Did Mr Trump buy himself a Manhattan DA?

Sol Rosenberg

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There's a pretty good discussion of it on this thread below.  It boils down to DA Bragg being the politician with his head on the block, in the "if you shoot the king you better kill the king" scenario. He didn't like his chances as much as the two experienced guys running the prosecution. 


 
AJ Oliver

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Sol Rosenberg said:
It boils down to DA Bragg being the politician with his head on the block, in the "if you shoot the king you better kill the king" scenario
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In that case the authoritarian oligarchs will win, won't they ?? 

too big and important to prosecute, like Dubya's war crimes, 2008 bankster fraud artists, . .  and now the TFG 

Check back on the Watergate and Savings and Loan eras - it did not used to be this way. 

 
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kent_island_sailor

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badlatitude said:
It's complicated. There is a strong argument out there now that we will never even see a conviction.

Edit to Add:

Attorney General Merrick Garland is not going to save democracy. Nor is the attorney general of New York, Letitia James; the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg; nor the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis. As the apparent collapse of the New York district attorney’s investigation makes clear, criminal cases are hard to make. Donald Trump, despite his many seemingly criminal acts, is unlikely to ever spend a day in jail.

Observers of the Trump malignancy have an unfortunate habit of wish casting—believing that their most optimistic fantasies will become reality. They did this with the Mueller investigation—remember “It’s Mueller Time”?—and they did it with both of Trump’s impeachments. Their dream has always been that somehow, somewhere, someone would call Trump to account for his actions and, in doing so, save American democracy.

Today, many invest the ongoing criminal investigations of Trump in New York, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., with the same hopes. Even my good friend George Conway has speculated that this time things might be different.

I don’t see it happening. Please don’t misunderstand; I am as convinced as anyone of the criminality of Trump’s conduct, and nothing would please me more than to see him get his deserved comeuppance. He should, and very well may, be indicted in one or more of these jurisdictions. And the civil suits against him may have legs.

But years of experience prosecuting fraught political cases (and defending others) has taught me that the criminal law is a blunt tool for achieving justice and a poor means of resolving political issues. In my judgment, the chances that Trump will be convicted of any crime are slim to none. And though I am no political analyst, my guess is that a failure to convict will only embolden him and his followers.

Why won’t the criminal law suffice?

To begin with, one should not assume that the cases against Trump will be easy to prove substantively. There is a great deal of evidence of criminality on the public record, but having that evidence and presenting it convincingly in court are different things. We should not assume that the evidence is clear and that any vote for acquittal would be the unreasoning verdict of a Trumpist holdout. I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment. In truth, the putative cases against Trump are difficult ones that would be hard charges to bring even in the best of circumstances, much less before a highly politicized jury pool.

Consider the New York case. As far as one can tell from public reporting, the kernel of the case is that Trump lied in his financial statements. He allegedly inflated his net worth and the worth of his properties to secure loans while, at the same time, deflating their value to avoid taxes. The stark inconsistency is evidence of fraud. In addition, it appears that the Trump Organization compensated some of its employees through nonwage benefits such as apartments, cars, and tuition, and that those benefits were not declared by the employees or the company.

All of that is serious stuff, to be sure. But it is also, sadly, very common. Even if we accept that the case against Trump is strong enough to be charged (and the recent Mazars disclosures suggest that it is), the simple fact is that fraud of this sort is commonplace in the real-estate market, and failing to declare nonwage benefits is, likewise, a common occurrence. Trump’s criminality may well be greater in degree than that of others, but it is unlikely to be different in kind (at least not on the evidence we can currently see on the public record). To my mind (and also, apparently, to the mind of the Manhattan district attorney), that’s a pretty good defense, as is the lack of an insider who is willing to testify against Trump. If Trump can show that his practices are “common” in the real-estate community, that will make his “They’re picking on me” argument much stronger.

Likewise, a federal case against Trump related to the January 6 insurrection—if the Justice Department is indeed investigating one, though we do not know that it is—would be a challenging one. The main complaint, in reality, is both that Trump incited the riot and that he then did nothing to stop it once it got started. But as the former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason has said, making a criminal case out of inaction is difficult. To do that you have to prove a fairly close connection between a duty to act and a failure to do so. Though it is right and correct to say that Trump had a responsibility to act to forestall the riots, having at least partially contributed to their instigation, that’s as much a statement of moral culpability as it is a statement about a legal requirement.

Read: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/why-criminal-cases-against-trump-are-doomed/627113/
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Short version:

When rich white men commit felonies, they are complicated felonies. It is way too hard to deal with them, so we just let them keep doing it.

 
kent_island_sailor

kent_island_sailor

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Mike G said:
Good movie.  It was absolutely true, except for the parts they made up.

BTW, she's been deported as of a week ago.  
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I didn't know she already got the boot. I loved how she WANTED to be found out as a criminal mastermind, she hated the idea of getting a light sentence because she wasn't good at crime :rolleyes:

 
βhyde

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To-Do:

1. Bragg

2. Willis

3. Garland

What little faith I had in our political system evaporated with the Newt/Tea Party bullshit culminating with the election of Shitstain and the complete destruction of our voting system. I guess I can add the legal system to the heap of delusional American ideals I once thought were real. A DA that doesn't want to prosecute because he might look bad? Fucking priceless.

 
Pertinacious Tom

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In $oro$-$pon$ored prosecutor news, Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg Said This Woman Acted in Self-Defense. He Prosecuted Her For Almost a Year Anyway.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has spent the better part of the last year prosecuting a woman for murder. There's a catch: He publicly expressed, multiple times, that he didn't believe it was a murder.

It's an odd scenario for a prosecutor to put himself in. But for Tracy McCarter, the New York woman who in March 2020 killed her abusive, estranged husband, James Murray, it was more than odd. Bragg explicitly campaigned for office on her innocence, calling the killing "self-defense." And though the evidence would appear to corroborate that assertion, he instead continued the prosecution he promised to end, subjecting McCarter to restrictive bail conditions and proceeding toward a trial.

That changed late last week. "After carefully reviewing all the evidence and extensively discussing this matter with members of my office, I have a reasonable doubt of whether Ms. McCarter stabbed Mr. Murray with the requisite intent to support a conviction of murder in the second degree," Bragg wrote in a letter to Justice Diane Kiesel of the New York State Supreme Court. "I cannot in good conscious allow a prosecution to proceed to trial and ask a jury to reach a conclusion that I have not reached myself."

...

McCarter's road to prosecution was littered with problems from the beginning. The grand jury that indicted her did so after the prosecution declined to share the evidence of Murray's abuse. In addition to the aforementioned materials, that also included Murray coming to McCarter's apartment that day—where he did not live—intoxicated after he had been on a bender in her building. She was seen administering CPR and screaming for assistance after the stabbing.

That slipshod approach to her prosecution carried over from former District Attorney Cyrus Vance's administration to Bragg's, who at one point attempted to compromise by having the charge downgraded to manslaughter in the first degree (which still carries up to 25 years in prison). The judge who heard that request—Justice Kiesel—rejected it, because Bragg's office neglected to share that same evidence concerning Murray's history. "They affirm, without reference to exhibit or documentation, that she is a survivor of domestic violence," she wrote.
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But perhaps the real injustice is that some college and then some law school let Mr. Bragg graduate without learning that conscious and conscience are different words.
 
P

phillysailor

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Sensational title to this thread… yet no suggestion in its entirety that Bragg is dirty.

Accusations of weakness, the DA protecting his political prospects seem appropriate but the baseless charge of corruption just reduces faith in public institutions without justification.

Let’s do better than the Republicans.
 
Pertinacious Tom

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billy backstay said:
Why bump old, very dead Trump thread for some other sensational BS?
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2022 was not all that long ago.

I had an article about Alvin Bragg. Since I search for a relevant thread instead of just starting a new one every time I have a thought, I found the Alvin Bragg thread.

His prosecution of a woman for defending herself against her abusive ex isn't "sensational BS." It happened. What do you think is sensational or BS about it?
 
billy backstay

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Pertinacious Tom said:
2022 was not all that long ago.

I had an article about Alvin Bragg. Since I search for a relevant thread instead of just starting a new one every time I have a thought, I found the Alvin Bragg thread.

His prosecution of a woman for defending herself against her abusive ex isn't "sensational BS." It happened. What do you think is sensational or BS about it?
Click to expand...

It becomes "sensational"when you tack it onto a dead Trump thread. Leititia James has taken over the reins in NY, and will hopefully bring home the bacon! But, that's okay Tom, you be you!!
 
Bus Driver

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Pertinacious Tom said:
2022 was not all that long ago.

I had an article about Alvin Bragg. Since I search for a relevant thread instead of just starting a new one every time I have a thought, I found the Alvin Bragg thread.

His prosecution of a woman for defending herself against her abusive ex isn't "sensational BS." It happened. What do you think is sensational or BS about it?
Click to expand...
Did you check with Billy, before posting, to make sure it would be acceptable to him?

He's kinda like the police, around here.
 
badlatitude

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Prosecutor: Evidence shows Trump 'explicitly' OK'd tax fraud​

Source: Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — In the end, it wasn’t a last-minute smoking gun but a prosecutor insisting that evidence shows Donald Trump was aware of a scheme that his Trump Organization’s executives hatched to avoid paying personal income taxes on millions of dollars worth of company-paid perks.

After telling jurors on Thursday that Trump “knew exactly what was going on” with the scheme, Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Joshua Steinglass followed up by citing trial evidence and testimony that he said made clear “Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.”

Steinglass, speaking on the last day before deliberations at the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud, showed jurors a lease Trump signed for one executive’s Manhattan apartment and a memo the former president initialed authorizing a pay cut for another executive who got perks.

He also cited Weisselberg’s claim, during his three days of testimony, that he told Trump he would pay him back after Trump agreed to cover his grandchildren’s hefty private school tuition cost. Weisselberg then adjusted his payroll records to cut his pre-tax salary by the cost of the tuition.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/business...and-politics-af8c8d828e224dcde9b39ae17cbb3a4c
 
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