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Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

nytimes.com

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Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#691

Post by thisGuyFlicks »

zarzavat wrote: post #318
fsckboy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly the entire point of the United States at its founding was that the law should apply to political leaders. I think that's overstated. First of all, it was the Magna Carta which established that the king was not above the law, so in that sense the founding of the United States was more "and we don't need a king". Second, there are frequently legal discussions in the present day as to whether a sitting presiden…

Just to clarify. The King of the UK is above criminal law. The monarch of the UK cannot be arrested or charged with an offence, or be personally involved in criminal proceedings. That is similar to the immunity given to the sitting US President. What is different is that monarch is not really expected to obey the law either. For example, the Prime Minister was fined for illegally not wearing a seatbelt. If the king d…

You really think anyone in the royal family has ever done anything because "it would be the right thing to do"?

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#692

Post by biorach »

marcell wrote: post #389

I've scrolled through the top ~10 or so comments, and none of them, describe or comment on the nature of the charges against Trump. To be fair to the commenters, most stories are vague. The charges relate to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, but hush money is not a crime. It's also not a crime to have an affair with Stormy Daniels. So the most salacious parts of the story are not what the crime is. My understand…

> Overall this seems like a weak case to me.

The Economist, no fan of Trump, made much the same point [1], archived at [2]

> Prosecuting Mr Trump for the campaign-finance violation relies on a convoluted argument. In 2016 Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer (who later went to prison himself), paid $130,000 to Ms Daniels out of his own pocket. Mr Trump allegedly reimbursed Mr Cohen with payments disguised as routine legal expenses. Falsifying business records can be a misdemeanour under New York law. The felony indictment would indicate that prosecutors are going to argue that the minor crime facilitated a more serious one: failing to declare the payment, which was made a few weeks before the election, as a de facto campaign expense.

> The payment probably did benefit the campaign and it was indeed undeclared. Mr Cohen, the lawyer, pleaded guilty to breaking campaign-finance law. But legal theory for prosecuting Mr Trump in Manhattan is untested. The campaign-finance rules that he may have broken are federal. The accounting rule is a state one. Linking the two in this way is unusual, and a judge may decide it is unwarranted.

And today it has a leader [3], archived at [4] which goes into greater detail, and concludes

> If Mr Trump is to be prosecuted, it should be for something that cannot be dismissed as a technicality, and where the law is clearer. The Manhattan DA’s case looks like a mistake.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/03/23/the-cases... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329221711/https://www.econo... [3] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/03/30/prosecuting-don... [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20230331115631/https://www.econo...

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#693

Post by AdamN »

brutus1213 wrote: post #677
pdpi wrote: post #605

I commented on my understanding of the situation on reddit a while ago. Copy/pasting here: He paid off Stormy Daniels to keep her from talking about their relationship. Paying her to stay silent is 100% legal, there is absolutely no issue with an NDA like that. The illegal part isn't the what, it's the how. Political campaigning laws set a limited budget for how much money you can spend on campaigning, which is defin…

Not a lawyer, nor am I American. No horse in this except maybe a citizen of the world. This seems like a weak case to me. For a former president and polarizing figure, you would think the bar on prosecution would be air tight. If he goes to jail for a crime the population (or his support base) considers is trivial or if he does not get convicted, it raises Trump's stock to the stratosphere. Perhaps if he goes to jail…

The prosecutor can only look at crimes in their jurisdiction. In this case it's a NY prosecutor and only crimes in that state can be charged. In fact, we don't know what the charges are yet as they are sealed (although the leak says it's 30+ charges). There are other, stronger cases against Trump being pursued in Georgia and at the Federal level (and perhaps more than that).

In the end, this is important though as we already have convictions that his company was committing tax fraud but those don't go back to him personally because the CFO was non-cooperative (and Trump probably wasn't directly involved enough to be convicted).

The campaign finance part though is definitely personally handled by him. He allegedly used money donated by people to his campaign to pay his lawyer who then used the money to pay Stormy Daniels. That money was billed as legal expenses for the campaign. That's more than accounting fraud - it's tax fraud and it's fraud against our democracy.

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#694

Post by TheHappyOddish »

NullInvictus wrote: post #600
guelo wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That issue was resolved when the FEC did an investigation and issued a fine. There was accountability. Why should there be no accountability for Trump?

It’s just Whataboutism. What the DNC did or did not do is entirely irrelevant to the case, because the DNC is not who was standing before the grand jury. “You could pin this on a large percentage of politicians”. Yes, please. It will in fact be good for the country. I don’t care what party they come from.

I'm not sure if you're intentionally being selective here, but I'll assume good intent.

GP goes on to say:

> There's clearly an element of selective prosecution here, regardless of whether the charge is valid. To make a martyr of Trump over small time crimes is not going to be good for the country in the end.

Their point is quite specifically _not_ whataboutism. They use another example to point to what they believe to be selective prosecution, not to ask "why not proscute the others who did this?".

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#696

Post by ChicagoDave »

blunder_chess wrote: post #654
ChicagoDave wrote: post #625

NY grand juries (regular people) do all of the actual work without prompting from the DA. The only thing the DA does is provide witnesses and physical evidence and read the laws relating to the evidence. The grand jury asks all the questions of the witnesses and reviews all the evidence. Then they vote to indict or not in private. The DA asks if they voted and how. They report their votes. At no point is the DA coerc…

> As law-abiding citizens, is this not what we expect and has it not been the foundation of our judicial system for 247 years? Not to cut against your point, but just want to clarify that 247 years ago was 1776, which is not when our judicial system was founded. The first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, wasn't ratified until 1781 and did not include a judiciary. The second constitution, which created the…

Thanks for the clarification!

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#697

Post by cxf12 »

dbbk wrote: post #676
marcell wrote: post #389

I've scrolled through the top ~10 or so comments, and none of them, describe or comment on the nature of the charges against Trump. To be fair to the commenters, most stories are vague. The charges relate to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, but hush money is not a crime. It's also not a crime to have an affair with Stormy Daniels. So the most salacious parts of the story are not what the crime is. My understand…

The gist of it is, the hush money payments were covered up by filing false business records claiming it was for "lawyer's fees". That's the first issue. The second issue is that it can be considered an improper campaign contribution because it was to benefit the campaign. In order for it to be a felony, you need to connect the two together. Otherwise it's a misdemeanour. In terms of it being a "weak case", I would ju…

Cohen plead guilty to the hush money as an excessive personal campaign contribution. Going forward, it's not likely that the contribution can be recharacterized for the purposes of charging DJT with a crime. This case is going to be tossed out of court.

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#698

Post by TheHappyOddish »

noduerme wrote: post #658

I think this is unfortunate because it cheapens American democracy even further in the eyes of adversaries who want nothing more than to mock us on the world stage. Whatever your view of the balance between the need to enforce laws vs. keeping national politics out of law enforcement: From a foreign policy point of view, it's a catastrophe. There are three classes of countries, as I see it, that indict or jail leader…

> I think this is unfortunate because it cheapens American democracy even further in the eyes of adversaries who want nothing more than to mock us on the world stage.

Sorry to inform you, but most of us haven't taken American "democracy" seriously since at least the 90s.

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#699

Post by AdamN »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #212
mbgerring wrote: post #55

Nearly the entire point of the United States at its founding was that the law should apply to political leaders. We are overdue for setting the precedent of a former President being charged with a crime, and we ought to go back and charge a few other former Presidents with crimes while we’re at it.

It's kind of interesting because, according to a lot of other people (whether they are speaking factually or in an opinionated fashion), Trump has managed to avoid a lot of laws (inciting an insurrection, etc.). Why is this hush money thing the biggest law a Grand jury is able to stick on him? If he's supposedly guilty for so many other things, why is this all he's been indicted on the past few years? Genuinely askin…

The most malevolent things he did were political and while in office. As anti-Trump as I am though, the clock ran out on that and the remedy (conviction of impeachment) was never completed. In that sense, that chapter is closed and now we move to all the other stuff.

Prosecutors in their respective jurisdictions should look for crimes and prosecute if they see malfeasance. In the case of NY, these are the charges that were at the top of the priority list for that one prosecutor. Multiple other prosecutors are looking at crimes in other jurisdictions and I would expect Trump to be facing charges in at least 2 and maybe 3 or 4 courtrooms on entirely independent indictments.

Re: Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

#700

Post by TheHappyOddish »

dang wrote: post #376
bsuvc wrote: post #84

Hacker News is better without unrelated political news.

The problem is that people draw the related/unrelated line very differently. The site mandate is intellectual curiosity, not political battle—but that still leaves quite a few stories with political overlap. If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see the phrase "interesting new phenomenon". The current story surely qualifies as that. I've posted various explanations about this over the…

Thanks dang! Hope your day is going well!
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