You'd think he'd have figured some of it out by now: It's illegal to falsify business records in New York State. Just three or four months ago Trump was found liable for $355 million worth of falsified business records, has he forgotten about that? That was a civil case (for Trump; it was a criminal case for his company and its CFO Allen Weisselberg), and the thing that made it important was the sheer magnitude of the crime, but it's basically falsifying business records, the financial statements Trump put out for the bankers and insurance brokers who needed to know how much risk he posed:
falsifying business records, and conspiring to falsify business records, in order to issue a false financial statement and commit insurance fraud. (In some cases, notably that of his primary lender Deutsche Bank, the corporate culture was so corrupt that they didn't care how much of the company's money they were throwing away, but that doesn't make it OK, as they try to tell you by calling it a victimless crime.)
Today's verdict was in a criminal case, and involved a tiny amount of money in comparison (though it would be an awful lot of money to me, and pretty much everybody I know), but it too was all about falsifying business records, at bottom, the records of Trump's payments to his New York fixer Michael Cohen, disguising them as a regular attorney retainer—
by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States
It’s a disgrace. Mother Teresa
could not beat those charges.
These charges are rigged.
The whole thing is rigged.
The country's a mess
between the borders
and fake elections and
you have a trial like this,
where the judge is so
conflicted he can’t breathe.
He’s got to do his job.
It's not for me,
that I can tell you.
It's a disgrace. And I
mean that. Mother Teresa
could not beat these charges.
But we'll see. We'll see how we do.
It’s a very disgraceful situation.
Actually, I've been trying to give some thought to this—to the idea of Mother
Teresa, learning that adult film star Randy Jackhammer has been pitching a
story to the National Enquirer, "My One-Night Stand With Mother Teresa",
recounting their years-ago tryst, with some vivid detail, even anatomical.
Which did not happen, as far as I know, but if it did.
I hate the hypercorrect "whom" in that headline: a headline is a truncated sentence, and surely the truncated question it's answering is "Who is the presidential candidate voters say they'll support?", not "Whom do voters say they'll support as a presidential candidate?"
It's something from the Other Nate (Cohn, at The Times) that I'm taking a personal interest in, because I've been asking somebody with the resources to do it for a long time: going in search of the unlikely voter. Except he doesn't know that's what he's doing.
That is, when he was looking into the factors that might be associated with voter preference for Biden, he found that people who were otherwise likely to vote for Biden—self-identified Democrats, people who voted for Biden in 2020, minority members, the relatively young—it was those who didn't vote at all in the 2022 midterms, who were more likely to express a preference for Trump or no preference at all:
Larry Thomas and Bret Mendenhall in Uwe Boll's 2008 Postal,
via
The New York Times.
On the prospect of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants on
Yahya Sinwar (the head of Hamas in Gaza), Ismail Haniyeh (head of the Hamas
Political Bureau), Mohammed Deif (commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades),
and the Israeli prime minister and defense minister Binyamin Netanyahu and
Yoav Gallant, there's been a lot of angry talk about the ICC prosecutor
practicing "moral equivalence", including from
President Biden—
The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders
is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply,
there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will
always stand with Israel against threats to its security.
A truly weird error in this connection from
NBC News, which ran an interview with Netanyahu yesterday in which the prime minister
complained that he was being given a "bum rap" (Trump's language choices are a
bad influence, now Bibi too sounds like a 1950s gangster):
Echoing Biden's comments, Netanyahu said Khan's decision to seek arrest
warrants for both Israel's and Hamas' leaders reflected a "false symmetry"
that he said was comparable to the arrest warrants that were issued for both
President George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden following the 9/11 terrorist
attacks.
Remember when ICC put out a warrant on Bush? I was so startled I looked it up,
but of course it didn't happen (the court
did open a preliminary investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan after the
country ratified the Rome statute in 2003, but after 11 years of that, from
2006 to 2017, it took until 2020 for them to decide to move on to a full
investigation, upon which Trump put sanctions on them, which Biden has
reversed). And Netanyahu didn't say it did. You can get a more accurate report
of what he said on NBC from The Times of Israel:
Trump's mind going totally blank, you really have to
watch it:
I don’t know if Trump’s teleprompter went out or if he just had a Glitch McConnell episode, but pausing for a full 33 seconds mid-speech for no reason is really weird.pic.twitter.com/IiPJW7iK6d
The background music is the original audio, a track Trump has been using for a
couple of years, at
rallies and in
campaign videos. It's been identified as "WWG1WGA"—a reference to the QAnon slogan "Where we
go one, we go all" (when the song comes on in the rallies, Q aficionados in
the audience make the Q index finger salute), by a tech house composer known
as "Richard Feelgood"—
Richard Feelgood is a compelling Electronic and Tech House artist from
Enschede, Netherlands. Feelgood has established himself as a leading
figure in the electronic music industry thanks to his distinctive style
and contagious beats. His work skillfully combines aspects of electronic
music with the rhythm and energy of tech house, creating a distinctive and
dynamic sound that captivates listeners.
TV lawyers keep fretting about how key witness Michael Cohen is a noted liar—he's even got a felony conviction for it—so juries might have trouble believing him. I don't know, if it's a "he-said-he-said" between him and Trump and he's explaining the deceit Trump was paying him to practice...
Also, the only important Cohen lie in this case is the one COVERING UP FOR
TRUMP in his guilty plea, when he claimed he'd made an illegal campaign
contribution (the Stormy payment), hiding the fact that Trump had reimbursed
him (as Cohen proved in 2019 with the canceled checks).
Village of Atatra, Northern Gaza, October 21, 2023. Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via AP.
A "centrist" Israeli parliamentarian on BBC was less uncomfortable to listen
to than the rightwingers generally are, soft-spoken with a kind of Central
European vocal quality unlike the shouty, hectoring Likudniks or the coldly
domineering IDF spox, who all seem to have been trained in BBC announcer
school themselves, but the message wasn't really any different: all about
Israel's unquestioned "right to defend itself" (as if that were what they've
been doing over the last six months, as opposed to creating an unending supply
of future Hamas fighters thirsting for revenge from now into perpetuity) and
the prosecution of a "just war". I'll get to that, and St. Thomas Aquinas,
later. I just want to point out how deeply unimaginative the Israeli "center"
is, like everywhere else, while I keep focusing on Netanyahu and his
unspeakable fascist partners, and how unwilling the center is to even try to
think outside the conservative box, and sometimes worse than that: like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's proposal to build a shiny new settler city, Ariel, the capital of "Samaria":
“There needs to be a large and significant city developed there, following what is happening in the mountain ridge of Ariel, because this is the most central junction that allows us to shift Israel’s population eastward,” explained the defense minister.
To which I responded
Drang nach Osten. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_n... Fulfilling the Likud
slogan "from the sea to the river [Jordan]" Honestly Gallant and Gantz have
swung so far right themselves they might as well just join Likud.
The purpose is to examine assurances from seven recipients of US arms aid that
are currently engaged in conflicts (Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria,
Somalia, and Ukraine) that they will
Tips of 15mm artillery shells and howitzer on the Israel-Lebanon border. Photo by Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images from Axios.
Activity on the Gaza front continues to intensify, not in Gaza itself, of
course, where it's the same rhythm of lower-level Israeli attacks killing
families in Rafah, though not the threatened major attack, and the death toll
continuing to inch toward 35,000, and reports of "full-blown" famine from the
director of the UN's World Food Program, Cindy McCain, yes, that Cindy McCain,
but on the diplomatic side, where
Haaretz (that's a gift link) reported yesterday that Hamas had agreed to
Egypt's proposed ceasefire, while Israel issued a denial that this had
happened.
This round of talks in Cairo seems to be definitely over, with Haniyeh and Netanyahu
blaming each other, of course, though CIA director William Burns is still shuttling around Tel Aviv, Doha, and Cairo as if it weren't, but the shape of the deal as reported makes it
look to me like it's Israel that turned it down: a 118-day deal in three
phases, during the second of which (34 days in)
the parties will start enacting the principles that will lead to a
prolonged cease-fire, including the withdrawal of the IDF to the borderline.
Not all of these principles are reported.
This looks like the development I've been imagining for the last five months among the Israeli public, as the hostages become more and more salient and the need for revenge less and less so. It's evidently connected to the video released a little over a week ago by Hamas of the American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin (Hersh was my dad's Yiddish name, as it happens), in which he denounced Netanyahu for abandoning the hostages and made the claim that 70 of the hostages have been killed, so far, by Israeli bombs, which may well be true (I've expected from the start that IDF would kill more hostages than Hamas would), even though the video is plainly released for propaganda purposes, and it seems that a lot of Israelis believe it.
The really curious thing is it seems to be where the Hamas leadership is at too, asking for a permanent ceasefire and release of many prisoners in Israel in return for release of hostages held in Gaza. The odd man out is Binyamin Netanyahu, who can't accept the permanent ceasefire, which would prevent IDF from killing everybody in the Hamas leadership.
I know, I know, Hamas is bad (but "you don't make peace with your friends," as a wise man once said, "you make it with very unsavory enemies"). At the same time, if you think about it, you can understand why they might be reluctant to get killed. That's definitely not the most evil thing about them. It's even kind of normal.
It's now possible to embed Bluesky posts! I guess it has been for a while, but I
haven't given much thought to posting threads here the way I used to do with
Twitter threads. Then yesterday everybody was talking about that Trump interview
in
Time, and I thought I might use some of mine. At least these, which have a more
threadish form:
I think Josh is literally incapable of understanding how stupid Trump is.
talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/decod... He's probably never met anybody that
stupid. On the NATO issue, Trump is unable to comprehend what the issue is.
It's like his inability to comprehend that a tariff is an import tax...
Trump doesn't know that the 2% rule is about the countries' individual
defense budgets. He has made up a story for himself that makes sense to
him--that all the NATO countries are supposed to pay some kind of fee to the
US and they're all deadbeats. And it makes him really mad!
I'm sure aides like Kelly have tried to explain it to him over and over
again, and he just can't get it. Kudlow explained tariffs to him too, but
he's still talking like this in the Time interview:
As Philip Bump has said, what he's doing in the interview is largely refusing to say what he might do in a second term because he hasn't thought about it and doesn't want to, and trying to interpret it as representing Trump's plans, as Eric Cortellessa does in his report of it, is a mug's game:
a lot of what Trump is reported as planning to do is constructed from murky, noncommittal answers Trump offered to specific questions. The interview is very revealing about Trump’s approach to the position in that it strongly suggests he hasn’t thought much about important issues, and makes clear how relentlessly he relies on rhetoric to derail questions
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H I got a law
called Article Two
Everyone says
It's the thing for a pres
that Article Two-Two-Two-Two-Two-Two says I can do
what I wanna do
skeleton key
for the man that is me
my Article Two-Two-Two-Two-Two-Two
I don't have to worry
ever see a jury
I'm like a tsar
buy yourself a justice
someone who will trust us
hiya Sam Alito
everything's A-R-T
I-C-L-E-T-oh
oh what a law
a hullabaloo
I'll shoot a guy
just for rolling his eye
on Fifth Avenue
I'll get a big erection
when I cancel the election
thanks to Article Two-Two-Two-Two-Two-Two
Question to
Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Donald Trump had an Article II where he had the right to
do whatever he wanted as president?
Answer: In principle, yes, but
first of all, he didn't really have it so much as he had access to it, as we
all do, in the US Constitution, which is in the public domain, and easily
accessible in excellent editions online
if you don't want to burden yourself with a print copy;
second of all, it describes what the president is required to do (to
take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed), not
what he has the right to do, which may not be the same thing at all,
other than issuing pardons and making his own decisions on who he wants to
name as ambassadors and cabinet secretaries and the like—and it specifically
lists some things that he is absolutely not allowed to do, although he did
in fact do them, such as taking money in exchange for hotel rooms and food
and beverage service at his businesses from representatives of foreign
governments, which isn't supposed to happen because it could be
an efficient way of accepting bribe money
if it were allowed; and
third of all, he isn't president any more, at least at the moment,
specifically because he also didn't have the right to stay in office after
he lost his reelection bid, no matter how much he wanted to. Not that he
didn't try.
One of the craziest pieces of news on this newsy day filled in some details on
a Trump incident we heard about back when it happened, in summer 2019, when US
intelligence caught an extraordinary satellite photo of the accidental
explosion of an Iranian missile at its launch site, very classified, and sent
it to the White House, and Trump promptly tweeted it.
What's news about this is what
ABC News
appears to have unearthed from the special counsel's investigation of the
Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case, involving what Trump thought he was doing:
Following the reporting on the arguments in the Supreme Court on behalf of
Joseph Fischer, a cop from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who had already
started driving home from Trump's Stop the Steal rally on 1/6/20 when he heard
on the radio about the crowd gathered around the Capitol and turned his car
around to join the fracas, and made it as far as the East Rotunda where he
turned on his phone's video recorder, yelled "Charge!" and went at a group of
Capitol police who pepper-sprayed him as he slid to his ass on the slippery
floor and into their line, and then hustled him back out of the building.
This behavior, while plainly illegal, did not do a lot of harm: it was already
3:24, well after the congressmembers had fled, and he was only there for about
four minutes. How he became one of the 300-odd January 6 defendants, including
former President Trump, to be charged with a felony count of "obstruction of
an official proceeding" is something else, the insurrectionary violence of his
intentions, as
revealed
in a series of texts and Facebook posts from before and after the riot:
Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command,
the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm
unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the
beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's
1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the
whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised
unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized
something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in character, which he
does, as you can see, really gorgeously.
Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys
By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States
Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and
so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in
so many different ways—it represented such a big portion of the
success of this country. Gettysburg, wow— I go to Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E.
Lee, who's no longer in favor— did you ever notice it? He's no longer
in favor. "Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!" They
were fighting uphill, he said. Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost his
big general. "Never fight uphill, me boys," but it was too late.
that... shorthand might not be totally apt, if a Monday letter from the judge in the case is any measure. Indeed, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan seems to indicate that what we really have is a third election interference case.
(The paper's headline writers certainly aren't helping, if that's the case.)
My take is that "election interference case" is not a winner, particularly not for this one, The phrase "election interference" doesn't have a happy history in the Trumpery; we've been using it a long time since the discovery that Russian intelligence agencies were interfering in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf, and the only thing we've really gotten out of it, rhetorically, is that Trump now uses it against every damn investigation of his crimes:
The Fani Willis lover, Mr. Nathan Wade Esq. has just resigned in disgrace, as per his and her reading of the judge’s order today. Nathan was the ‘special,’ in more ways than one, prosecutor ‘engaged’ by Fani (pronounced Fauni) Willis, to persecute Trump for Crooked Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice for purposes of election interference and living the life of the rich and famous. This is the equivalent of Deranged Jack Smith getting ‘canned.’ Big stuff, something which should happen in the not too distant future!
And there's a kind of a point there, too; a guilty verdict in any of these criminal cases probably would have an influence on the outcome of the November election, and if the prosecutors believe he's guilty they'd probably be happier if he lost the election too, just as I would. You and I hope to exert an influence on the election too, by voting, and by persuading other people to vote the same way, including by spreading stories about Trump's criminality. Everybody's trying to interfere with the election—that's the point Trump wants to make here, in his post-truth whatabout way, that singling him out as if he were the only election interferer on the block is unfair.
But really, "election interference" isn't a crime in and of itself. If somebody murders his rich uncle for a share of the estate, he doesn't get charged with inheritance interference but with murder; inheritance interference is the motive, not the crime. If a political candidate commits crimes in order to influence the election result, whether it's collaboration or conspiracy with a foreign intelligence agency or the illegal coverup of hush money payments, those are the crimes charged; election interference is the motive. And this seems to be exactly the view taken in New York State: it is a crime only if it's "committed unlawfully".
When Trump's attorney-fixer Michael Cohen arranged for the National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to pay $150,000 kill fee to Playboy model Karen McDougal for her article describing her affair with Trump, that was an unlawful campaign contribution under federal law; it was way over the limit in size, and it was illegal to donate it in secret. When Cohen himself got $130,000 laundered through a shell company to Stephanie Clifford/Stormy Daniels to kill her article on a night with Trump, mushroom imagery and all, that was apparently another unlawful campaign contribution, but when it turned out Trump had ended up reimbursing Cohen for the money with another $130,000 to cover taxes, that made it an unlawful campaign loan, and Trump's own money the illegally unreported contribution, and his attempts to pass it off as legal fees is a case in New York State of falsifying business records in the first degree:
Falsifying business records in the first degree is a felony under New York state law that requires that the "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof". This is in contrast to falsifying business records in the second degree, which is a misdemeanor that does not have that requirement.[8][92][93] In later filings, Bragg listed three such crimes that that Trump allegedly intended to commit: violation of federal campaign finance limits, violation of state election laws by unlawfully influencing the 2016 election, and violation of state tax laws regarding the reimbursement.
Those three crimes that make the falsification a felony instead of a misdemeanor aren't themselves charged in the Trump indictment, which is a little weird. The first of them, though, is a federal crime, for which Cohen was charged, and convicted in his plea with the Southern District, and he indeed did prison time—Trump himself (Individual-1 in Cohen's case) wasn't charged with it because he was president at the time, I guess, so it's implicit that the crime took place and he was certainly involved in it; we all heard the recording of his call with Cohen in re the Pecker payment.
The second one is the definition of what constitutes "election interference" in New York State (thanks, Just Security!):
N.Y. Elec. Law § 17-152: Conspiracyto promote or prevent election. Under that statute, “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
(I'll ignore the tax issue.)
So this is clearly the kind of thing that happened, as summarized at ABC News:
"From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant [Trump] orchestrated a scheme with others [including Cohen, who did prison time for his part, and Pecker, who was given federal immunity in return for his testimony]to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant's electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York," prosecutors said in a statement of facts accompanying the charges.
Which may seem a tiny bit circular—it's unlawful influencing because of the election law violations and the falsification of records, and the falsification of records is a felony rather than a misdemeanor because the influencing is unlawful—but that makes sense to me: it's a real conspiracy, in which the distinct parts aggravate the criminality of the whole.
Anyway, it occurs to me that this is a case where the coverup is not worse than the crime, it is the crime. Or rather I should say the metacoverup is the crime, because if you think about it it's a coverup of a coverup, in which the first-order federal campaign law violation of concealing Donald's nasty sexual behavior (which itself was not a crime but a bad look for the evangelical champion, especially at the moment of the Access Hollywood tape) by paying off the two women is itself concealed by the second-order New York crime of falsifying the records.
So I'd like to propose an improved nomenclature for the criminal cases in which they are clearly differentiated and both the crime involved and its subject matter are referenced:
the Hush-Money Coverup for Bragg's case (I'm not saying it's not an election interference case, but I think the expression tends to make all these cases sound less criminal than they really are, which is why Trump is deploying it so much in his zone-flooding commentary, and it's merely "influence" in any case: I don't think Bragg should put himself in the position of having to argue that knowing about McDougal and Stormy would have made a crucial difference in the election results, not something we can really know);
the Election Racket for Willis's case in Atlanta, in which Trump after the 2020 election is just one (important) member of a criminal gang trying to impose its will in its territory through threats and intimidation, messing with voting machines and tormenting election workers, with more attention to thugs like Giuliani and Meadows; and
the Election Fraud for Smith's Washington case, where Trump is (mysteriously) the only defendant, which overlaps a good deal in content with the Atlanta case but which seems to me to focus less on the activity of making trouble and and unrest (it's remarkable how little attention Smith gives to January 6 itself), and more on Trump's broader personal objective, the "conspiracy to disenfranchise voters" promulgation of the Big Lie, Trump's effort to sustain the idea that he really had won the 2020 election, alongside his knowledge that he was lying; and
the Documents Theft (I've been using this all along) for Jack Smith's Florida case generally known as "Mar-a-Lago", in which the important element isn't that they were in his house (as is also the case for Biden and Pence) but that he deliberately took them from the White House and resisted giving them back in so many ways, with such a variety of lies and subterfuge, and such a total refusal to obey the law.
Narratologically speaking, I think this is a pretty good schema for seeing the four very different proceedings as constituents of a single story, which I hope is a story of Trump's failure. Don't count on that though.
By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
Happy Easter to all, including crooked
and corrupt prosecutors and judges
that are doing everything possible
to interfere with the presidential
election of 2024, and put me in prison,
including those many people that I completely &
totally despise because they want to destroy
America, a now failing nation, like “deranged”
Jack Smith, who is evil and “sick,”
Mrs. Fani “Fauni” Wade, who said
she hardly knew the “special” prosecutor,
only to find that he spent years “loving” her,
long before the Georgia persecution
of President Trump began (and thereby making
the case against me null, void, and illegal!),
and lazy on violent crime Alvin Bragg who,
with crooked Joe’s DOJ thugs, unfairly working
in the D.A.’s office, illegally indicted me
on a case he never wanted to bring and
virtually all legal scholars say is a case
that should not be brought, is breaking the law in doing so (Pomerantz!), was turned down by all other law enforcement authorities, and is not a crime. Happy Easter everyone!
As is traditional in his annual Easter messages, the former president (who has eloquently said of Easter that it is "just a very special—
time for me. And it really represents family
and get-together and—and something, you know,
if you're a—a Christian"), takes time to reach out to folks he may have neglected for a while over the past year, especially those engaged in what he calls "election interference", by which he means trying to hold him to account for the various crimes he's committed over the past eight-odd years, which might, if he's convicted, make it harder for him to win another term, kind of like the 48 Russian athletes who had Olympic medals taken from them since 2008, just because they used performance-enhancing drugs. It really seems unfair, if you think about it, or even more if you don't think about it.
Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) in the Capitol just after midnight, January 7, 2021, helping to clean up the garbage left by the marauding Yahoos. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC News.
Unbelievable torrents of news over the last few days, as if coming down on us from one of those "atmospheric rivers" they have in California now (of which I have a mental picture like a Dr. Seuss drawing, with foamy, roiling blue waves at the border of the stratosphere and lots of careless but energetic fish doing aerial maneuvers).
***
In New Jersey, First Lady Tammy Murphy dropped out of the Democratic primary race to replace the abominable Senator Robert Menendez, now under indictment for (among other things) representing Egypt instead of New Jersey on the foreign affairs committee, though he still claims to be running as an independent. The presumptive nominee, Rep. Andy Kim of the suburban district 3 east of Philadelphia, filed immediately after Menendez's indictment, but Murphy seemed inevitable, with her husband's political might behind her and the special Jersey trick known as the County Line, where 19 of the state's 21 counties print their own primary ballots with a top line which the voter can pick to vote for all the candidates endorsed by their party machine at one blow, which generally always wins.
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