Doren, here's what I got from a Bing search. Does this sound like a strong case to you?
My guess is that Trump is exaggerating this possible indictment big time for the benefit of his own ego. And too many people, both on the Trump side and the anti-Trump side, are falling for it.
Tenchusatsu
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A Trump indictment in the alleged Stormy Daniels "hush money" case out of the Manhattan district attorney's office could be imminent—but his arrest may not be. (slate.com)
Paying hush money to someone you had sex with seems very gross. But what makes this illegal? Like, why would the Manhattan D.A. be able to investigate this in the first place?
Yeah, no, it’s totally OK to pay hush money to people you had sex with. [Laughs.]
Note to self! [Laughs.]
So that’s not the problem. I think the problem was the falsifying of business records.This is kind of what Wall Street bigwigs are investigated for and prosecuted for all the time, which is just falsifying their records. And I think that what Cohen told federal prosecutors he did was, he said these checks he received, ostensibly as legal fees, went onto the books as a legal expense to pay Michael Cohen for his work. And that is, you know, false. At the most simple level, this is just bread-and-butter financial crimes. Don’t say you are getting paid for legal services when you’re being reimbursed for what could be—or may or may not be—a campaign donation.
That seems tiny.
The misdemeanor is just first-degree falsifying business records. Maximum four years in prison. It’s a low-level thing. And I think that the question is—and this is what people are scratching their heads about—is there a way to make this a bigger thing? And can you connect it either to campaign violations or can you connect it to tax fraud? Can you connect it to something huge? Because if you do that, either in furtherance of a crime or to hide a crime, then you can vault yourself into felony land.
There’s been a huge amount of infighting in the legal journalism world about whether this case is too tenuous—and what happens if Bragg brings it and he loses. Like, it’s going to be horrible. You get all of the momentum not just blocked but reversed if it ends up feeling like a weak case. And then Charles Blow wrote a piece saying, “Oh my God, just get what you can get, the low-hanging fruit.” This is all stuff that Michael Cohen got tagged for where Donald Trump couldn’t be tagged for it because he was sitting president at the time. So tag him.
I think that one of the things that Donald Trump’s thermonuclear response evinces is that he thinks that this is going to be a thermonuclear indictment. And it might just be, like, super-small french fried potatoes. |
