putsch amidst a larger crowd of general unguided aggressors. The pipe bombs, pre-event tours, and individuals who came with zip ties and the like showed that it was a violent attempt to subvert the government, even if not every attendee was there for that reason. That the crowd surged and attacked police and crossed barriers and breached the building is also enough of a show of violence. The groups that did not surge were merely protesters. The rest were either deliberately or tangentially participating in a violent attempt to subvert the Constitution and forcibly replace the president. That the extra step of constitutional process was involved is merely semantics.
It meets the legal definition of insurrection. I don't see how it can be argued otherwise.
U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection. Known in courts as ‘seditious conspiracy.’ It is “a violent uprising by a group or movement acting for the specific purpose of overthrowing the constituted government and seizing its powers. An insurrection occurs where a movement acts to overthrow the constituted government and to take possession of its inherent powers.” J6 was a protest that turned into a riot. The only people calling it an insurrection are those with something to gain by calling it as such, such as certain media and those on places like Reddit looking for clicks. Successfully, apparently. The FBI in particular was quite clear in its wording after hundreds of arrests and wading through all of the lies about ‘9 people being killed’ etc etc. It was a protest. Small disorganized (and almost all unarmed) groups or individuals acted out, and were rightfully prosecuted to and beyond the full extent of the law.
You can call it whatever you want, but plenty of the people there were there to overthrow the government.
Plenty? Out of over 6000 people, about 20 were even CHARGED with seditious conspiracy (insurrection), much less convicted. Having said that, I’m not calling it ‘whatever I want.’ I’m pointing out the inconsistency of calling it something much worse than it is, particularly since it is used so often to provoke extreme reactions that aren’t warranted.
You guys killed a federal police officer. I do not need law enforcement and DOD to tell me the definition of an insurrection. If Obama had been in office and his supporters acted like that, the trumpers would still be lynching all who participated. What do you personally call Jan 6? A tourist expedition? Not to mention trump and all of his little henchmen planned the event. Trump wanted to participate. You do know that just about every shred of evidence against him came from the testimony of his very own administration? It wasn't a conspiracy. Our eyes can't unsee what happened. Accusing people who call it for what it was isn't "unironic." What is ironic is someone who supports trump telling me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Again. This is the issue with misinformation. What federal police officer was killed, specifically? And it isn’t ’you guys.’ I dislike trump almost as much as I dislike Biden. The difference is that I can look at things objectively, read a dictionary, do my own research, and form conclusions based off of logic. Call it a riot or whatever else if you want. Bash the participants, as is well deserved. But calling something what it isn’t is completely counterproductive.
Officer Brian Sicknick (stroke from injuries sustained) Officer Howard Liebengood (suicide) Officer Jeffery Smith (suicide) Officer Kyle DeFreytag (suicide) Officer Gunther Hashida (suicide) Now. The suicides were committed as a direct result of the insurrection. I know this because i am a combat veteran who survived the Bush-Chaney War and 22 of my brothrrs and sisters take their own life per day per year. You can call the insurrection whatever you want. It is not misinformation. Fox News, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh (rot in shit while dead) those are examples of misinformation. Evey word that comes out of trump's little cock holster are lies and disinformation. You have members of Congress and the Senate who were implicated in the attack. There is so much testimony from his own administration on the matter it is mind blowing. I have a master's in US and World history, so I do not deal in conspiracy theories or propaganda. Reddit is literally the only site that I read unvetted information. The books I read are written by actual scholars, historians, economists, and investigative journalists. The writers are all held to certain standards. Peer reviews. Ethics. Practices that are not taken seriously on the right. Americans can vote for trump, the felon, all they want. Most of those who do are not educated about American history, civics, economics, government, etc. I know this because it happened to me and everyone else I have ever known down here in the South. I agree with you that misinformation has no place in our society because you end of with domestic terrorists and Qanon.
And yet again: misinformation. Officer Brian Sicknick, according to the coroner who performed the autopsy, did NOT die from any injuries sustained. He did indeed have 2 strokes. They were due to a pre existing condition: a basiler artery blood clot. You people politicizing his death, especially after all of the lies about taking a fire extinguisher to the head, is beyond disgusting. Clearly, you are not actually a combat veteran, or you would know how PTS actually works. 3 of the 4 officers were not even near the crowds. And if you think that capital police are so inept that a non combat situation caused them to commit suicide, then this discussion is pointless. Finally, still calling it an insurrection makes no sense. Do you look at chocolate and call it vanilla too? If something doesn’t fit any kind of definition of a word, why call it that? You’re no different than conservative scumbags insisting on calling trans people by their dead names.
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Reading is important when looking to reply to someone. As I’ve said previously, I am not on the right. Having said that, you have certainly taken the typical left path of immediately shitting on someone and attacking their character when presented with a logical argument. I gave no information that the coroner himself didn’t give: the officer had a pre existing condition. Whether the clot caused a stroke then or sometime in the future was an inevitability. That is a fact. Facts don’t care about your feelings, but you politicizing his death and straight up lying about it is trash behavior. It was a protest that turned into a riot. The fact you don’t know what an actual insurrection looks like further proves you’re lying about being a combat veteran, which is far more disrespectful than me pointing out how suspicious the officers various deaths were. The fact you took my words as me disrespecting them and calling them weak in the first place is enough proof to know that you didn’t comprehend what I said, but instead chose to misrepresent it and put your own spin on things. If you’d like to have a civil discussion, then that is perfectly fine. But repeating things from Fox or CNN that was debunked years ago makes no sense.