The only thing he did was hire a sleazy, lying lawyer. My guess is he never had anything to do with her but Cohen did. Other than living and doing business in New York, Trump did nothing anyone else hasn’t done. NDA’s are not illegal and since they are legal contracts are in fact legal expenses. He’ll win on appeal. The bigger view is he allowed the corrupt DOJ to open Pandoras box. Now the rael show begins.
In reality, he was convicted for daring to run again and take the lead in the polls.
There was literally not a statute which the prosecution or the corrupt judge said was violated.
Trump is guilty of running against a Democrat.
Good question. I want to understand the flim-flam law that was broken too.
The thing is Trump was never charged with any of the three "other" crimes because none of them were actually illegal under New York law. However, since they were illegal under federal law, New York used them as the crimes Trump was supposedly in a conspiracy to violate.
And yes, I took multiple law classes in college and still this is the most convoluted, tortured legal logic I have ever seen. How can you be charged with a misdemeanor that somehow magically turns into a felony for conspiracy to violate a law you were never charged with let alone convicted of and isn't even illegal in that jurisdiction?
Orange man bad
Legally speaking paying your lawyer isn’t a legal fee
This is my understanding of Levin's comments :
So (again as I understand it) NY convicted Trump with 30+ State felonies for alleging he violated Federal election laws, thus overstepping the Constitutional jurisdiction of the State, and this requires immediate intervention and reversal by SCOTUS to preserve Federalism.
I’ll try to give a serious answer. He was convicted of a misdemeanor of false accounting. That wasn’t true because his accountant did the accounting using a drop down menu and testified that Trump had no knowledge, but...
The misdemeanor was raised to a felony (and thereby extended the statute of limitations) because it was to further another criminal act. This is where it gets tricky.
Since Trump had not been convicted of a criminal act, the jury had to find him guilty of one. They were given three choices:
1 - Violating the Federal Election Campaign Act, meaning Cohen’s payment to Daniels was a contribution to Trump’s campaign that exceeded the legal limit.
2 - Falsifying other business records, after Cohen created a fake shell company to send the Daniels payment in 2016.
3 - Violating tax laws by making false entries on tax returns related to the payment.
Oddly - and in direct violation of the Supreme Court - the jurors did not have to agree which of those three Trump was guilty of. I’ve read no one KNOWS if they agreed on one because the judge told them they did not need to.
Also, a jury in a state court cannot - I believe - find Trump guilty of federal crimes. That is why he normally would need to have been convicted of them in federal court FIRST.
But...the judge had no intention of letting the law stand in way of a conviction.
The crime was DEFEATING Bill Clinton’s harpy, low-life, ugly wife, Hillary.
Felony failure to return overdue library books, felony feeding a parking meter, felony driving 3 mph over the posted speed limit, and, of course, 100,000 counts of felony failure to keep his front lawn mowed, one count for each blade of grass 1/4” longer than the legal limit.
No
It’s vapor law
The felony Donald Trump committed was beating Hitlery Clinton.
Opposing rabid abortionists.
Promoting freedom and economic progress.
Promoting American interests over international global social communism. Campaigning while being a white male republican.
Not being a GROPElite stooge.
The only way this got to be characterized as a felony was in committing a years-old misdemeanor but doing so in order to hide another (presumably earlier) crime of some sort. To do this it is essential to identify the earlier (covered up) crime.
Think killing a witness to your having murdered someone else.
However, the judge did not require the prosecutor to ID the earlier crime. He did not allow the defense to ask witnesses what that crime might be. The judge allowed the prosecutor to allude to an earlier crime and instructed the jury to convict if they simply thought that an earlier crime MIGHT exist..
The judge had no interest in implementing the laws of the US.
The essential crime is that DJT’s accountant selected “Legal Expense” from the Quicken dropdown list, instead of “Personal Expense”, and he did it while conspiring to be elected president.
Remember Pretty Boy John Edwards, who fathered a child by his videographer while his wife was undergoing cancer chemotherapy, booked his NDA payment as a personal expense. The Feds charged him the same way, asserting it should have been booked as a legal expense. For better or for worse, the good jurors of North Carolina provided jury nullification.
Orange Man Bad! That’s all you need to know.
The jury was instructed that they could each pick a different crime and still convict him. The democrat hack judge didn’t want to take any chance on a hung jury or, heaven forbid, an acquittal.
Whether it gets overturned based on multiple reversible errors doesn’t matter, because any appeals won’t be decided until long after the election.
Falsifying records