Bear in mind that in this case it’s a bit different from a bank robbery.
This campaign finance law, unlike robbing the bank, involves a component of intent. If he literally did not know that it was in violation of the regulations, then no law is broken.
But i think there’s a lot of evidence that he did know.
Well that link took me down a wormhole of stupid. Thanks!
Okay. Best blog title ever.
-xtien
If ignorance is a defense, Trump will skate every time.
Indeed, that’s just what the inference is from, “Individual-1,” as part of the recent filings. Those filings were made by the same prosecutors that had access to the documents and tapes seized as part of the raids on Cohen’s office and properties.
Late Friday, U.S. prosecutors — ordinary prosecutors, not the ones working for Robert S. Mueller III’s supposed rogue witch hunt — filed papers in court saying President Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen admitted “he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.”
This means that it is the considered view of Individual-1’s Justice Department that Individual-1 participated in a felony violation of campaign finance law by directing, in order to influence the presidential election, the payoff of two women who alleged affairs with Individual-1.
Mueller and his team will decide in the coming months whether to accuse Trump of crimes. But in one sense, these are just details. That Trump is fundamentally lawless can no longer be seriously disputed. His own prosecutors now say he took part in a crime — and his former secretary of state says Trump had little concern about what was legal.
More self-ownage:
Whoaaaaaaa.
We’re gonna be hearing some crazy crap from the orange orangutan on this:
I remember hearing about the taint team that reviewed all the documents seized from Cohen’s office in the FBI raid - at one point they had only found 162 documents covered by attorney client privilege, out of 300,000. So this sounds about right.
Well…damn…
Is that Eddie Murphy in Coming to America?
It is. Uncanny makeup for the time.
Huh, I never noticed that it was him in that role.
Eddie Murphy playing the part of Billy Crystal. :)
The standup-who-worked-on-Celebrity-Apprentice thing is interesting because once upon a time, someone like that wouldn’t have dared say a word.
Not because of fear of the NDA as such (because to enforce the NDA Trump would have to admit the events were true) but because of fear of ongoing legal harassment from Trump’s lawyers. You don’t want to be in the crosshairs of high-priced lawyers who have nothing else to do with their time.
But Trump’s fixer is in jail and Trump’s lawyers have plenty to do for the next several years. Plus the lawyers he has don’t seem to be very good.
That means you’re going to hear more and more people on the periphery of Trumpland chiming in with their stories. The risk of going public gets smaller and smaller as Trump sinks.
Good points. When I saw that my first thought was, “Oh no he’s going to get buried!”. But as you pointed out, Cohen is in jail and honest lawyers don’t want to work with trump the dumpster fire.
Most of us in these threads are already familiar with things like Trump’s Mirror and won’t learn anything new here, but Stephen Saideman does a great job laying it all out clearly and concisely.
The Trump Rules
Trump sadly has been president for enough time that we can identify the rules of Trump Dynamics:
- Whenever Trump accuses someone of something, it is because this is how he would behave–it is all projection . He is an awful person so he thinks everyone else is awful, too, and then blames their behavior on what would be motivating him in that position.
- Whenever Trump uses a number , it is wrong. Because you have to read and pay attention to learn the specific value of things. So, any number, especially ten, is going to be wrong.
- If there is money involved, it has been used/distributed/etc in some way, there will be something sketchy involved. The stories of late about where the Trump inauguration money went inspired this rule, but we should have known this when the Trump Foundation news was reported by David Fahrenthold in the lead up to the election.
- If Trump appoints someone, they will be awful–incompetent, evil, or both.
- Trump will not take responsibility --the buck stops somewhere else, always.
- The brand is everything–so, anything to erase the brand of others and replace with one related to him. NAFTA didn’t change much, but now it has a new name, USMCA, so Trump erased Obama’s brand and replaced it with his own.
- If there is an opportunity for Trump to say something inappropriate , he will do so.
- And, yes, like the second law of Thermodynamics, everything trends towards entropy.
I am sure there are other rules, but as I started a seventh, I realized it was a combo of 1 and 4. What have I forgotten.
Excellent if sobering analysis of the way forward.
Spoiler alert: eradicating trumpism is a long term affair.
We can understand Donald Trump’s rise as a civil religion giving way to its cultic expression. Con man, cult leader, populist politician: Trump is all of these, rolled into one. He has become all-encompassing, even to non-believers. We all feel the fatigue of merely existing in the Trump era, the rapid-fire assault on all of our political and social senses. We want immediate solutions to the Trump problem. We want to beat reason into his followers, until they recognize how wrong they are, or at the very least, submit. We want to blame them—justifiably—for perpetuating his sham.
I want these things. I want them in my gut . But I also know that the cult’s pull is so powerful that it risks destroying its opponents, by eliciting a counterproductive reaction to it. If we want to bring members of the Trump cult back into the mainstream of American life—and there will be plenty of those who say we should move on without them—resistance means not only resisting the lure of the cult and exposing its lies, but also resisting the temptation to punish its followers.
“When the cultic behavior is on a national scale, [breaking it up] is going to take a national movement,” Lalich says. Such an approach promises no immediate gratification. But it also might be the only way to move forward, rather than continue a dangerous downward spiral. Andres Miguel Rondon, a Venezuelan economist who fled to Spain, wrote this of his own country’s experience of being caught up in an authoritarian’s fraudulent promises: “[W]hat can really win them over is not to prove that you are right. It is to show that you care. Only then will they believe what you say.”