Given that we don’t know the charges or the evidence the grand jury saw yet, the only think we do know is that 43% of the poll respondents are idiots.
Which makes me wonder: Given that Fox news personalities lied about the election hoax and can’t stand Trump, why would anyone give anything Fox says any credence? Just a few days before the indictment, Trump was praising the grand jury. They’re only partisan now that he’s indicted.
There are interviews, e.g. this one from Dec 2021, where Bragg said that he would prioritize or focus on the Trump case.
I am not saying that this makes it politically-motivated, I’m just giving an example of the kind of thing Trump-supporters consider to be evidence of that claim.
There have been US Presidents like this before, Nixon was arguably dirtier and more corrupt than Trump, it’s just that he was psychologically able to work with the system to cut a deal to keep himself from a felony conviction.
But I’m sick of the media hand-wringing about “uncharted waters” and how “unprecedented” this is. True, we never indicted a U.S. President before…….there haven’t been that many of them. But current and former high level politicians are indicted all the time, it’s practically a tradition for Illinois governors. And other liberal democracies have arrested and indicted their former leaders. I wish the media would stop this pearl-clutching.
Or if a grand juror(s) came out publicly and made such claims.
Suggested guidelines in the New York courts for dealing with potential grand juror bias/prejudice:
“A fair grand juror is a person who will keep their promise to be fair and impartial and will not base their decision in any case upon a bias or prejudice in favor of, or against any person involved in a proceeding on account of that witness’s race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, gender identity or expression, religion, religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation.”
I don’t see political party mentioned there, for what it’s worth.
All the hoopla about political motivations is silly. The vast majority of investigations and criminal prosecutions of political figures feature a degree of political bias or motivation. What it should boil down to is if crimes were committed and whether pursuit of them and assessment of penalties are justified.
Humans by definition are not objective beings.
I don’t think that’s possible. Nixon was far more intelligent and politically cunning than Trump, so his evil machinations were potentially more dangerous, but he was also a conventionally loyal American whose mixed legacy includes many positive accomplishments. Trump is a seditious traitor and serial grifter whose malevolence is only limited by his own toddler-like stupidity.
People have said on these boards, and I agree, that most of the stuff Trump is guilty of is bog-standard behavior for the 1%. Trump’s big mistake, they’ve said, was putting himself in the spotlight via politics.
I don’t feel like digging up cites on this sentiment, but is this really in dispute?
Obviously we don’t know what charges Trump is being indicted on, but I suspect that there will be charges related to financial fraud; specifically, inflating the value of properties to get loans, and then deflating them to pay taxes. As I understand it, this sort of thing happens all the time, and almost nobody is prosecuted for it.
So in one sense, none of this is politically motivated, because financial fraud is financial fraud no matter who you are. In another sense, Trump has (rightfully, IMHO) had his finances put under extreme scrutiny because of politics in general, and because of his politics specifically. That is, because he’s so outrageous and polarizing. If I were to be surveyed and ask, “Are the prosecutions against Trump politically motivated,” I would struggle to answer, because while I know how my answer would be construed, I also feel that it’s true. Furthermore, I’m fine with it. Or at least, prosecuting the 1% who happen to draw attention to themselves isn’t as ideal as prosecuting all of the 1% who break the law, but it’s certainly better than not prosecuting the 1% because “we should strive to be more consistent in letting people get away with breaking the law.”
Yes, I’d say it’s very much in dispute. The thing that’s bog-standard with the 1% is routinely exploiting tax loopholes that may be outrageous but are legal. Outright tax fraud of the kind perpetrated by the Trump organization is much less common and tends to be prosecuted when caught.
With regard to the hush payment matter specifically, we don’t yet know what the specific charges are except that there are many of them, so one can’t pass judgment either way from that alone. But as I said before, Bragg was initially so reluctant to bring charges that two of the prosecutors working in his office resigned in protest, which makes it hard to characterize Bragg as engaging in some unjustified political vendetta. Also remember the other matters being investigated – the Jan 6 insurrection, mishandling of secret documents, and a variety of election interference conspiracies of which Georgia is the most brazen. Trump is less an example of bog-standard behaviour of the 1% and more like a mob boss, with criminality woven deep into his basic fiber. He engages in criminal activity the same instinctive way that he lies: so natural and ingrained that he does it without a second thought.
I strongly disagree but I feel like continuing that is a hijack. So I’ll leave it at that.
Let’s not forget how many times trump had been sued in his career before running for president.
He’s not typical of the 1% at all.
Typical one percenters do not set up fraudulent universities, or publicly petition for the death penalty for men who turned out to be innocent, or “allegedly” sexually assault and rape multiple women (I can put allegedly in scare quotes because, according to trump, scare quotes just add emphasis).
Or at least: not many one percenters have such a long list of malfeasance.
That’s only true if you accept the notion that trying to overturn a legitimate election is “politics”. Like it or not, Trump actually has done things far outside the norm of other “1 percenters”. Prosecuting him for that isn’t just a matter of being “politically motivated”. If we don’t punish these kinds of things, the whole system is in peril of collapse.
I agree, and I’d add that in the world of New York legal/ finance /celebrity scandals, $130,000 is a rather small amount of money.
As an aside, if I had been the negotiator for Ms. Daniels, I would have held out for at least a quarter million.
I figured it was a “$1,000 per second” kind of thing.
You’re conflating a campaign spending of politicians felony case to a corporate malfeasance felony case.
$130k for a billion dollar business might, yes, be a rounding error. For a campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised if $130k wasn’t fairly standard for prosecution, or even at the high end of it since most politicians are not at the top level and most spending violations are probably for matters similar to the Stormy Daniels case - trying to buy off people who would say bad things about you, spending campaign money to take a mistress on a vacation, etc. Numbers in the thousands of dollars are probably the vast norm.
But it should be noted that the campaign spending violation is probably not the only allegation amongst the bunch. Cohen made a variety of allegations against Trump and many of those could involve tens of millions of dollars (or not - we don’t know).
There are probably a large number of businesses who are committing tax and banking fraud and who will do so for decades without ever having any single criminal ramification come of it. But that’s where the “caught” portion comes into the matter. If everyone who is in on the crime is good at keeping their yap shut then it’s probably never going to come to light.
Most crimes are found because someone reported it - and that’s true whether it’s street crime or white collar crime.
Most street crime is never discovered or penalized because everyone who’s doing it is pretty satisfied with what’s going on. Likewise with white collar.
Maybe as AI is taken up by policing agencies, they’ll be able to start tracking down white collar crime, by having the virtual manpower to sit down and crank through the numbers looking for questionable values. At the moment, that doesn’t exist yet.
But that doesn’t mean that prosecutors don’t bring cases to court when a crime is reported.
I’d also argue that Nixon (so far) paid a stiffer penalty for his crimes by being forced from office and basically banished from politics, and also that he displayed more honor in resigning than Trump will ever display in a thousand lifetimes.
IANAL but my understanding is that a lot of these financial crimes have an “intent” element that’s difficult to prove. That plus a defendant with deep pockets means that, AIUI, prosecutors actually don’t bring cases to court. Absent either a slam-dunk case or substantial political pressure, a lot of these cases don’t get tried, and it’s not because prosecutors don’t want to. They just have limited resources.
Anything related to Trump now comes with substantial political pressure, in that they’re it’s all highly visible and lots and lots of people want to see something done. That doesn’t mean the cases are weak, just that they’re atypical. IMO, of course.
The case in Georgia and Jan 6 are different, naturally.
I dunno, we’ll see what the charges actually are tomorrow, but I suspect they’re going to be relatively boring white collar crimes, with the exception that it’s a) a former president and b) involves someone named Stormy.
Schrodinger’s grand jury.
but what would he have done had he not resigned, was impeached, then not convicted like Trump? Not much, I imagine.
Right, but my point was that he didn’t put the country through that. He was certain to be impeached, not sure about conviction, but (for maybe the only time in his life) he did the right thing for the good of the country and took himself out of the equation. Trump finds that kind of thinking inconceivable.