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| Hogback Bridge, Winterset, Iowa. Were you aware that Joe Biden owns it, and falsely valued it at $100 million in his application for a $100 million business loan for his failing Madison County real estate organization, thus committing serious bank fraud? No? That's mainly because he doesn't—he doesn't have any business interests in Iowa at all, so the likelihood of the Madison County DA slapping him with a financial fraud indictment is really very small. You have to go where the financial crimes are committed, which is especially Manhattan for Donald Trump, who's been committing financial crimes there for decades, and pretty much noplace for Joe Biden, who isn't a businessman. Maybe you can nail him for sex trafficking in Florida, or issuing threats in Texas, but I kind of doubt it. Via EncirclePhotos. |
The singularly clueless former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori offering his opinion to The New York Times ("Trump's Prosecution Has Set a Dangerous Precedent"):
How could something so big — the first criminal indictment of an American president — seem so small?
Mr. Trump was not indicted for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election or for engaging in egregious financial fraud to increase his wealth or even for allegedly obstructing the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation...
Yet.
He was not indicted for those crimes by the Manhattan grand jury, which doesn't have jurisdiction in the first and third cases. The Manhattan district attorney's office and the state's attorney general are in fact collaborating in a civil rather than criminal case on a lot of Trump's financial fraud, $250 million worth, which, if successful, will put an end to Trump's ability to do business in New York, and these people have succeeded before, in smaller but similar cases, in wiping out the Trump University and Trump Foundation frauds (with Alvin Bragg in charge, in the latter case as chief deputy attorney general), and making restitution to their victims.
I'm not sure what's making people gloomily think an indictment in this instance means there won't be any more indictments. I think it's a case of the Monte Carlo fallacy, the gambler's belief that rolling a six now decreases the odds that he'll roll a six next time, and it's just bad math. That's not true! And since it's not a random event like the throw of a die, it should actually increase your estimate of the odds that it will happen again, since we now have proof that it's possible, which wasn't obvious before.
It is far from clear how this case will end. No matter what the precise charges are, the prosecution will raise unusual and arguably novel legal issues.... Republicans are already mounting an effort to frame Mr. Bragg as a political hack who is weaponizing his office to take down the former president on behalf of Democrats.
That certainly affects the journalists, but it's not supposed to affect the jury. The doubly racist job of depicting Bragg as a clueless Black slave of the fiendish Jewish puppetmaster George Soros (Bragg's district attorney campaign received money from the Color of Change organization, which works for criminal justice reform, and to which Soros has contributed, in recognition of his excellent record on and commitment to that issue—not his equally excellent record in prosecuting Trump, though we old liberals aren't sad about that either) is helping Trump and Cruz and McCarthy and the rest of the shamelessness caucus raise money, but it doesn't have any political weight at all in Manhattan.
But at least one thing seems clear: Mr. Bragg may have been the first local prosecutor to do it, but he will probably not be the last. Every local prosecutor in the country will now feel that he or she has free rein to criminally investigate and prosecute presidents after they leave office. Democrats currently cheering the charges against Mr. Trump may feel differently if — or when — a Democrat, perhaps even President Biden, ends up on the receiving end of a similar effort by any of the thousands of prosecutors elected to local office, eager to make a name for themselves by prosecuting a former president of the United States.
Oh, that's it, is it? You're doubtful that Bragg's charges will encourage Willis in Atlanta and Smith in D.C. to file theirs, but you're certain that a prosecutor in Madison County, Iowa, or someplace like that, is going to indict Joe Biden? How?
Say he ran a business or nonprofit that arguably inflated its financial condition in order to secure office space. That could form the basis of an investigation into whether he committed a crime by fraudulently obtaining property or credit. And if someone like the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a Republican who is no stranger to accusations of illegal and unethical conduct, could orchestrate such an effort, is there any serious doubt that he would try it?
None at all, as far as Paxton goes, there's no skullduggery that crook is
incapable of, but the candidate would have to be doing business in Texas in
the first place, and he shouldn't be.
Trump is in this situation only because he is a businessman, with extremely large interests in New York City among other places, and because he refused to divest himself of them. As Emptywheel says, he wouldn't emulate Jimmy Carter and sell the peanut farm. He wouldn't create a blind trust to manage his money for him, like the Bushes and other wealthy presidents in recent years. (If Mitt Romney had won the 2012 election, he might well have set himself up for prosecution somewhere, because his "blind trust", managed by a friend who was a lawyer for Bain Capital, didn't meet federal standards.) Trump erected this fraudulent "revocable trust" and appointed his sons to "run" it for him, and continued to enrich himself as much as he could (mostly not much, since he's not very good at business), siphoning unconstitutional emoluments from government agencies and foreign regimes into his hotels and golf courses, throughout his presidential term. How do you think he spent all those weekends in Palm Beach and Bedminster?
The important lesson to take from this prosecution isn't that such prosecutions shouldn't happen, but that politicians, especially at the highest levels, shouldn't be in a position where they can commit financial crimes so easily. Trump's inability to detach himself from his interests should have been obvious, and it should have been noted before the election, not waiting until December 8 2016 for Josh Marshall to figure it out—
Since Donald Trump’s surprise election one month ago, there’s been a bubbling conversation about the mammoth conflicts of interest he will have if he is running or even owning his far flung business enterprises while serving as the head of state. I’ve suggested that the whole notion of ‘conflicts of interest’ doesn’t really capture what we’re dealing with here, which is really a pretty open effort to leverage the presidency to expand his family business. But a couple things came together for me today which make me think we’ve all missed the real issue.
Maybe he can’t divest because he’s too underwater to do so or more likely he’s too dependent on current and expanding cash flow to divest or even turn the reins over to someone else.
Khardori's worry, instead of being directed at prosecutors, should be directed at candidates. If they can't protect themselves from prosecution by getting rid of their conflicts of interest, they shouldn't be candidates. If they can't divest, as we now understand (too late!) Trump couldn't, they should be barred from standing.
The payoffs to Daniels and McDougal were not only illegal election contributions but also part of a broad pattern of the way Trump conducted himself as a businessman, as the Wall Street Journal was reporting back in 2018
US President Donald Trump was “involved in or briefed on nearly every step of the agreements” to pay off multiple women who claimed to have had sexual affairs with him, before was was elected president, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Citing interviews with “three dozen people who have direct knowledge of the events or who have been briefed on them, as well as court papers, corporate records and other documents,” the WSJ said Trump intervened directly on a number of occasions to “suppress stories about his alleged sexual encounters with women,” and provide them with hush money. (Times of Israel)
along with other areas where he made use of bribery or extortion or intimidation—part of the same pattern of ruthless business practice in which he abused Vololdymyr Zelenskyy or Mike Pence or Brad Raffensperger.
The case provides a vivid example of who he is and why he should never have been president, and a window on suggestions to how we can make sure it never happens again. And by the way those psychopathic businesspeople running for office are all over the place, and it's no coincidence that they're largely Republicans (Rick Scott and Glenn Youngkin to Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert). It's a nationwide problem, and it's going to be good to have more indictments,
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