Posted on 05/07/2020 7:36:16 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out the convictions of two government officials implicated in the 2013 Bridgegate scandal, in which then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's (R) allies schemed to create a traffic jam to retaliate against one of his rivals.
The justices said in their unanimous decision that while the scheme involved deception and corruption, it did not violate federal law.
"The question presented is whether the defendants committed property fraud," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the court's opinion. "The evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing — deception, corruption, abuse of power. But the federal fraud statutes at issue do not criminalize all such conduct. Under settled precedent, the officials could violate those laws only if an object of their dishonesty was to obtain the Port Authority’s money or property."
The case centered around convictions of Bridget Anne Kelly, a former aide to Christie, and Bill Baroni, a former Port Authority official, for their role in a scheme to close lanes on the George Washington Bridge to create traffic problems for the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., who had refused to endorse Christie.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
I wouldn't even bother sitting on a Federal jury of any kind, since at least 95% of the things listed in the Federal criminal code shouldn't even be Federal crimes.
P.S. -- The Supreme Court's reasoning here is ultimately going to end up getting a whole other set of Federal court cases tossed: the ones against those parents who submitted phony college applications on behalf of their children.
You don’t see many 9-0 SCOTUS votes.
It was much ado about nothing.
The New York newspapers went wild over it, both the Post and the Daily News.
It's also important to note that a fraud charge doesn't hold up to any scrutiny unless there's an alleged "victim" who has been deprived of something that rightfully belongs to him or her. There were no victims in any of these cases.
Actually, they are more common than you'd think. It's just that it usually happens in cases that don't get much public attention.
In Bridgegate the defendants may,or may not,have benefited politically but,according to the court,didn't benefit monetarily.
Assuming that you,like me,are not a lawyer (perhaps an unsafe assumption on my part),I think we should have a lawyer weigh in on this particular issue.
Bridgegate was all over the news. Yet NursingHomeGate is barely news.
“You don’t see many 9-0 SCOTUS votes.”
Today, we saw two 9-0 opinions. In the other case, the SCOTUS unanimously smacked down two Clinton judges and an Obama judge on the 9th Circuit for overreaching and gross abuse of direction in overturning the felony conviction of an “immigration consultant,” under 8 U. S. C. §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) and (B)(i), for encouraging and inducing “an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.”
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-67_n6io.pdf
The SC issues more unanimous rulings than any other kind. More than a third of the time.
I'm not a lawyer but I have often been involved in legal proceedings professionally on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants -- so I know a bit more about the law than your average layperson.
What a degree from USC is worth after you graduate has no bearing on a fraud claim. The only thing in question is what the admission to USC is worth to USC. I would assume it's worth $50,000/year, since that's what they charged for it.
If someone steals my $40,000 car and uses it to hold up a bank and get $1 million in the process, my "loss" is $40,000 ... not $40,000 plus the $1 million the thief got after he stole it.
How about the kid who didn’t get in be a use his slot was taken by a kid who lied on his application?
Grant you it would likely be impossible to ID a specific vic, but there are losers or there wouldn’t be an incentive to lie on an application. Everybody who wants to can’t get in.
That person has a legitimate interest in an honest application process, but he wasn't defrauded of anything because he had no ownership of that slot in the first place.
The only potential "victim" in this case would be USC, but they could never hold up under any scrutiny for two simple reasons:
1. As I demonstrated, you can't be a fraud victim if the person who allegedly defrauded you paid the full cost of what you were selling.
2. If having an unqualified applicant admitted to USC amounts to "fraud," then USC itself should be prosecuted for fraud every time it admits a student who is an unqualified woman, minority, "disadvantaged" person, etc.
Although I am not a criminal lawyer, I am a lawyer and so I guess that makes my opinion slightly more than worthless. The SCOTUS unanimously held (which means the law should have been obvious to the judges on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals and the district court judge) that wire fraud requires an intent to acquire money or property by by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises. In other words, the government must prove that the goal of the fraudulent scheme is to acquire money or property (as opposed to an incidental result of the scheme).
In the college admission fraud scam, the goal of the fraud was to obtain admission to a college that the applicant would not have otherwise obtained. The money or property acquired by fraud is the value of the college education, including the cost of instruction, administrative support, maintenance, infrastructure, etc.
No offense, but are you really a lawyer? How can the parents who submitted false applications be guilty of fraud if they PAID for all these things after their children were admitted?
Suppose my name is Albert S. Child and I earn an annual salary of $50,000. I go to a Lamborghini dealership to buy a car, and I tell the sales representative that my annual income is $25 million. I fill out a purchase contract as John Q. Smith, pay $250,000 cash for a car, and drive it off the lot. Did I defraud the car dealership?
In the case of a college admissions process, there is even LESS of a fraud case to be made because the applicant is almost always paying a fee just to file the application.
The only person who should have been charged was Chris Christie. He was governor and he’s a vindictive, mean SOB. There’s no way he didn’t know about this. None.
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