https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u23t__ysVjU
Straight Down the Middle — The Trump Verdict —Ep. 1 23 MIN
the person who reported the steele dossier payments as legal expenses for the clinton campaign
is now the head of the sec
gary gensler
Where was is proven that it was not a legal expense, nor another category of expense within the Trump Org. accounting system?
Trump reported a legal expense as a “legal expense.”
Off with his head!
An academic proposes a method to finesse away an autracity…
To: kiryandil
I believe Trump has had a fair trial. Should I be charged with crimes, I hope I would be treated as well as Trump.
148 posted on 5/29/2024, 11:06:08 PM by joesbucks
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4240700/posts?page=148#148
We've discovered Joe Scarborough's Free Republic screen name.
Rubenfeld, Dershowitz, Turley, Levin - it seems everyone has an opinion on how to challenge and overturn the guilty verdict, except Trump’s lawyers. Where are they? Are they at the golf course? On vacation?
All of it is years past the Statue Of Limitations, anyhow. Why is Trump excluded from that protection as any RAT would be?
“is not illegal, falsifying business records is.”
Apparently, they used provisions in the Sarbanes Oxley Act to trump up this charge. If they were trying to conceal the payment, they could have picked a dozen other better choices than legal expenses.
Anyone who has been audited knows there is a high level of scrutiny placed on all costs categorized as legal expenses in the general ledger. It’s the last place you’d put a charge if you really wanted to try to hide it.
I’m a little disappointed with Trump’s legal team in New York, but possibly Trump wanted a guilty verdict.
So far it’s improved his polling and raked in 400 million dollars.
If they can't prove a second crime, then there is no first crime of falsifying a business record. Without a second crime, the business records were entered appropriately.
That's why Bragg and Merchan are desperate to find a second crime at any cost.
-PJ
In order for you to find the defendant guilty of this crime, the
People are required to prove, from all of the evidence in the case,
beyond a reasonable doubt, each of the following two elements:
1. That on or about (date) , in the county of (county) ,
the defendant, (defendant’s name),
Select appropriate alternative:
made or caused a false entry in the business records
of an enterprise; or
altered, erased, obliterated, deleted, removed or
destroyed a true entry in the business records of an
enterprise; or
omitted to make a true entry in the business records
of an enterprise in violation of a duty to do so which
the defendant knew to be imposed upon him/her by
law or by the nature of his/her position; or
prevented the making of a true entry or caused the
omission thereof in the business records of an
enterprise; and,
2. That the defendant did so with intent to defraud that
included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or
conceal the commission thereof.
https://nycourts.gov/judges/cji/2-PenalLaw/175/175.10.pdf
Origin
late Middle English: from Old French defrauder or Latin defraudare, from de- ‘from’ + fraudare ‘to cheat’ (from fraus, fraud- ‘fraud’).
To defraud broadly means trick or deceive someone at the expense of another for personal gain.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defraud
Defraud
To make a Misrepresentation of an existing material fact, knowing it to be false or making it recklessly without regard to whether it is true or false, intending for someone to rely on the misrepresentation and under circumstances in which such person does rely on it to his or her damage.
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/defraud
“On the heels of the publicity over the hush-money scandal, Avenatti helped Daniels ink a $800,000 book deal.”
Sort of in-line with the $1 million in liquidated damages Cohen specified in the non-disclosure agreement.
“Stormy Daniels says she was not paid to appear or participate in her documentary.”
“But the production company paid her $125,000 for the licensing rights to her material and book. She said she’s been paid $100,000 so far.”
same link
“Trump attorney Susan Necheles re-asks the question confirming Stormy Daniels owes the former president about $560,000 in legal fees.”
same link
$35,000 x 4
for Cohen’s work + reimbursement of the $130,000 ‘consideration’ for Daniel’s signing a NDA legal document
(some of which her lawyer took as his legal fees)
If any reasonable, honest person (not a lawyer or certified professional accountant) could consider the $35,000 payments as “legal expenses” then I fail to see the problem in using that term.
Simmons plays a retired admiral who is called to the Enterprise to investigate a suspected sabotage. She begins reliving her greatest past achievement of discovering a great conspiracy by stringing together apparently random coincidental events into a larger conspiracy aboard the Enterprise that involves its highest officers.
This theme was revisited again in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called "The Voyager Conspiracy." Seven of Nine expands her database by assimilating all of Voyager's ship logs. Overwhelmed by the amount of data, she begins to string together unconnected, but coincidental events into a plot by Voyager's officers to spearhead a Federation invasion into the Delta quadrant.
This is exactly what Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan are doing in the Trump case. In order to use the NY State law 17-152, they need to find a predicate crime that was being "furthered" by a falsification of records. In order to do this, they have to find business records that could be alleged to have been falsified in order to further this crime. Which business records these are depends on what they settle on as the crime being furthered.
It was actually Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan who were the conspirators who were concocting a plot against Trump in order to illegally influence the 2024 election.
They started by building a conspiracy where there was none. They took normal business dealings between Trump and David Pecker, and Trump and Michael Cohen, and Cohen and Pecker, and alleged that they were all working in a conspiracy regarding the election, despite evidence that what Pecker was doing was something he's done many times before for many other celebrities, that Cohen was a liar and a thief and was doing many things on his own initiative, and that buying silence is not a campaign finance violation (see John Edwards).
Now that the alleged conspirators were in place, they needed a predicate crime. Of course, influencing the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton lost was the crime, but prosecuting election interference is a federal matter, not a NY state county court matter. They needed a crime that could be prosecuted in a county court, so they looked at financial transactions of the Trump Organization. They settled on the payments to Cohen as "legal expenses," which they were, and alleged that this was a falsification of a business record to cover up a conspiracy, the conspiracy that Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan concocted against Trump.
As a misdemeanor, prosecuting these falsified business records expired several years ago. As legal expenses, these records were never falsified at all and should be immune from prosecution. As a conspiracy, the records were falsified in order to further another crime. This is the reverse-engineering of the crime that President Trump was charged with, was prosecuted for, and was convicted of.
Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan conspired to create a conspiracy where none existed, to illegally influence an election by means that were previously determined to not be illegal, by falsifying business records that were normal and correct business transactions. As with most constructed conspiracies, they usually fall apart under the weight of their own assumptions, and this was no different. They kept the nature of the underlying crime a secret for as long as possible to prevent Trump's team from investigating it more deeply. They kept the nature of the underlying crime vague for the jury so they would focus on the "conspiracy" and not the facts of the alleged crime. They needed the "conspiracy" to be true in order to convert normal business records into "falsified" business records so they could have something to prosecute in their lowly county court.
The whole thing was a fabrication just like in the episodes of Star Trek that I cited at the outset.
-PJ
Yale law professor says Trump isn’t a convicted felon despite guilty verdict — here’s why