In a Salon.com article, Amanda Marcotte says
As is generally true of Marcotte, there is a lot of truth in what she writes. But there is a problem with her article: she doesn’t mention a single prosecutable crime that Trump may have committed. This is bullshit “journalism”. So, to help her out, what might these be?
Marcotte doesn’t mention any crimes because there aren’t any.
There have already been a couple of threads along this line including one I started shortly after the election but as time goes on it seems like more and more stuff piles up. Maybe the mods can consolidate the threads.
The one crime in particular that I think is going to hurt Trump the most is things that he tried to have buried on a secret server. Remember how the impeachment started? There was a recording of Trump doing something unethical to illegal, his advisors shit a brick and the recording was moved into a special military top-secret server. Hopefully this conversation with Trump attempting to bribe the Ukraine president is still in there. There are probably other conversations in there along similar lines. But that one in particular got Trump impeached and the only reason he did not lose his presidency at the time was because a friendly Senate made sure the evidence could not be heard. He won’t have that cover once he is out of office.
There’s also plenty of emoluments clause issues, campaign finance violations, nepotism (although I am not sure if that is actually against the law but if there are any nepotism laws to be broken we can be sure Trump went out of his way to break them just because), multiple sexual assaults, all kinds of tax fraud and probably a bunch of other stuff I can’t recall. The State of New York will probably be waiting to arrest him at 12:01pm on January 20th and they’ve got a variety of options for what they charge him with.
I don’t feel we can conclude that the Trump administration did a thorough job of investigating all of the allegations that were made.
The emoluments lawsuit has already been dismissed by the Supreme Court. Campaign finance violations rarely result in anything other than a fine. The tax stuff will also result in nothing more than a civil fine as long as accountants signed off on everything. Even during impeachment Trump was not charged with committing any crimes.
Impeachment doesn’t require allegations of crimes. Tump’s possible crimes most certainly circle around taxes and finances. Wouldn’t knock me down to see some bribery and stuff like that, too. Perjury, lying under oath. Wouldn’t suprise me. Lying. Anywhere lying is an actual crime, Trump better watch his ass.
This is far fetched, but if Trump is successfully pardoned for Federal crimes, aside from the route of prosecution for state crimes, is there any possibility that the I.C.C. could investigate him for crimes against humanity? Not that I’m envisioning him ever standing trial there, but it would be entertaining for there to be a summons that could make him subject to arrest in a whole bunch of countries and make it extremely difficult to travel anywhere.
I agree. If somebody wants to put Trump in prison, all they have to do is have him testify under oath. I don’t think Trump is physically capable of speaking for an hour without telling a lie. And if he does it while he’s under oath, he’s committing perjury.
IIRC the Supreme Court did not take the case and let stand the lower court opinion stand that the the members of congress who brought the suit did not have standing.
So, there was never a decision on the merits of the case.
That said I am unaware of any penalties for an emoluments violation so not sure anything would happen even with a guilty verdict.
To the OP:
Just look at the Mueller Report. Mueller himself said the report did not exonerate Trump. Obstruction of justice figures large. If the FBI had the same evidence on one of us we’d certainly find ourselves in court. Mueller did not believe you could do that to a president so he let it be.
Mueller does not accuse the president of crimes. He doesn’t have to. But the facts he recounts describe criminal behavior. They describe criminal behavior even if we allow the president’s—and the attorney general’s—argument that facially valid exercises of presidential authority cannot be obstructions of justice. They do this because they describe obstructive activity that does not involve facially valid exercises of presidential power at all. SOURCE
Also:
There are times in every person’s life where they are well advised to pause for a moment, go into the bathroom, look themselves in the mirror, and ask, “have I lost all possible semblance of a coherent grasp on reality?”
This is one of those times. Crimes against humanity? Really? Listen to yourself.
There are legitimate avenues of criminal prosecution for which Trump is in real jeopardy; most of them dealing with tax and bank fraud at the state level. (Not subject to presidential pardon.)
Whether anything will come of that remains to be seen. New York prosecutors will soon get their hands on mountains of documents from Deutsch Bank and Mazars. Maybe some people will get pinched by the next administration for the Ukraine stuff, but I doubt it. Certainly Trump is not going to be prosecuted for it.
Trump himself has committed acts that, without his presidential powers and prerogatives under the constitution, would get him in legal jeopardy at the federal level. The problem is, for most of the crimes we’re thinking of (i.e. Russia-gate), he can conceivably use his official powers as a defense, and this has already been litigated to some degree anyway via impeachment (yes, I know impeachment isn’t the same as prosecution).
If there’s any legal jeopardy at the federal level, it’s probably tax fraud and money laundering, but we’ve not really seen any hard evidence of actual crimes and won’t until we see tax and financial records. I agree with friedo that the real jeopardy is at the state level, where he has no prerogatives and protections. It’s just a matter of which crimes are provable and within the statute of limitations.
I wish the IRS would fast track that friggin audit already!
Perjury, when he took the oath of office.
Obstruction of justice as detailed in the Mueller report.
Cheating on taxes.
Financial crimes are harder to prove to a jury than they would seem.
Indeed, to me these are the crimes that need to be investigated fully. I have long said that firing Comey, the very person who was investigating you, for no good reason, even if he does serve “at the pleasure of the president”, which we heard from the right ad infinitum during the impeachment process, doesn’t warrant prosecution for obstruction, I can’t see what does.
What’s your evidence that he cheated on taxes? Just askin’
Name one thing he hasn’t cheated at.
No shit. He has cheated banks both in the USA and overseas so much they are refusing to touch him. The executives that handled his accounts with Deutsche Bank resigned or where pushed out. He cheats everyone down to the lowest subcontractor and has been involved in thousands of lawsuits. That is his business ‘plan’.
And I believe that this business ‘plan’ is nothing more than a child feeling that everyone owes him, well, everything. And he feels slighted when he does not get everything that he wants. That’s been his entire life. He’s a child with a machine gun. A child that never got to the point to learn any empathy, or understood that actions have consequences.
Like this?
