Didn’t Omarosa do the same thing?
People would speak to Trump with their IPhones recording the conversation. All you’d need to do is keep it on top of some stack of papers you’re holding.
Damn…recorded conversations never seem to turn out good for donald.
If this is the article you’re talking about, that isn’t true. All the prosecutors say about a tape with Trump on it in the filing is that they have “an audio recording of him and a witness.”
It might very well be the Cohen tape (kind of hard to imagine it isn’t), but that isn’t what the article says.
All in the game, yo.
Zbuzz I wantrd to apologize for misreading and quoting this the other day. Im going to reread it to get it right next time.
No apology necessary. I mean, like I said, it’s probably a very good bet that it’s the Cohen tape they are referring to. But who knows, maybe we’re all in for a surprise.
Tweets can come back and bite you in the ass too. Manhattan DA tells a federal judge that Trump cannot transfer to federal court his criminal trial for the Stormy Daniels hush money coverup because he was NOT a “federal officer” when the crimes were committed, using Trump’s old tweets against him. MeidasTouch
https://youtu.be/yGaUuZYBirU?t=300
Wow doug, he tweets more than we breathe. They could drudge up a lot from him.
{Former Trump lawyer Cohen says, “Yeah, right.”}
Of course he won’t do it. And we never checked if Trump had his tiny fingers crossed.
He doesn’t have to. Somehow the witnesses’ info gets leaked and the MAGAt bots will finish the job.
““It is not meant to impede Mr. Trump’s ability to campaign for the presidency of the United States,” the judge said. As Trump listened, a skeptical look crossed his face.”
He’s watching his campaign go down the shitter because, instead of talking about all the things he’s would do as the president, his entire platform is based on badmouthing plaintiffs. And, what’s worse, it clearly works.
Imagine instead of resigning, Al Franken ran for office but spent every rally talking about LT* the way Trump talks about anyone that’s accused him of anything.
*I feel like I shouldn’t use her real name. I’d hate for someone to search for it and find this post.
Trump has chosen to make his current campaign “platform” consist of badmouthing those folks.
He could just as easily be delivering the same sorts of rants he did in 2016, promising a Mexican Wall, no more Muslims or Wokies, lifetime free fuel for new purchase Diesel pickup trucks, or whatever. He could be singing the praises of Putin’s mission to stop the Ukrainian Nazis.
All that deliberate misdirection would be sound politicking whether for a traditional pol in legal trouble or for a Trumply one. Instead he chooses not to. That’s on him.
I don’t think it “works” exactly. It does drive the Trump worshipers into paroxysms of persecution-driven love for their god-martyr. But it doesn’t attract anybody else and in fact is pretty repelling even to semi-rightists.
There are no recent posts here. But this seems to be the only case where Donald Trump is unable to run out the clock between now and November.
New today at Vox:
The chances that Trump will be a convicted felon by Election Day have dropped
From the New York Times last week:
Manhattan’s District Attorney Is Quietly Preparing for a Trump Trial
In my ideal world, bribing someone to give up their first amendment rights should be considered a serious crime — although that’s not exactly what this trial is about.
If I understand correctly, he paid her money so that she would not speak or write about whatever they did together. It seems thin grounds for a felony charge – what exactly would the charge be? Mr. Bragg is talking about election interference, but to me that seems like a very long stretch to get to a charge. And what about Ms Daniels? She took, and possibly solicited, money to suppress a story that had no real political significance (especially in hindsight, but we can pass that point) except as a character issue when he was running for office. Was she guilty of blackmail? Do we typically charge a blackmail victim with a felony? Because there was nothing illegal about what he wanted to cover up, or at least nothing more serious than soliciting prostitution. This seems to me very similar to the way the Republican Congress went after Clinton for trying to hide a blow job.
I loathe Trump as much as anyone, I think, but I hope that if that’s all there is to this indictment, that it fails to reach trial. It would give the “witch hunt” folks some real ammunition, and set a very bad precedent. The ends do not justify the means.
Falsifying Business Records. You know you can look this up right?
I believe that its’ falsifying business records in relation to the attempts to cover up the payments. Not charges for the payments themselves.
It’s not the initial act; It’s the coverup. I guess Trump didn’t learn from Nixon.
Nothing for that because it’s legal.
This is a business fraud type of crime. Trump illegally mischaracterized what the payment was for after the fact. If he had characterized it accurately, it would not be a crime. The payment, implicated election laws (need to report this payment) and tax laws (pay taxes), etc and those are part of the charges.
Edit: what everyone else is saying. Also, Clinton is a good example actually to point out the basic legal similarities. The act was not illegal. Lying about it under oath was.
The example I like to use was when Martha Stewart got in trouble. When the SEC came to investigate her for selling ImClone stock, she panicked and thought she’d get in trouble for insider trading. So she lied to federal investigators (SEC and FBI as well as federal prosecutors later on) and also got her broker to lie for her too. It turns out that what she did was not, in fact, criminal insider trading (though she did have to settle a civil lawsuit with the SEC over it), but the lying about it was criminal.
Now, to clarify, she was charged with securities fraud, but it was dismissed, however the charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to investigators, she was convicted of all of those. If she had told the truth she probably would have just had to pay a fine and not have to spend 5 months in prison followed by 5 months of probation.
So yeah, sometimes the coverup itself is the only crime, but it’s still a crime.
It’s all the stuff Michael Cohen, you know, actually went to jail for. Although I think he had a few more IRS issues in the mix for his personal shenanigans.
The background, which must have been discussed earlier in the thread, is that two Manhattan ADA’s wanted to indict Trump for racketeering, but Bragg thought he needed a narrower case to win. So those two men resigned, and Bragg pursued the business records case.
If press reports are correct, and Trump is guilty, neither of which I assume, it goes something like this:
Cohen, with Trump’s knowledge and approval, bribed Stormy Daniels to prevent negative news stories coming out before the election. Maybe this isn’t directly illegal. But it is impractical to do it in legal way. There should be a $130,000 payment, from the Trump campaign to Daniels, showing as a campaign expenditure we can look up at a Federal Election Commission web site. I’m pretty sure there is no such, and the reason is records falsification.
I wish it didn’t have to do with adultery, but this kind of bribery does seem to me a big step along the authoritarian path of shutting down media the caudillo doesn’t like. This case thus addresses dangers of a second Trump term.
This influenced my post: