This to me is the sticking point. I just don’t know if the jury is going to buy that this is election interference. I’m not even sure if I buy that it is election interference. It really feels like a stretch to say that the American people were defrauded to know this detail about Trump before the election.
On my first jury the judge said we could set any schedule we wanted and we would be accommodated. The second one we were told that our hours were 9:30 to 4:30. We could leave early or start late but just that time frame.
Here’s something I posed up thread that, IMO, ties a lot of that together.
I get it, I’m just not convinced that the jury will get there. They may reach the conclusion that Trump didn’t want the story to come out, but is that electoral interference? Are the voters entitled to know everything about every candidate? This for me is where it falls down. If Comey had not made his statement about Clinton, would that have been electoral interference? He made his statements, and lot of people that that was electoral interference. I want so badly for Trump to be found guilty but I think … well let’s just say I don’t think it is a trivial decision. I don’t think it is everybody sits down, they all vote guilty, and they’re back an hour later.
I assume he wants photos of his sticky taken and then talked about.
I would have wondered why his wife did not show up at all.
It really is all conspiracy theories with them. And a complete distrust in American institutions and the rule of law.
C’mon, don’t be absurd! They gave him a frontal lobotomy and covered the scar with the usual amount of orange makeup.
So random thought. What happens if a juror says something like this as a reason the fraud wasn’t about keeping it secret from his family? Is that verboten? (The prosecutor would not have been allowed to even allude to that) Or just a logical argument like any other the juror could make during deliberations.
I don’t think that could be considered relevant. I doubt that the two have a lot of love, she digs his gold and he just liked having arm candy.
you couldn’t use his wife not being there as a factor. you can use what witnesses said about their marriage as a factor.
I can’t understand why the underlying crime wasn’t something along the lines of “misreporting [concealing] an in-kind campaign contribution”
that was just one of the underlying crimes.
Everything? No. But they’re entitled to know things that may change their minds about voting for a candidate.
He made the statement precisely to avoid the perception of electoral interference – “here is information that is sufficiently important that it may change some voters’ minds about their support for a candidate, and I don’t want to be in the position of suppressing it”.
I think it’s relevant in that Trump claimed he paid off Daniels in order to protect Melania. If the two don’t care about each other – and I’m sure they don’t – then why did this notoriously stingy orange fuck pay the hush money? The prosecution says that after the Access Hollywood scandal, it was because he felt it would sink his election chances. I believe them.
A juror can do whatever the hell they want.
I believe you meant Seth Meyers?
If he didn’t want it to come out because he was worried it would hurt his chances for election then of course it was. And there was a large amount of evidence showing that to be the motive.
The jury isn’t being asked to determine whether it’s election interference. They’re being asked to determine whether Trump structured multiple payments as “legal fees” in order to avoid scrutiny.
Basically, did Donald Trump think that he was doing it as part of campaigning?
But note that the question is not, “Was it reasonable for Trump to think that this was a campaign expense?” Nor is it, “Was it reasonable for Trump to think that the information would affect his odds of winning the campaign?”
If a guy comes into a store with a banana and threatens to murder everyone with it, his state of mind is that of a murderer. That his belief in the lethality of bananas is ridiculous doesn’t have any bearing on his intent. His intent was to go in there and murder a bunch of people, and we’re all just lucky that he’s a nutball. But, likewise, he’s a nutball who could have murdered a bunch of people if he had gotten his hands on something more dangerous.
It’s okay for Trump’s beliefs to be ridiculous. We’re not asked to evaluate whether the decisions he made, made sense in the real world - knowing what we know today, in 2024, about the average Trump voter and how much they care about the morality of his activities. We’re only asked whether he thought that he was paying Cohen for legal advice or if he was channeling money through his lawyer, to Stormy Daniels, and marked it down as a legal expense when - in reality - it was a hush money payment.
per msnbc verdict watch:
lunch has arrived for the jury. no further details. hopefully they did not order smelly stuff.
We’ve reached the point I have been anticipating. The jury eats lunch because hey, free food and then comes back out to say guilty as shit on all counts.
I don’t think this will actually happen but I will remain hopeful.