13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...
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One big election question is whether voters will again fall for Joe Biden’s 2020 pitch: Elect me because Republicans are a “threat to democracy.” If they don’t, Democrats can blame the growing insanity of the Donald Trump prosecutions, which every day look less like fair or sober justice.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s court case—which hinges on the claim that Mr. Trump falsely labeled seven-year-old business records about a nondisclosure-agreement payment to an adult film star—was always tenuous. To elevate this somewhat nonsensical issue to a felony, Mr. Bragg had to claim further the entries were mislabeled with intent to commit or conceal a secondary crime. After months of indecision, Mr. Bragg finally settled on a gotcha, suggesting the NDA payment made by lawyer Michael Cohen was an illegal campaign contribution—even though the money came from the candidate—that Mr. Trump criminally concealed from voters, amounting to election “interference” or “fraud.”
Consider the sheer nuttiness of this argument, especially when spooled to its natural conclusions. Campaigns exist to present a candidate favorably to the public—to highlight good things, hide unpleasant things. If it is felony “election interference” for a candidate to try to keep private the details of a seamy relationship, what other candidate concealments—of a lawful and entirely personal nature—must be reported? Must the out-of-pocket settlement for that fender-bender be disclosed, since it conceals a candidate’s bad driving skills? How about plastic surgery, since it masks the true ravages of age or health? Let’s raise donation caps now, since this will cost a lot.
Better yet, let’s march the entire political class to their jail cells now and save donors and the courts the costs. Many should already be there under the Bragg “concealment” theory. The Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 paid an opposition-research firm to produce a bogus dossier that accused Mr. Trump of collusion with Russia. They fed it to the FBI and leaked it to the public prior to the 2016 election. The DNC and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign reported the expenditures to the Federal Election Commission but concealed their true nature by describing the payments as “legal” services, as Mr. Trump did with his NDA. The FEC fined them for the deception, but under Mr. Bragg’s theory it should count as criminal election interference.
The Bragg argument also fails on the facts of the Trump case. The claim is that by concealing his hush-money payment, Mr. Trump improperly influenced and interfered with the 2016 vote. Yet had the payment been made and disclosed via the campaign, the final pre-election FEC reports that year were made public on Oct. 27, 2016, and covered transactions only through Oct. 19. Mr. Cohen wired the money to Stormy Daniels’s team on Oct. 27, and the agreement wasn’t signed until the next day. Even had Mr. Trump reported all this to the FEC, the public wouldn’t have known until long after the election.
Critics will insist that Trump campaign would have been legally obligated to report Mr. Cohen’s “last minute” contribution within 48 hours. But of course that couldn’t have happened, since the $130,000 Cohen sent to the Daniels camp would have vastly exceeded individual contribution limits. If the Trump team had truly viewed this as a campaign-finance issue, Mr. Trump surely would have counted the money as his own contribution to the campaign, since there are no limits on self-financing. Top to bottom, left to right, the Bragg argument is absurd, a desperate effort to turn a baseless case into an ominous and buzzy “election interference” charge.
Such legal contortions leave nobody feeling safe. If they can be applied to a prominent politician—with stacks of money to pay lawyers, and tens of millions of supporters—they can more easily be applied to the average Joe. Who’s the threat to democracy? And given the silliness of the case—brought entirely with the aim of influencing the voting public—who is actually “interfering” with the election?
The Bragg headlines must be added to other newsy onslaughts, few of which smell much like “representative government.” This week alone, the Biden administration unilaterally invalidated 30 million contracts (non-compete agreements, which the Federal Trade Commission now deems illegal), removed 13 million Alaskan acres from use, imposed sweeping regulations on power plants, and commandeered the internet with a new “net neutrality” rule. Congress was consulted on none of this. The Supreme Court just heard arguments over whether—among other power grabs—this administration is allowed to prosecute Mr. Biden’s opponent for things he did while president. Politico reports that a regular cabal of liberal activists and commentators huddle every Friday to dictate the nation’s headlines.
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@Jolly said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...:
Politico reports that a regular cabal of liberal activists and commentators huddle every Friday to dictate the nation’s headlines.
Actually, they do it by Zoom.
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@Jolly said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...:
@Jolly said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...:
Politico reports that a regular cabal of liberal activists and commentators huddle every Friday to dictate the nation’s headlines.
Welcome to Journolist 2.0.
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@Jolly said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...:
The claim is that by concealing his hush-money payment, Mr. Trump improperly influenced and interfered with the 2016 vote.
At this point, I think that most of teh public does not really look at the case this way. They are looking at it as:
Did President Trump have an affair with a porn actress?
Why is he lying about it?Very simple, regardless of what the charges are.
Of course, any candidate would try and minimize/eliminate bad stories about themselves.
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@taiwan_girl said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...:
At this point, I think that most of teh public does not really look at the case this way. They are looking at it as:
Did President Trump have an affair with a porn actress?
Why is he lying about it?Very simple, regardless of what the charges are.
Of course, any candidate would try and minimize/eliminate bad stories about themselves.
You're right.
Now that can be adjudicated in the court of November 5th.
If the judge has any integrity, his jury instructions will be specific as to what laws may have been broken, and whether the evidence proves that.
Jury instructions are a BIG DEAL, and improperly framed jury instructions are fodder for appeal, so Merchan better be very careful and specific. Judges HATE being overturned on appeal.
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@Jolly said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...:
@Jolly said in 13 million acres recused and other stories you won't hear...: Politico reports that a regular cabal of liberal activists and commentators huddle every Friday to dictate the nation’s headlines.
Actually, they do it by Zoom.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/23/anti-trump-legal-pundits-calls-00153300
Oh.
The regular attendees on Eisen’s call include Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, and Laurence Tribe, the famed liberal constitutional law professor. John Dean, who was White House counsel under Richard Nixon before pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, joins the calls, as does George Conway, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as one of the senior prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, is another regular on the calls. Jeffrey Toobin, a pioneer in the field of cable news legal analysis, is also a member of the crew. The rest of the group includes recognizable names from the worlds of politics, law and media.
Sometimes there is a special guest, like the Jan. 6 committee staffers (who recalled briefing the group). One Friday last May, after E. Jean Carroll defeated Trump in the first of her two defamation cases to go to trial, her lawyer Roberta Kaplan joined as a guest to talk for roughly half an hour about her strategy for beating Trump in court. Another time, J. Michael Luttig, a conservative legal scholar and former judge who helped lead the public campaign to disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment, showed up to make his case.
Trump has claimed that there is a legal conspiracy against him, and there is a risk that news of a group such as this could give Trump and his allies an attractive target.
Trump’s claims of an organized conspiracy might be bunk, but there are other potential problems with the Friday Zooms: There is a risk, for instance, that the calls could breed groupthink or perhaps help dubious information spread, where it might then reach people watching the news.
A prominent legal commentator with a TV contract was surprised to learn about the existence of the calls when I approached them for the story. That person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, volunteered some reservations about the idea of hosting a standing, off-the-record call with people working across different television, print and digital outlets.
“It runs the risk of creating the impression that there is an agreement or cooperation or conspiracy across mainstream media entities,” this person told me. “And that could feed into some false and damaging perceptions, particularly on the right.”
Ya think?
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Yeah, I think.
Look at the Dem talking points about Trump on any given weekend. How is this not a bigger story? If FOX, Newsmax, Breitbart, and various commentators and ex- politicians were discussing strategy every week and agreeing on talking points, Lester Holt or Rachel Maddow would probably be ripping their garments on air.