Så er den store sag om Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels og en uspecificeret føderal forbrydelse startet i New York. Sagen drejer sig i korthed om, at Trump i løbet af valgkampen 2016, skulle have betalt pornoskuespillerinden Stormy Daniels, for ikke at fortælle om et angiveligt seksuelt samkvem, Daniels hævder de havde haft 10 år forinden. De penge, blev opført forkert i Trumps regnskab, mener anklageren, Alvin Bragg, hvilket ikke blot er et forsøg på at give sig selv et ulovligt valgkampsbidrag, men også et forsøg på at skjule en større forbrydelse, som ingen endnu kender.
Der er flere problemer med den udlægning. Først og fremmest tyder det mere på, at Stormy Daniels har forsøgt at afpresse Trump ved at bruge pressens overdrevne jagt efter alting negativt om Trump midt i en valgkamp. Det er lovligt at betale sig fra at få sit gode navn og rygte trukket igennem sølet og Trumps navn er en integreret del af hans forretningsmodel. Åh, og så har han også en familie at tage hensyn til, hvor man kunne argumentere, at en ansvarlig far, ville skåne sin dengang 11 årig søn, fra at se offentligheden vælte sig i historier om, hvorledes hans mor var blevet svigtet i en slibrig affære. Og da det således er lovligt at betale det, som Danmarks Radio kalder tys-tys penge, fordi de ikke kan finde en juridisk betegnelse (NDA eller Non Disclosure Agreement), så skal det selvfølgelig ikke bogføres, hvor alle kan se det, nemlig i de offentligt tilgængelige regnskaber. Meningen med hemmeligheder er at holde dem skjult – også hvis de er løgn.
Byron York skriver
Many legal experts, and not just those on the Right, have said the case against Trump is weak. But that doesn’t really matter. The fact is, Trump will be on trial, charged with 34 dubious felonies, and a jury in deep-blue Manhattan will likely find him guilty of something. That’s the point. After this trial, if things turn out like Trump’s enemies hope, every single Democratic reference to the former president, every single political ad, every party utterance will refer to Trump as convicted felon Donald Trump.
For the man behind the case, the elected Democratic district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, the trial is more than a trial. It’s a campaign promise kept. The 2021 race for the Democratic nomination for district attorney of Manhattan was essentially a bidding contest in which candidates pledged to go after Trump more aggressively than their competitors. Bragg boasted that he had already sued Trump or Trump’s companies 100 times. Elect me and I’ll give him hell! It turned out the “100 times” claim wasn’t true — the real number was less than half that, even if you count generously — but Bragg won the Democratic nomination and then, of course, the election in Manhattan. “[Bragg] seemed to double down on Trump as the campaign went on,” the New York Times noted recently.
(…) Shortly after Bragg indicted Trump, the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne addressed the widely expressed opinion that the Bragg case was weak and was therefore not the best first case to bring against Trump. “My immediate reaction was not to wonder if this was the ‘best’ case to lead with or what the politics will be,” Dionne noted on March 30, 2023, “but simple relief that Trump was finally being held accountable by the law. He still faces a trial, but that’s the point. He has evaded responsibility for too long.”
Bragg “is counting on the sympathies of a liberal trial judge, Juan Merchan, and the venom of a jury pool destined to be dominated by Trump-hating New Yorkers.” skriver Gregg Jarret
Even the left-leaning New York Times “could “identify only two other felony cases in Manhattan over the past decade in which defendants were indicted on charges of falsifying business records but no other crime.” This makes the DA’s legal theory not just untested, but absurd.
It is also an archetype of unequal justice. In the same 2016 election, Hillary Clinton secretly paid for the phony Steele dossier by using a lawyer to funnel the money while misreporting it as “legal expenses.” She was fined by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), but never prosecuted. Trump, however, is a disfavored Republican, so he is treated differently.
Det bekymrer altså ikke “Bragg or his sycophant judge” siger Jarret og uddyber
The DA asserts that any payments to Daniels were illegal campaign donations. Forget the fact that the FEC investigated Trump and concluded that said payments do not constitute unlawful donations. Never mind that the Department of Justice also studied the same expenditures and decided that no crimes were committed. Even Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, chose not to charge Trump at the end of his years-long investigation.
It is well established that money paid in exchange for non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs, as they’re known) is perfectly legal and quite common. Corporations and individuals do it every day. You can assign the pejorative term of “hush money” if you want. But it is often a normal conclusion to settlement agreements and even encouraged by judges who are motivated to resolve lawsuits that clog their courts.
Gregg Price noterer Braggs slingrende juridiske kurs
In 2022, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg reduced 52% of all felony charges to a misdemeanor.
In 2023, he then elevated a misdemeanor to a felony that both the DOJ and his predecessor refused to go after so he could indict the Republican nominee for president.
Today, Donald Trump will be in court for it because America is currently making Putin’s Russia look like a free country.
Jonathan Turley skriver at “Whatever the outcome, it may prove a greater indictment of the New York court system than the defendant.”
It is a repeat of the case involving former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. In 2012, the Justice Department used the same theory to charge the former Democratic presidential candidate after a disclosure that he not only had an affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter but also hid the fact that he had a child by her. Edwards denied the affair, and money from donors was passed to Hunter to keep the matter quiet.
The Justice Department spent a huge amount on the case to show that the third-party payments were a circumvention of campaign finance laws. However, Edwards was ultimately found not guilty on one count while the jury deadlocked on the other five.
With Trump, the Justice Department declined a repeat of the Edwards debacle and did not bring any federal charge.
But Bragg then used the alleged federal crime to bootstrap a defunct misdemeanor charge into a felony in the current case. He is arguing that Trump intentionally lied when his former lawyer Michael Cohen listed the payments as retainer costs rather than a payment — to avoid reporting it as a campaign contribution to himself.
Thus, if he had simply had Cohen report the payment as “hush money,” there would be no crime.
Once again, the contrast to other controversies is telling. Before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign denied that it had funded the infamous Steele dossier behind the debunked Russian collusion claims.
The funding was hidden as legal expenses by then-Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias. (The FEC later sanctioned the campaign over its hiding of the funding.). When a reporter tried to report the story, he said Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
Likewise, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, was called before congressional investigators and denied categorically any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who reportedly said nothing to correct the misleading information given to Congress.
Yet, there were no charges stemming from the hiding of the funding, though it was all part of the campaign budget.
Making this assorted business even more repellent will be the appearance of Cohen himself on the stand. Cohen recently was denounced by a judge as a serial perjurer who is continuing to game the system.
Cohen has a long record as a legal thug who has repeatedly lied when it served his interests. He has a knack for selling his curious skill set to powerful figures like Trump and now Bragg.
For those of us who have been critics of Cohen from when he was still working for Trump, it is mystifying that anyone would call him to the stand to attest to anything short of the time of day . . . and even then most of us would check our watches.
Fortunately witnesses are no longer required to put their hand on the bible in swearing to testify truthfully in court. Otherwise, the court would need the New York Fire Department standing by in case the book burst into flames.
So this is the case: A serial perjurer used to convert a dead state misdemeanor into a felony based on an alleged federal election crime that was rejected by the Justice Department.
Cohen lavede lydoptagelser af alle sine klienter, deriblandt CNNs direktør Mark Zucker, der på en af dem pralede med, at det var CNN, der afgjorde hvem der skulle være præsident qua hvilken dækning de gav de forskellige kandidater.
Michael Cohen er endda muligvis en del af et komplot imod Trump, om, sammen med Daniels, at afpresse Trump, skal Michael Avenatti angiveligt have afsløret. Avenatti har også siddet i fængsel for løgne og for at have bedraget sine klienter. Åh, og så var han Stormy Daniels advokat, som ihærdigr forsøgte at vælte Trump med påstande om, at han vidste hvor ligene lå begravet. Hvis Trump er så ‘heldig’, som Bill Maher mener, så kan historien meget vel vise sig at være sand
Kara Swisher: “This guy is the luckiest guy in the world. Trump social. Excuse me. Truth social just got permission to go public. Because it’s a meme stock, it’s worth 3.5 billion dollars. And it could go up higher if people bid it up.”
Maher: “He definitely made a deal with the devil. Because he always lucks out on everything.”
Sara Isgur: “He has the best enemies. Fani Willis now in Georgia.”
Maher: “Now we’re probably not going to see any of the trials. He just always lucks his way into everything.”
Sådan var det også med Sir Alex Ferguson. Folk troede at han var en dygtig træner, men det var blot 20 års uafbrudt held. Men det er endnu mere bizart for, som Vivek påpeger, så er den oprindelige betaling til Stormy Daniels, som alt andet bygger på, en forældet sag, hvis den havde været en sag.
Alvin Bragg‘s case against Trump rests on the ludicrous legal premise that a candidate must use *campaign* funds to make personal hush money payments. Yet if Trump had done that, they’d undoubtedly be going after him for that. This isn’t the pursuit of justice, it’s a political persecution that is tearing our country apart.
Trump er så lovlydig at de er nødt til at opfinde forbrydelser, der end ikke er forbrydelser. “But for the anti-Trump coalition, it’s what it’s got”, som York skriver.
MONOKULTUR 
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