Just for the record, I'm not deliberately avoiding Trump news because I think it's stupid.¹ It's mostly because events like his arraignment today are already covered in minute detail by every news outlet on the planet and I don't have anything special to add.
I am curious to see what the charges are, just in case there's something interesting and unexpected. We should know shortly.
¹Although it is, of course.
UPDATE: It's just 34 counts of falsifying business records. Nothing unexpected. Given that, my view remains the same: these are fairly trivial charges and probably shouldn't have been prosecuted.
I don't think it is stupid to follow news about a president being held to account for his actions under the law. This is a momentous and historical moment, one that should be reassuring to those who have been concerned about whether the rule of law is being set aside. This matters to plenty of us. I find it appalling that Drum would dismiss this as "stupid."
Mr. Drum didn't say following it is stupid. Rather, he said the "it" itself is stupid. Here's a President who repeatedly tried to subvert American democracy, both sub-rosa through manipulation of the voting system, and violently, through fomenting violence in The Capitol itself. So then "the action he's being held to account for" is paying to hush up his screwing a porn star. THAT is stupid.
Contrary to what Kevin apparently believes, Trump being indicted over the Sotrmy Daniels bribe does *not* mean he can't be indicted for election interference in Georgia, or for stealing classified documents, or inciting insurrection, etc etc etc.
The "apparently" is doing a lot of work there. It's a stupid thing to believe, and it's not "apparent" to anyone but you that anyone believes it.
Anyone else who did these crimes would be prosecuted. Nobody thought to give John Edwards a pass on a trivial crime. He was prosecuted for essentially the same conduct.
Why should Donald Trump be allowed to commit crimes with impunity? How serious does it have to be before Kevin thinks it’s serious enough to prosecute Trump?
"... Nobody thought to give John Edwards a pass on a trivial crime. .."
Plenty of people thought he should get a pass. See this for example:
"In my opinion it was a witch trial, done more to exorcise society’s demons than to serve as a rational application of the law. .."
It might be stupid if one entity were planning out how to take down Trump most efficiently. That would be exactly the conspiracy against him that Trump always rails about.
Of course, it doesn't work like that. There are multiple legal entities and each is operating independently of the other. Nobody is setting out a master plan.
I find it rather appalling also. Surely Kevin would not think that because Trump has committed bigger crimes, he should get a pass on smaller ones? So, Trump gets off for a crime that would nail the likes of you or me just because he has committed bigger ones?
Nah, Kevin can't possibly mean that. He must mean that he thinks it politically unwise in some way. Since he hasn't explained why, I just want to remind readers that his political prognostications have had an unusually high rate of failure. Isn't that right, President Harris?
I dunno, man. In his earlier posts about this, KD has been pretty clear about why he thinks it's unwise. His argument isn't all THAT persuasive to me because I think concealing important information from voters is a bigger deal than KD thinks it is, but he's been perfectly clear here.
I look forward to this same attitude being displayed in future the next time the left complain about either
- the police arresting or harassing for "trivial" crimes, like loitering or broken tail lights
- the arbitrariness of prosecutorial discretion and how it can be used as a weapon against the "wrong" people.
Yeah, the Left will lose a lot of sleep if the rich are prosecuted for loitering while the poor are not.
The problem with loitering and broken taillights isn't that they're not crimes, it's that they're pretexts to harass someone. It's not a pretext to go after somebody for committing tax fraud. This is at least tens of thousands of dollars in lost taxes, used to then fund Trump's election campaign (allegedly also fraudulently). A stolen ten thousand dollar car gets you 2-10 years in prison.
Maybe you can explain why somebody stealing 10 grand in vehicles should spend 10 years in prison, but somebody stealing 10 times that in taxes shouldn't even be prosecuted?
You seem awfully confident about the exact details of the case...
The charges are falsifying business records, not tax evasion.
If we're going by the letter of the law, pretty much every person in America has at some point "falsified business records" by mistake, simply by getting some detail wrong on some form. To make the charge a felony requires a somewhat tricky set of additional claims, none of which (as far as I know) involve tax evasion. Specifically the set of escalations is claimed to be
- the payment was "conspiring to illegally promote a candidate", and
- the payment counts as a campaign contribution that exceeds a particular federal campaign cap.
These strike me as tough sells unless there is specific documentation with Trump saying specifically something like "we gotta pay this broad off to make me look better for the voters"; conversely I can see Trump easily arguing that the payoff had zero to do with the campaign (it was to protect his family or whatever) and that if he had cared about the campaign he would have publicized because it made him look good, more virile, to the voters to whom he was trying to appeal (and this is not actually even a crazy argument).
So no, this is not about some alleged theft of $10K from the US government; it's about a rare and thoroughly unusual (the statute of limitations is only avoided by twisted legal reasoning that would never be bothered with under normal circumstances) prosecution for rare and thoroughly unusual (but very obvious) reasons.
And you think it will end here? Were you OK with Nixon sic'ing the IRS on his enemies. Because the fallout from this will make Nixon look like Mother Theresa. EVERY elected official in America will discover that every document they have ever signed will be looked over with a fine tooth-comb, for the slightest irregularity that could be claimed to be, if not felony business record falsification, at least misdemeanor.
And, of course, the goal is not even the fine of a misdemeanor, it's a steady trickle of harassment, month after month after month, as each successive case is handled and a new one is brought to light...
And hell, why stop at elected officials? Let's go after other people we don't like, eg abortion doctors.
After all we've been told that the good and democratic thing in America is to make sure that EVERY case of business record falsification has its day in court, no matter how petty the circumstances of the case.
What happened after the Bork hearings? Did it end there? Uh no in retaliation we got Zoe Baird and Nannygate. And so it goes. The end result being that an ever smaller pool of people are even willing to consider some sort of political job, and many of them are essentially like Trump or Brett Kavanaugh, fighters who simply don't care about other people's opinions.
Next time you bemoan the fact that every politician these days seems at least a little pathological, or that the range of experiences and personalities of Supreme Court Justices seems so minimal compared to the court say a hundred or two hundred years ago, maybe consider just WHY that might be...
This post is made entirely in bad faith. What a silly post.
Gotta love Republicans for Technicalities though.
Intent is basic to criminal law. Intentionally falsifying business records is a crime; making an error in business record keeping is not.
The only think interesting is what the charges are, unless it also leads to violence.
You don’t think the coverage of Trump’s luggage exiting his plane stupid?
Reminds me of the coverage of a certain Ford Bronco.
Ever since the grand jury voted to indict, all, and I do mean ALL of the news coverage has been simple speculation. Nobody knows anything, but they've managed to fill 24x7 coverage with it.
Michael Cohen has gotten so many "moments in the sun" that he's near roasted. All the usual experts are on screen, day after day. And, as I write this, although the arraignment is complete and the perp fingerprinted (you'd think the Secret Service would have taken care of that at least 7 years ago), the indictment has not yet been unsealed.
So, more days of Knowing Nothing, Saying Everything. Too bad nothing else is going on anywhere in the world, right?
Okay, now the indictment is out. I remain corrected. 34 felony falsifications of business records. The operative part is, of course, FELONY. Which, to the layman's ears, suggests that it's not "trivial."
Well, yeah. But, the legal theory that turns these misdemeanors into felonies seems novel.
IIUC, these charges would ordinarily be misdemeanors on which the statute of limitations has run. In this case they're, arguably, felonies because the prosecutor alleges that they were committed in furtherance of another crime.
The novel part here is that in this case the other crime is one over which NY state courts have no jurisdiction. Maybe that fits the statute, and maybe it doesn't? I gather that's an untested question.
I guess there's no principled reason why a prosecutor ought to roll out new legal theories against indigent defendants to validate them before trying them out on well-provisioned defendants. So maybe we could look at this as brave and principled instead of reckless and overreaching?
It's not just a matter of illegal campaign contributions. Trump's payments to Cohen were claimed as tax deductible legal fees, which means that the falsification of business records was done in furtherance of tax fraud, both federal and state. Apparently the indictment refers to the tax fraud.
Ooo. To my amateur eye, that looks stronger than the campaign stuff. That's interesting. Thanks.
The indictment hasn't been unsealed. The only thing we know is they're all felony counts, and include, as one should have expected, conspiracy charges.
at work so i can't keep up. are they planning to unseal?
They just did. 34 counts of 1st degree of falsifying criminal records, a class E felony (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/175.10).
Indictment here: https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Donald-J.-Trump-Indictment.pdf
thanks
Statement of facts of the case: https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Donald-J.-Trump-SOF.pdf
Note that it includes references to "Woman 1" and "Woman 2", likely Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels.
The reading of the indictment implicated the furtherance of crimes including tax fraud and a criminal conspiracy, though it does not specifically state these in the 34 counts.
But is he being charged with those crimes specifically? If he's not how can they call them crimes?
No.
In part, they're alleging federal crimes that have yet to be charged. In part, they're referring to a conspiracy that Cohen and Pecker have both admitted to their role in, but without making a criminal charge of conspiracy. In part, we don't know if they'll add more charges later.
If the charge is based on the presumption of guilt of something not proven isn't that the same thing as jailing somebody because he looks guilty so he must have done something?
If they assert underlying crimes, they will have to prove those crimes occurred. Beyond that, it's all speculation as to what the prosecution's strategy is. They could, after all, amend their indictment with more crimes.
If they can prove those crimes occurred why not charge them?
Becuase they are federal crimes, and they can prosecute only NY state crimes.
I am not a lawyer so I have to ask, is this often done?
It seems like putting the cart before the horse, presuming the guilt of crimes never charged or tried in court.
What if he is convicted of this then charged with those other crimes? Wouldn't they say his guilt is already established, and in the state court establishing that they overstepped their jurisdiction and any conviction gets thrown out?
A trial founded on overstepping jurisdiction sounds feeble.
I think it's a bit strong to say that tax fraud is part of the indictment.
Like everything in the indictment there's a fair bit of assumption that you, the reader, will fill in the blanks.
As far as I can tell, what's actually claimed is statements "miscategorized for tax purposes". That's a lot weaker than actual tax fraud; for a start, tax fraud would require the statements "miscategorized for tax purposes" to eventually make it to a tax return, which is unclear.
ie the stronger statements of "false tax filings" or "false statements to a tax authority" are not part of the indictment, which suggests there isn't enough evidence to include them.
But, we don't know.
We're only speculating based on the tiny bits of information the prosecutor was willing to show at this time. We don't know if there are additional charges.
We do know that the grand jury is off for a couple of weeks. We do know that the investigation isn't finished.
It's all kinda dumb but can't say I'm unhappy that "hush money payments to a porn star" is getting the word association workout with "Donald Trump"
Given that, my view remains the same: these are fairly trivial charges and probably shouldn't have been prosecuted.
I'm sorry, no. Had Trump quietly cut a personal check to Stormy Daniels and the other women, then that would have been one thing. They stay quiet and it's his money to do with as he pleased. But that's not what he did. He schemed with Cohen to use Trump Org money to make the payoffs and conceal its source and then claim it as a "legal expense," which is, you know, fraud. In addition to a campaign finance violation. Why should a prosecutor just shrug his shoulders at this?
White collar business crimes arent real crimes and the VIPs who commit them shouldnt have to stoop down with the rest of us to deal with it.
This view is common and cuts across party lines.
Well, there ya go! In the past thirty years he's defrauded about 20,000 people including students in his bogus schools, contractors and their employees, and tenants in his properties. He's probably screwed people out of hundreds of millions of dollars...just because they didn't have the wherewithal to come after him.
So now they're going to get him for cheating a few thousand bucks on his taxes.
Why should a prosecutor shrug at this? Because PRIORITIES! Because he should be nailed for the real stuff, not this penny-ante b.s.
This is the stuff that Bragg has jurisdiction over.
Prosecutors saying “yeah he did this, but there are so many bigger things he did that someone else should be charging him with that I won’t bother” is how guys like Trump get away with a lifetime of white collar crime.
I would respond that he should be nailed for the real stuff as well as this penny-ante b.s.
I dunno, there's a lot of creating LLCs and shifting payments around and tax avoidance. It's not like jaywalking. It's abusing the "system" pretty big time, I'd say.
Evidently because Kevin thinks that Trump is exempt from the ordinary laws that most people are required to obey. He can only be prosecuted for the January 6th insurrection and nothing else.
Trump's own DOJ prosecuted Michael Cohen for the SAME EXACT CRIME
Good to know you think a man should be able to do felonious campaign violations, deliberately, and walk away scot free.
And not to mention that Kevin thinks New York should just ignore tax fraud, like it’s only the little people who need to pay their taxes.
Kevin's a standard institutionalist progressive, which means he has very conservative views on whether "important" people doing crimes is "trivial" or not. If you asked him whether someone falsifying records to steal a few $30,000 cars should go to jail, he'd say, "Of course, that guy's stealing cars! That's a crime!" But if if a billionaire uses some false accounting to get a $100,000 in tax refunds or some business advantage, he'd say, "Whoooooaaaa now, isn't that just penny-ante business shenanagins that happen all the time? That's trivial."
The basic problem is he sees a billionaire stealing $100,000 as trivial because it should be trivial to a billionaire. But we see it as just a crime; he took a hundred grand.
I guess we know better where the line is with KD.
Many voices argue against charging these "trivial" crimes. Knowing they allowed him to commit the presumably "serious" crimes seems like the more compelling argument to me. I don't see how cheating to get hold of the most powerful office on the planet is anything but serious.
The indictment discusses falsifying business records which without any context it is kind of hard to understand. Where things get interesting is the statement of facts and one’s mileage may vary. For me the electoral issue is a gray area but the tax avoidance!? IOW, the taxpayer helped fund Trump’s tryst? I would think everyone would be prosecuted for such an offense.
De minimis felonies is now a thing with KD. If it's a minor felony, former presidents shouldn't be charged.
Why?
Because former presidents are not like the rest of us. (Or something like that.)
these are fairly trivial charges and probably shouldn't have been prosecuted.
You go with the charges you have, not the charges you wish you had. Mafia kingpins have been brought down for mundane tax fraud and other "minor" felonies, especially relative to all the murder, smuggling, and other organized crime they're overseeing. But, a conviction is still a conviction and got them off the streets. Not sure why Kevin thinks "only" falsifying business records thirty-four times isn't worthy of prosecution, given that this country routinely throws people in jail who "only" shoplifted a few bucks worth of merchandise or "only" trespassed on the Capitol grounds.
What do you all think of Nancy Pelosi's opinion?
"The Grand Jury has acted upon the facts and the law.
No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.
Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right."
Something is wrong with that statement. And it comes from a leader of our country with a lot of influence.
I hope all these legal actions do not guarantee Trump the GOP nomination. He would lose the general for sure. However, that is what I thought in 2016.
What’s wrong with that statement?
It's implying the the burden of proof lies with the defendant.
Thank you cld.
It doesnt say that at all.
The only 'burden' is the request that Trump avoid violence or calls for violence by others.
But viewing this as a burden imposed on a defendent is a bizarre and dishonest way to frame the comment by Pelosi. We are all expected to avoid being violent in response to a court case.
Allow me to get more specific; my problem with her statement is in the line "everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence." The burden is not on the defendant to prove his innocence, the burden is on the prosecution to prove guilt. At least, that is how it used to be.
Well, yet again she doesnt say what you accuse her of saying.
She doesnt say that the burden is on the defendant to prove his innocence and if he does not, he is guilty.
You are insisting that that is what she meant, but she pretty clearly did not say that.
This website gives you a chance to prove you are correct.
But obviously that doesnt mean you are wrong by default and will be legally punished unless you prove something to me.
Those are two completely different statements, but apparently they are easy to mix up.
You're wrong. Pelosi quite clearly said that Trump has the right to prove his innocence, and that's just wrong. Trump has the right to test the case against him to find out if the prosecution can prove guilt. It is very rare for an accused person to be able to prove their innocence.
Pelosi may have intended to write that Trump had the right to test the case against him, rather than what she wrote, but that doesn't mean that what she wrote is wrong. If Trump has evidence that proves he is innocent, he is entitled to present that evidence as part of his defense.
What on earth is wrong with Pelosis' statement? It's about as anodyne a statement that can be made.
It is by Pelosi...
For most republicans "good morning" would be a wrong statement if Pelosi said it.
I believe that it's OK for them to charge Trump with this if they would charge him with it even if he wasn't Trump. If they're doing it just to "get Trump", it's wrong. And I have no idea how often business execs get charge with falsifying financial records. (I suspect it's not nearly enough.)
But I will say that a man was choked to death over the crime of selling loose cigarettes. Breonna Taylor had her home invaded (and was killed) because police suspected that an ex-boyfriend of hers who was a criminal may have once had a package delivered to her home. My point is that our justice system is brutal for people who don't live on 5th Ave, particularly non-whites, and aside from wishing cops would be a little more restrained, the public is largely OK with this. Trump himself advocated for the execution of teenagers who were found to be innocent, and he put into place a policy where immigrant children were separated from their parents (sometimes permanently) merely as a deterrent to other immigrants who might want to seek asylum.
So I'm not shedding any tears if Trump is getting less than the normal white-glove treatment for Business Execs (like Mr. Bankman-Fried who is out on bail at a fraction of the normal rate and using the loot he stole to fund his defense) because he pissed off a lot of people as President. There's a lot of injustice in the world, and fairness for Trump is at the bottom of my todo list.
(But won't this turn off moderate voters? Um, no. What we've learned from the past decade is what turns off moderate voters is the nearly incessant hyperventilating from Democrats over whether they're doing "the right thing".)
Bragg says his office prosecutes cases of falsification of business records quite regularly. Because New York, and specifically Manhattan, is effectively the financial capital of the US, "commercial" law enforcement is seen as important.
Think of it as attrition.
34 counts and the resulting court proceedings. Trump away from his Fortress of Decrepitude, going to court, day in, day out. The legal process, grinding slowly. It's bound to wear down Trump and it's bound to wear down all but the most fanatical of his followers. It might even wear down the 24/7 news cycle as viewers start tuning out yet another array of courtroom sketches of Yellow Hair.
And it's tying him down, keeping him away from the rallies that are his lifeblood out there in tractor pull territory.
Death of a thousand cuts? Works for me.
I like your earlier comment that if Trump's had paid this with a suitcase of cash he'd be good now, but having read the "statement of facts" I'm not sure that's really right. They doubled the reimbursement to Michael Cohen because Cohen was going to list it as legit income and therefore pay taxes on it. I.E., Cohen paid Stormy $130k but his "reimbursement" was $260k because he was going to pay NY and Federal taxes on it as income.
I suspect what really happened here is Trump has spent his whole life listing everything as a business expense, and thus a write-off, so he thought just do that here as well. As I recall that was something described in the big NYT's articles about Trump family money and taxes. Trump's dad, as I recall, set up a repair company so that payments for work on apartments could be listed as payments to another entity.
Anyway, it's payback for a lifetime of cheating the system, so I think it's fine to hit him for this rather than something "important". And this will resonate with people as much as, or more than, trying to find votes, I predict. "Hush money to a porn star" and "cheating on your taxes" are gonna be tough for Fox to spin.
Maybe the wealthy should get the "broken windows" treatment.
If instead of listing Cohen's reimbursement as legal expenses they had just called it 'other work' would that have made it alright?
No, Cohen should have billed the payment as a disbursement and Trump should have paid that bill.
So, by Kevin’s logic, if person X assaults person Y and murders person Z, he should get off the hook for assaulting poor ol’ Y. No need to follow all the laws, just the ones you deem ‘important’ enough.
Got it.
Of course that sends a helleva message to people committing ‘little’ crimes like assaults (or campaign finance, or falsifying business records, for that matter) to have at it.
We’re a nation of laws or we aren’t.
I’m guessing that charges like these are filed often in New York. I’m also guessing that the usual end is a plea bargain in which the defendant pleads to a couple of misdemeanors and is sentenced to probation and some sort of fine. That avenue might be open to Trump though I doubt he will take it.
With regard to this:
“So the case against Trump is this: In order to keep his payoff of a blackmailer secret, he had it labeled as a legal expense.”
I don’t think that’s true with McDougal. As I recall it she sold her story to the National Enquirer in expectation that it would be published. That’s not blackmail.
Bragg's statement of indictment is singularly unimpressive. It alleges an illegal conspiracy to suppress negative information during an election campaign, without explaining why that was illegal. One charge, concerning AMI's payment of $150,000, doesn't seem to relate to Trump in any way at all, beyond a claim he wanted to reimburse AMI but ultimately didn't.
As I've written in the past, unless America indicts Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, all this other stuff just brings the justice system into disrepute.
So…..every criminal case against Trump should be either dropped or put on hold until a particular case you deem worthy is put forth?
I can’t imagine anything that would put America’s justice system into more disrepute than that.
If falsifying business records is a crime, then it’s a crime. And if it’s a crime and you think it shouldn’t be, then you should be busting your ass lobbying to get that law off the books.
I suggest you read the first paragraph of my comment again. Then perhaps reflect on this piece at Slate: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/donald-trump-charged-felony-bragg-mistake.html
Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. Trump has been charged with felonies, on the allegation that he falsified records to cover up a crime. Except Bragg refuses to say what the crime was.
The indictment quite specifically identifies tax fraud.
Bragg laid out three crimes:
-Violation of New York State laws prohibiting the promotion of a candidate by false means
-Violation of Federal campaign finance laws
-Document falsification by American Media Inc (National Enquirer)
Your comments appear to be in bad faith. The specific crimes you wanted to see are not required to be in the filing documents, they were publicly known prior to yesterday and the NY DA has specifically named them.
Actually this case is basically being put on hold. Trump’s next court appearance is December 4th at which time the judge will rule on motions that the defense will put forth (such as motions to dismiss).
If the other cases haven’t been charged by then I doubt they ever will. The New York case will not likely get started until about this time next year. If Trump isn’t a candidate I suppose he might be amenable to a plea bargain. If he is I suppose his attorneys will try to delay things until after the election. If Trump is elected he is dictator and the prosecution is up shit creek (along with the rest of us). If he loses I still think a plea bargain that keeps him out of prison is possible.
If the other cases are charged…well, I don’t know. I guess it depends on what the charges are. Could be the NY case ends up as a footnote.
As I've written in the past, unless America indicts Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, all this other stuff just brings the justice system into disrepute.
It doesn't have to be "America." The State of Georgia might well do so also. And the federal documents case might well prove legally highly perilous for Trump.
I would guess he gets charged in all three (that is, including the Stormy Daniels matter; not sure about the sedition-Jan 6th charge: we'll see). Let's imagine he gets convicted in two of the three and goes to prison, even if briefly: the US system of justice is in disrepute?
(The US constitutional-political system is arguably in disrepute in that Trump should have been impeached/removed and barred from holding office. That I don't argue with!)
I abhor violence, but if you tell me over and over that this despicable trump is a threat but can’t be prosecuted then, well, I’ll start hoping some rogue / hero secret service agent does us a solid.
" I don't have anything special to add."
But what do the 34 charges look like in chart form?
+1
Ok, someone must have done this somewhere before....
Tumpty Dumpty had a great fall....
Someone may have posted. What is the statue of limitation for falsifying business records??
Two years, but it can be extended by any period during which the accused person was continuously absent from the state. I expect one of the first of many technical arguments which will wind their way through the appelate process over the coming years will focus on whether occasional visits to his New York properties since 2016 mean he was not continuously absent from the state.
It's hard to know where to begin here on all of the ways Kevin is wrong on this one.
1. Does Kevin think falsifying business records/tax evasion is a crime that should not be prosecuted at all? Or only for former presidents?
2. Off the books hush money payments are extremely bad things that should be prosecuted. It's exactly this sort of conduct that allowed people like Harvey Weinstein to be a piece of shit for decades. It's how Fox allowed Ailes, O'Reilly and others to get away with abusing women for decades.
3. Most relevant to this case is that the hush money payments that kept these stories out of the news just a few weeks prior to the 2016 election undoubtedly helped Trump win the EC by a very narrow margin. I'll guess that Kevin discounts the degree to which these stories would have mattered given what we already knew about Trump by that point, but the counter to that is that the people around Trump went to great, and illegal pains, to keep these stories out of the news. So, they definitely thought it would effect the election.
4. Charging Trump with what Kevin thinks is trivial does not, in any way, preclude Trump from being indicted on the more serious charges.
And, to my point 1, it is illegal to do what Trump (ok, FFS, allegedly) did, so if we care about the rule of law it would just further our descent towards authoritarianism to not charge him. Starting with Nixon, then Reagan, then Bush I and Bush II, not holding former presidents accountable for their crimes laid the foundation for Trump*. Not holding Trump accountable could well be the final nail in the coffin of democracy in this country. We've run out of road to further kick this can down. So, yeah, it's risky, but if we can't hold this former POTUS accountable then we can't hold any POTUS accountable, and that is one tiny step away from fascism.
*It's interesting that every POTUS I named is from the law and order GOP, ain't it?.
+100
Kevin's so wrong on so many things that I find myself second guessing whether leaded gasoline was actually bad for anyone afterall.
If I am ever caught taking a fraudulent $300,000 deduction on my income tax I will be sure to tell the judge Kevin Drum thinks it is a trivial charge and shouldn’t be prosecuted.
Come on, Kevin, it’s a significant amount of money, lying about it is worse, and TFG should not be allowed to use the “rich obnoxious asshole” exemption.
Counterpoint: These are exactly the crimes that progressives should want to see prosecuted more frequemtly and more zealously.
They are the kind of crimes rich white men commit routinely and reflexively because they know with something approaching absolute certainty, that nobody will ever hold them accountable. They are the kind of crimes only rich white people can afford to commit, which is also why so many journalists (pretty much all of whom are rich white dudes themselves) are so quick to dismiss them as trivial.
But it is crimes like this that create rhe real two-tier justice system, a system that allows certain groups of people to crime their lives away without ever facing any questioning.
Why would we be interested in prosecuting rich white men any more than other people? I don't understand your point. I'm not against prosecuting anyone that breaks the law but we shouldn't specifically target men, white people, or rich people.
And you really think journalists are rich? That is ridiculous! I'll introduce you to a couple of journalist friends who can set you straight. Maybe 0.01% of journalists (those you see on national news) are rich, but the vast majority bring in pretty small paychecks.
"probably shouldn't have been prosecuted": Read Josh Marshall's comments on this exact issue. I think he is smarter than Kevin on this sort of questions.