In the 6 hours after the verdict was read, the Trump Campaign – via the Team Red donor ap – was taking in money at $1,600 per second. In the 24 hours after verdict, nearly $54 million was taken in. We’ll see what the final numbers are but it wouldn’t surprise me if in the immediate aftermath (say, a week?) it is around $100 million. Thanks, Democrats, you completely erased the Democrats fundraising edge for 2024. Oh, and Miriam Adelson, widow of the late, great casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, is donating about $100 million for pro-Trump PACs. Then there there are the rumors – we’ll have to see money numbers over the next couple months – that some of Biden’s major money bags are switching to Trump. But more important than that is the Team Red money – massive numbers of first time, small donors ponying up. This is people doing something. With money. That matters
Bottom line, Team Trump and the GOP will have all the cash they need.
Oh, don’t want to forget that Team Trump is building a nationwide system to monitor the vote and object early and often to any irregularities. And I guarantee you with this much time – and, now, this much money – they’ll be able to venue shop a bit to make sure they get to judges who aren’t mere Democrat hacks. Team Pudding Brain will not be able to ballot box stuff like they did in 2020. Oh, sure, in deep Blue States like California they still can…but, who cares? It is in the purple States that they won’t be able to…certainly not to the degree they’d need to for a repeat of broken water pipes at 3 am.
There were a few polls right after verdict which claimed that Biden got a boost and/or Trump lost GOP support. These polls seem like drivel to me. I guess they could be real, but most of them claimed that the re-interviewed people interviewed previously…which means it isn’t random and not at all hard to pick your target to get the result you want. In this, whatever you see in polling: give it ten days. That’ll tell us if there’s any trend away from Trump. One thing certain: Trump’s conviction won’t make Biden more popular. Won’t make us forget what we’re paying for groceries. Won’t make us forget the border and rising crime. Won’t make us forget Biden’s attempt to mollify anti-Semites over Gaza. On and on like that – Biden and his people are still who they are. And they are monumentally unpopular. Whatever negatives Trump picked up via conviction will fade away…you can’t re-convict him (and the other trials are winding towards dismissal or being pushed into 2025…showing that only in Manhattan could you get an overall system anti-Trump enough to get a trial going…to be sure, they could get it in San Francisco or LA, but Trump doesn’t have offices in those places). If the judge tries to hit Trump with jail time as a first-time offender for Class E felonies, that will just make people mad. It fades. Biden is who he is.
How will the appeals go? Badly for Bragg. Basically every element of the trial was questionable. From bringing the charges to begin with (never in all of American history has anything like this been charged against anyone. Ever), to the obviously biased judge, tainted jury pool, unfair trial procedure, inadmissible evidence…on and on. How long it takes for this to get tossed is the only question. There is absolutely no doubt that at some appellate level, this conviction gets vacated.
Some are arguing Trump should apply to the Supreme Court. While rarely done – and even more rarely accepted by the Court – it does happen when there is a case of very large and immediate impact. One we’ll all remember was the 2000 Election case. It was still winding its way through the State and federal appellate process but it was determined by the Court that all legal challenges needed to be resolved lest the people of Florida lose their equal protection under the law – that is, if this wasn’t resolved by a date certain, Florida’s vote wouldn’t count. So, too, with the Trump case – it can be argued that having this hang over Trump’s head unresolved unfairly impacts Trump’s equal protection under the law. Trump’s claim is that the trial is false. Biden’s claim is that the trial is true. But it is unfair for Trump to labor under the trial if it was false, and so someone better step in and decide if it is good or bad. And Roberts might accept it.
Here’s the crucial aspect of this – and risk to our entire Republic – if we get into the habit of placing former President’s on trial our whole system of government hangs in the balance. If Trump is defeated as a result of a trial – especially one as bogus as this, and over a trivial issue (class E felony, guys: it is the sort of thing you charge a guy with when he paints graffiti on a wall) – then it would cause a catastrophic collapse in trust in the system…and lead to retaliatory lawfare from the other side. It is best we put this to bed. I know our Liberals won’t agree – but Caesar crossed the Rubicon because his political opponents proposed to jail him after his term as governor of Gaul expired. It was start a Civil War or be jailed on bogus, political charges. If we start jailing ex-Presidents then very quickly we will no longer have ex-Presidents.
Meanwhile, Biden’s people are refusing to release the audio of Biden’s special counsel interview. Their current claim? That if released someone will make a deep-fake of it so that Biden sounds like a senile twit. This means, of course, that Biden sounds like a senile twit on tape. They really don’t want that tape out – they can barely hold Biden together for 20-30 minute public events…a long interview and I guarantee the guy was completely lost.
Hunter Biden goes on trial – after Joe and company paid a visit to Beau’s widow…who is a witness in the case. Allegedly to mark Beau’s passing…but actually to make sure she knows that you never go against the Family. Ever. I figure it’ll still wind up with a sweetheart plea deal.
Blogs For Victory 
Fabrizio pointed out that “he wouldn’t be surprised to see national polls where deep blue states like California and New York hold great weight, to show shifts in voter preferences based on the unfavorable ruling.
“But as you know, President Trump’s path to 270 Electoral Votes runs through these 7 Target States,” he wrote. “And thus far, we see no discernible impact.”
In other words, take a poll in New York and California and you will get a response that echoes the general political tendencies of those states—kind of like you will get a similar jury pool. Watch for the Left to get schlubs like casper eagerly parroting the results of these carefully constructed polls as if they actually mean something, in yet more desperate and frantic efforts to tip the scales. (One might even consider them as “efforts to influence the election” which, as we now know, is nearly a capital crime and certainly one calling for felony status and imprisonment.)
I think their complaint is that they haven’t finished making their own deepfake of Biden’s interview yet.
That would be my guess.
Great piece by Steve Baker this morning at the Blaze.
Again, the bootheel of the State on the necks of those it has targeted.
There is a poll out alleging that 53% support the Trump verdict as fair. It is from a Lefty outfit but let’s pretend for a moment that they are being honest. Stop laughing.
Ok, I’ll give you a minute.
Done?
Good.
Supposing it is honest (no laughing!) then it is still a catastrophic failure. An election can be decided with 53% of the vote. Heck, it can be decided with 50% plus one vote…but in the operations of government, the requirement is that 90%+ of the citizens see it as fair. When we have 88% of Democrats saying “fair” and 88% of GOPers saying “unfair”, that isn’t a verdict: that is civil war prep.
And keep in mind that none of us on our side believe for a moment that those on the Left truly think the *trial was fair. They might believe that Trump is guilty of *something* so should be found guilty, and are happy to let this *trial do the dirty work, but only the most determinedly ignorant can pretend to not know the moral, ethical and legal defects of this Stalinist show trial.
Also, keep in mind Mr. Fabrizio’s point that “he wouldn’t be surprised to see national polls where deep blue states like California and New York hold great weight, to show shifts in voter preferences based on the unfavorable ruling.”
I am always reminded of a classic and award-winning very old TV ad, when Chinese food started to hit Middle America and Chun King was selling Americanized “Chinese” food. It had a photo of ten men wearing white coats, with stethoscopes around their necks, and nine of them were Chinese, with the slogan “Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King”. So 53% of people stupid enough to elect Newsom or Cuomo are also stupid enough to think this is fair—I don’t find that compelling.
Courts Are Abandoning the 8th Amendment to Push a Political Agenda
They started this when they started giving hard prison time for many years to non-violent protesters on January 6. This blatant disregard for the Bill of Rights’ 8th Amendment might have inspired Fat Al Bragg and *Judge Merchan in their abandonment of the 6th Amendment. They don’t even try to hide their contempt for the 1st.
But hey, what’s a little cruel and unusual punishment, or denial of due process, or punishing free speech, when you’re fighting to preserve democracy by controlling who can run for office?
Americas 2 tiered justice system will be fully exposed once Hunter Biden is acquitted. Because that will happen.
This story makes zero sense. First of all, why is Wendell Pierce renting anything?? He is a very successful actor and multi millionaire. And is that the only rental in Harlem?? Did he speak with the landlord to get clarification? Or did he just run to social media???
‘Racism and bigots are real. There are those who will do anything to destroy life’s journey for Black folks. When you deny our personal experiences, you are as vile and despicable,’ The Wire star wrote.
The REAL racists in America are people like Wendell Pierce who claim that any oversight, any denial, and/or any rejection of what they want to do …. is racist. You can’t have a decent society if people like Wendell are offended every time he turns around. Americans have had enough of this racist garbage, as they have with climate change garbage, saving democracy garbage, gay rights garbage, etc. Democrats are just not fun to live around anymore
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13492427/Wendell-Pierce-apartment-harlem-denied-black.html
I have no problem with him renting an apartment, especially in NYC. What I do have a problem with is his assumption that the reason the white man did not rent to him was his skin color. If the building owner hates blacks he wouldn’t own a building in Harlem.
If Pierce exhibited the same arrogance and belligerence in an interview as he does in his complaint, it’s more likely that the white man saw him as a potential source of trouble and just decided to pass. I’ll bet there is a good reason for his rejection. To extrapolate from this that the white man (and, of course, MAGA) is denying the personal experiences of all black people that is a pretty good indication of what a drama queen this guy must be.
Too bad, because I really liked him in Jack Ryan.
Here’s a good example of the reality of the Ruling Class. While Democrats and Never Trump Republicans are all spun up over bullshit issues like “saving democracy”, fighting climate change, and fighting racism, Americans quality of life is diminishing right in front of our eyes. Homes are unaffordable, gas and grocery prices are punishing, and crime is rampant, but the worse could be yet to come … and that is a commercial real estate collapse that could devastate local municipalities budgets and accelerate the decline
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13491027/San-Francisco-retail-crime-homelessness-drugs-newsom-breed.html
Related story … this is largely due to the collapse of commercial real estate; retail is gone and tenants are gone, all thanks to our current Ruling Class and Dr Fauci
The FDIC’s Quarterly Banking Profile report paints a grim picture of the current state of our nation’s financial institutions. Banks are now burdened with more than half a trillion dollars in paper losses on their balance sheets.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/bidenomics-517-billion-unrealized-losses-cripple-us-banking/
Thanks for addressing the substance of the issue. Now run along and go save democracy somewhere, because you’re really good at stuff like that
And now Saint Anthony is admitting that he made up the whole “social distancing” thing that was the reason people were not allowed to go to work.
And remember the kids were put in those plastic bubbles in school all because of Fauci’s “distancing”?? What a piece of shit he is …
Just food for thought … I think Nikki Haley is going to be VP
I hope not.
Me too, but I think it might happen, and it wouldn’t be the worse outcome IMO. First, I think Trump can get Nikki to dial back her war mongering desires, and secondly, we need the GOP to be completely unified.
If we want the GOP to be completely unified we need a VP who is not so hated. And who is, BTW, legally eligible for the job. She is not a Natural Born Citizen. Native Born, if you accept the increasingly challenged interpretation of the 14th Amendment that hands out citizenship like Halloween candy, but not Natural Born, which is based on heredity and not geography.
Trump’s biggest fault has always been his inclination to pick the wrong people and Haley would be continuation of that.
Yesterday I read a ringing endorsement of Lee Zeldin, and of course the best possible pick would be Ron DeSantis. I hope and pray Trump breaks his pattern of choosing the worse possible person. The Right has so much depth on the bench there is absolutely no reason to choose Haley over any of them. She has literally nothing going for her except the perception she and her backers have created that for some unknown and inexplicable reason she will bring in a lot of votes.
Her “war mongering desires” are hardly the only things that would make her a terrible choice
DeSantis would be my first choice but I want to win. No I take that back. WE HAVE TO WIN or America is over. 4 more years of a Chinese led Biden Presidency, and this country is over.
I also want to win but don’t see how nominating a mediocre governor with a toxic personality and an overwhelmingly negative opinion of her outside her tiny bubble of supporters, most of whom are Democrats, who will probably get challenged by the Left on her Natural Citizen status right after the convention, thereby creating another easily avoidable crisis, will help that happen.
I was going to vote for Trump enthusiastically. If Haley is his VP I will still have to vote for him but it will be with the same holding-the-nose depressed feeling I had in 2016, that it’s just because he’s still better than the alternative.
Trump has GOT to start picking the best people for the job and trying to overcome his history of doing the opposite. I’m just so tired of watching him do so well and then shoot himself in the foot.
4 more years of a Chinese led Biden Presidency, and this country is over. Thanks for that, Captain Obvious.
Just because “….an early March survey by Emerson College found that 63 percent of Haley backers preferred President Joe Biden over Trump in a general election matchup, compared to 27 percent who preferred Trump” that does not mean that putting her on the ticket would mean winning over this 63 per cent.
Read the statement: It says that the support for Haley is not support for the policies and political philosophy of the GOP, or Trump, but that it is on the shaky ground of just LIKING her as a person. This kind of superficial reasoning for “backing” someone is not necessarily going to remain if backing her means voting for Trump. It’s one thing to say “In a matchup of Haley vs Trump I support Haley (INSTEAD OF TRUMP)”—-which is what I think this survey reflects—-and is very different from saying “I like Haley so much I will vote for Trump if she is his running mate”.
Any poll or survey that touts support for Haley has to dig down into it to find out if this support is for her instead of Trump or so deep and solid it will follow her even if that means voting for Trump. When most of her alleged support is from people who back her in a head-to-head with Trump but otherwise would prefer to vote for Biden, it’s pretty clear that this much-ballyhooed Haley backing is on pretty thin grounds.
Argentine inflation rate was 25% when Milei came in – it is now down to 8%; there will be massive economic disruptions as Milei attempts to dismantle the Social-Democratic State. Hopefully he succeeds and thus provides a roadmap for the whole world to get out of that dead end.
Speaking during an audiobook interview in 2020, Fauci said opposition to vaccine mandates were “ideological bullsh*t” and argued that making people’s lives difficult would force them to comply with government mandates.
“It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their idealogical bullsh*t and get vaccinated,” Fauci said.
In T.H. White’s wonderful book about Merlyn and King Arthur, the conflict in the kingdom was explained to the young Arthur as one between the belief that might makes right, vs that of right makes might.
That’s an important concept and I never hear of it, or anything like it, being taught to children these days. Oh, there is some fretting about bullying and so on, but never the distillation of the core difference between different world views.
I think that most of us on the Right feel, even if we don’t analyze it or articulate it, that doing the right thing conveys moral authority and earns other forms of authority,. That is, that right makes might.
But to the Left, it is the opposite, and they subscribe to the philosophy that using might to accomplish what they decide is best is the same thing as being “right”. That is, that might makes right.
Fauci articulates this second belief system when he explains that in using the power (might) of the State to “make it difficult for people in their lives” they are forced to submit and then do what those wielding the power determine is “right”.
The political divide in this country can distilled into this conflict of visions, which is also expressed in other paradigms, such as free speech vs censorship. The “might makes right” group always seeks control and the use of power to force others into what they decide is “right”.
I love it was Democrats shoot themselves in the foot.
ARRGGHHH!!!
No wonder we have such a hard time making any progress in explaining our narrative, when even outlets like Newsmax get it wrong.
From a Newsmax article today:
A Manhattan jury convicted Trump on Thursday on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by calling payments to lawyer Michael Cohen “legal expenses.” Cohen had paid porn star Stormy Daniels to not share stories before the 2016 presidential election about how she and the former president had a sexual encounter, which Trump has denied.
So what’s wrong with this “analysis”?
It was not illegal to pay the sex worker to keep her lying mouth shut. The “illegality” in how the payments were categorized in the bookkeeping system of Trump’s lawyer was (1) a misdemeanor, not a felony, and (2) done by the lawyer, not by Trump, who paid a bill identified as being for “legal services” and the state was forbidden to pursue action on this minor offense as it was beyond the statute of limitations.
The alleged felony was, or would have been, if the minor crime was committed in the furtherance of another crime, which was finally identified at the very end of the *trial, during the judge’s instructions to the jury and too late for Trump to defend against it. Trump was never charged with this alleged crime, and it was not part of the indictment. It existed only in the fever swamp of the prosecution’s minds. It was that the real reason, the motive, the thoughts in Trump’s mind when he cut a check for “legal services” to pay an invoice for “legal services”, was really to illegally influence the election. The actual named crime in the indictment, the crime that was charged, the crime for which Trump was allowed a partial defense, the crime for which he was found guilty, was for the entry of this payment. The payment was entered after the election was over.
If Newsweek is going to reference the *trial and the verdict, they should do so accurately.
Perhaps this will help you understand the case.
https://time.com/6985532/trump-conviction-myths-debunked-essay/
Poor casper, so desperate to find some rational defense for his irrational loathing of Trump. Worse, though, is his desperate scrambling to excuse the many and various violations of law and decency that this *trial exposed.
This article is, actually, quite well written, a masterful display of sliding around the facts. First, though, we need to understand that disputing the narrative is not the same as “debunking” the narrative. This is a common tactic of the Left, claiming that a passionate claim of an alternate explanation is an actual “debunking” of what was said. To “debunk” something is to prove it false. This little screed merely dances around the allegations of wrongdoing in the *trial and explains how things were done.
A perfect example is the first so-called “debunking”—–that of the observation that No one knows what Trump was charged with. That’s obviously not true, as the “explanation” goes on to point out. No one ever said we never knew what Trump was charged with. We DO know what he was charged with. He was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, with the charges elevated to a felony based upon the speculation about why he did this. The author has to get halfway into the third of the arguments she (falsely) presents as her “debunking” before she gets to the core of the complaint—- that Trump was not informed of the crime upon which the whole mess was based when she admits: A defendant is entitled to fair notice of the crime with which he is charged so that he can effectively defend himself at trial, but New York law does not require this level of specificity in the charging document. New York case law requires that the indictment allege only a general intent to conceal a crime, not an intent to conceal a specific crime. And here we get to the tap dancing the author (who, ironically, authored a book about “disinformation”) is trying to obfuscate. She is really quite clever in the way she managed to make implications sound like facts. Unpacking the elaborate twists and turns of the explanations is quite a task. But to me, this is like my version of working a Rubik’s Cube, so when I run into some Lefty’s foray into deceit sometimes I like to untangle it.
(Warning: This is going to be far too complex for casper to follow, so he should go take a nap or something.)
She links to a prosecution filing in November 2023, five months before his trial began. This is to indicate (without actually making the claim, because THAT would be a lie) that the predicate “crime” was part of the indictment and that therefore he had the ability to defend himself against it. However, this filing was merely an opposition to motions by the Trump team. It was not an indictment, it was not a charge. It merely laid out claims made by the prosecution.
Here we get into the weeds. New York case law requires that the indictment allege only a general intent to conceal a crime, not an intent to conceal a specific crime. but in the case we’re talking about we are talking about an alleged crime, one which had never been charged or adjudicated but was simply given the status of an accepted crime. Logic would say that to be included as the predicate crime upon which another crime was piggybacked, it would first have to have been adjudicated, or proved to have both existed and then to have been the motive for the charged actions—-remember, the charged actions were 34 counts of falsifying business records. This is the first element of this alleged predicate crime that has bothered so many of us—it was a theoretical crime not only never proved to be the reason for the way the attorney payments were entered but never even proved to exist in relation to those payments. But then we learn that in the Peoples’ Republic of New York, they don’t need no steenkin’ adjudication, because all they have to do is say, essentially, “the predicate crime does not have to be cited, proved or in fact have been committed It can exist as an abstract concept, a theoretical crime dependent solely on the prosecution’s determination of the thought processes of the defendant, without an iota of evidence to support the conclusion”.
So the complaint was that Trump was never given a chance to defend against the supposition that he had a specific motivation to subvert election laws. And he wasn’t. While he and his team KNEW what the State was trying to do, they were denied the ability to fight against it because the State very carefully refused to make their supposition part of the actual charges against Trump.
The filing she so smugly references says: In that filing, prosecutors disclosed that the crimes they alleged Trump intended to conceal were violating state and federal campaign finance laws and violating state tax laws. But they carefully refused to charge Trump with “violating state and federal campaign finance laws and violating state tax laws”—they just convicted him of thinking about doing this. There was nothing in the indictment, or charges, about “violating state and federal campaign finance laws and violating state tax laws”. Not a word. That’s because those are real crimes, not Thought Crimes, and have to proved with actual evidence, not fortune cookie levels of projection of imagined motives.
Something interesting about this filing is the extensive list of supposedly supportive cases: I did a random look-up of several of them and didn’t find a single one even remotely related to the novel concept of finding a predicate “crime” that was never clearly stated and which depended solely on personal opinions regarding the thoughts of the defendant with no supporting evidence, much less proof.
She tap dances around the observation that it is not illegal to pay someone to refrain from talking about something by falling back on the same old argument: “….it is a more serious crime to falsify business records with, as in this case, intent to conceal other crimes. These include violations of campaign finance laws, by accepting donations over the legal limit, and violations of tax laws, by inaccurately characterizing the payments as income.” Yet they refused to charge Trump with “violations of campaign finance laws, by accepting donations over the legal limit, and violations of tax laws” because to do so would have enabled him to defend himself against these charges, and because federal prosecutors had already examined these charges and found them spurious and refused to prosecute. (She tries to finesse this decision that the allegations did not comprise violations of federal laws by whining “For reasons unknown, federal prosecutors during the Trump Administration did not bring charges against Trump”—implying that the FEC was controlled by the Trump Administration, another deceptive ploy to shift focus from the facts. The reasons were not unknown and were undoubtedly part of the record regarding this decision. The fact that she refused to include this reasoning is suggestive of a need to pretend that it was “for reasons unknown”. Keep in mind that this is supported by Merchan’s decision to prevent the former head of the FEC from testifying to this. The claim was that it would be inappropriate for him to testify on “law” though he certainly could have testified to the processes by which the FEC arrived at the conclusion no crime had been committed.)
So, after eliminating any of the extensive verbiage of the *trial apologist, none of which was relevant to the facts at hand though full of straw men and tap dancing, we should go back to the sole document (which she so thoughtfully referenced ) that outlines in a formal filing the real charges against Trump, even though never made into an actual indictment: Unproved and speculative motives highlighted.
Defendant and others agreed to identify and purchase negative stories
to prevent them from hurting his chances in the 2016 presidential
election.
There is no law I know of, and certainly no law cited, regarding the desire of a candidate to try to present the best possible impression in an election campaign. This would, of course, include not “hurting his chances” (an amazingly imprecise legal concept) in a campaign by not challenging spurious attacks on his character.
A. The falsified records here are business records of an enterprise
B. Defendant acted with intent to defraud.
C. Defendant’s intent to defraud included the intent
to commit or conceal other crimes.
1.The first-degree intent element applies
where a defendant has the general intent
to commit or conceal any crime, whether
by himself or by someone else, and whether
or not any crime was actually committed.
Stop here for just a moment to look at this. So far the only crime which could have been intended by the inaccurate identification of payments to an attorney as “legal fees” based on an invoice for “legal fees” would be, COULD be, the intent to use the full amount of these payments as legitimate and therefore deductible business expenses. The only “fraud” at this point, even if accurate and not just speculated, would have been tax fraud. Which they chose not to charge.
2. Defendant intended to commit or conceal
election law crimes.
a. Defendant falsified business records
to conceal violations of the
Federal Election Campaign Act
and Election Law § 17-152. 23
Now we are into the nitty-gritty of the prosecution. That is, attributing motive and intent based on absolutely no evidence or proof beyond guesswork and speculation. How, for example, could the Federal Election Campaign Act play into this? It does not address the limits to which a candidate can try to create a favorable impression of himself. Unless someone else can research this Act and discover any potential violation related to the inaccurate reporting of payments to an attorney, I’m going to suggest that the only relevant aspect of the FECA could be related to reporting of donations to a campaign. And I suggest that this is covered by this rule:
When candidates use their personal funds for campaign purposes, they are making contributions to their campaigns. Candidate contributions to their own campaigns are not subject to any limits. They must, however, be reported.
So now we are drilling down to the only real “crime” uncovered so far—that is, that the way the payments were entered into a bookkeeping system might possibly be construed as donations to the Trump campaign and were not reported as such. Of course, as he could have made them directly the campaign and been well within the legal boundaries of the FECA (which would have been the testimony of the former chairman of the FECA, had the judge not intervened and forbidden such exculpatory testimony) so there was no reason to try to hide the “donation” in a bookkeeping record.
(Here’s where we come to Occam’s Razor—-the principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, the simpler explanation that the entry was a simple error based on the payment of an invoice for legal services being believed to be a payment for legal services, as opposed to the lengthy and torturous speculations, calculations, posited conspiracies and assertions engaged in by the prosecution to prove the unprovable.)
b. A federal offense is a valid object crime
that supports charges of first-degree
falsifying business records.
c. Election Law § 17-152 is a valid object crime
OK, let’s look at Election Law § 17-152. No argument that it is a “valid object crime” but what, exactly, IS it? It’s referenced twice, so it must be relevant and probative, right?
Election Law Section 17-152
Conspiracy to promote or prevent election
Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
Funny, isn’t it, that there is not a word about any effort to “promote or prevent the election of any person” in any of the cluttered verbiage surrounding this whole attack on Trump? The desire to present a favorable impression to prospective voters, even if it played a role in the inaccurate entering of payments to Trump’s lawyer, has nothing at all to do with an effort to “promote or prevent the election of any person” so why is it even referenced?
Bigger question: IS A VIOLATION OF 17-152, WHETHER COMMITTED OR MERELY INTENDED, THE CRIME DETERMINED TO BE THE PREDICATE CRIME UPON WHICH THE ILLEGAL ENTRY CRIME IS ELEVATED TO THAT OF A FELONY?
I ask because this is literally the only election-related crime I have seen referenced in the claims that the inaccurate payment entries were done purposely to cover up an election interference crime. But I haven’t seen any legal definition of “interference” or any such law cited—and surely if there were such a law the passionate and voluble Ms. McQuade would have cited it.
3. Defendant intended to commit or conceal tax crimes
4. Defendant intended to commit or conceal the falsification of
other business records.
Neither of which were part of a formal charge against Trump and certainly never part of an indictment, so they did not belong in this filing that purports to be about the actual indictments and formal charges.
To sum it up: When payments were entered in a way that could be interpreted in different ways, the State of New York and the District Attorney who ran for his office on the promise to “get Trump” purposely skipped over the most obvious explanation for entries in Trump’s bookkeeping system, that of his belief that a payment for an invoice labeled “legal services” was a payment for legal services, to engage in a complicated ritual of first determining what Trump “really thought” when he paid these invoices, then using those crystal ball revelations of his inner and unexpressed thoughts as the foundation for bypassing the important law regarding the statute of limitations to unearth old reports and then, based solely on their speculations about motive and intent, classify them as efforts to defraud.
They bypassed the most obvious possibility of intended fraud—that of tax evasion—-to jump to that of campaign finance fraud. But that was a non-starter because (1) it involved Trump’s own money, paid out of his own account and not out of campaign funds or by a third party, and (2) this would, by precedent, only be punished by a small fine. So it was decided that the crime needed as an excuse to elevate the minor bookkeeping error would be the ominous-sounding “election interference” claim. So they doubled down on the original mind-reading trick of deciding they knew why the entries were made the way they were and added, to this already unstable foundation, another layer of imagination—that of knowing, somehow, why Trump wanted these payments hidden, and that was to hide unfavorable information about him because he was running for office. But every candidate does this, so in this case the old minor legal infraction of improper reporting of payments to his lawyer (never accused, never tried, never adjudicated as an actual crime that had been committed) was unearthed, dusted off, somehow removed from the legal restrictions of statutes of limitations, and redefined as a crime committed to further a separate crime. This separate crime was alleged to be that of “election interference”—-irrespective of the lack of any law defining an effort to hide unfavorable information from the electorate as interference in an election.
They cited two laws regarding election interference, though neither of these laws had anything to do with an effort to present a favorable impression to voters. One was about campaign finance, and the Federal Election Campaign Act was cited—omitting the rather important information that the FECA had already investigated this concern and found no violation—-and the other was New York State’s Election Law Section 17-152, which also had nothing to do with concerns of public opinion about candidates.
Trump was then prosecuted for his improper identification of payments to his lawyer, which—-if he was found guilty, would have been a misdemeanor with a small fine, and which had already been removed from consideration for prosecution by the statute of limitations on such violations. These charges were then linked to claims of being part of an effort to violate election campaign laws—-though no such election campaign law was cited, or even exists. And he was found guilty of the first and only legitimate charge—that of improperly reporting his payments—-and of the second, imagined, Thought Crime of doing it for a big bad nefarious reason (which happens to be unrecognized by the law as hiding negative allegations to improve ones’ image to the public has never been legislated as a crime).
Ms. McQuade did her best to confuse, confabulate and in general spin the very few facts into a narrative she then claimed “debunked” the reporting of the many defects of the Trump *trial, but when you strip her claims of their irrelevant tidbits and stick to the bare framework of her efforts they actually “debunk” nothing.