Donald Trump’s sentencing in hush money trial is no win for the rule of law Donald Trump has become America’s first convicted felon president after a New York state court formally sentenced him on January 10 over 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal. However, this is no win for the rule of law. Trump’s constant attempts to delegitimise and pick apart the American justice system have worked. As a convicted felon, Trump won’t be able to buy a gun in some states, travel to 38 countries including Canada and Japan without a waiver, or do jury duty. Yet Trump was sentenced only to an “unconditional discharge”, meaning he will face no further penalties. Nearly half of people convicted of the same crime in the state of New York would go to prison, and Trump could have faced a fine of up to US$170,000 (£140,000). Even Trump’s former advisers, Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon, went to prison for the same hush money case that eventually led to the president-elect’s conviction, as did his former fixer Michael Cohen. But Trump’s relationship with the justice system is to use delay tactics such as appeals and public and private pressure campaigns to bend the rules. In July, the US Supreme Court ruled that presidents have immunity for actions taken while in office. With that ruling, the judiciary effectively gave up its ability to check a sitting president, undercutting horizontal forms of accountability that are so critical to democracy. This has given Trump the green light to carry on with his assaults on the rule of law. The only recent check on Trump’s power was the Supreme Court’s decision, passed by five votes to four, to allow the sentencing for the hush money trial to take place. This decision followed a call between Trump and Justice Sam Alito, in which Alito said the case was not discussed. In the world of authoritarian regimes, similar types of phone calls are known as telephone law, a legal framework where a leader habitually contacts judges to direct the outcome of critical cases. When Trump is not trying to influence judges directly, he is denigrating those who do not comply with his agenda. With this latest case, Trump has shown no contrition and even showed contempt for Justice Juan Merchan, the judge who oversaw his trial. In a social media post on January 4, Trump claimed the charges against him were “made up” by Merchan, whom Trump referred to as “the most conflicted judge in New York state history”. It is not just Merchan who has faced Trump’s wrath. Trump has in the past attacked US-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel over the blocking of a border wall with Mexico, saying Curiel could not be impartial because he was “Mexican”. While this is not as bad as when former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez sent a sitting judge to prison for ruling against his wishes, it is not yet clear where Trump’s new justice system will take the US. Trump has certainly revolutionised the way we think about the US presidency. In 1972, burglars were arrested after breaking into the Democratic party’s national headquarters in Washington. Former US president Richard Nixon was subsequently accused of engaging in a cover-up in what became known as the Watergate scandal. By the autumn of 1974, 58% of Americans said that Nixon should be tried for criminal charges and 53% felt that he should not be pardoned if found guilty. Trump has not faced the same level of backlash. According to a YouGov survey released on the day of his sentencing, 48% of Americans believed Trump had committed a crime in the hush money case. However, 28% did not. In addition, though 42% of Americans thought Trump is treated more leniently than other people, 30% think he is treated too harshly. Tracking Trump’s trials Trump faces a few other active cases, too. But these criminal cases have mostly faded away. Special Counsel Jack Smith had to give up the January 6 insurrection case (and recently resigned from the Justice Department) after Trump’s electoral victory. And over the summer, Judge Aileen Cannon, whose name is being cited for a potential role in the Trump administration, threw out the case against Trump over taking classified documents to his home in Florida. Trump was also accused of conspiring with others to overturn the results of the 2020 US election in the state of Georgia. This appeared the most dangerous of the four criminal cases that Trump was facing as the crimes were more serious and he could not potentially pardon himself for state-level crimes. But numerous delays, appeals and accusations of conflicts of interest caused the case to stall. District Attorney Fani Willis was moved off the case, and though she has appealed, this will take months to come to a resolution. She would probably have to wait until Trump is out of office for him to be tried, and it is not clear if there will still be an appetite for this. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, has also been convicted of 17 counts of tax fraud, among other crimes. A civil court found Trump guilty of business fraud in February 2024 and fined him a staggering US$350 million due to years of engaging in fraud. This has now swelled to more than US$500 million, but Trump has yet to pay anything. And another civil court found him liable for sexual assault in May 2023, something he tried to appeal unsuccessfully. When ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos referred on air to the decision of this case as one of “rape” rather than “sexual abuse”, Trump sued and ABC was forced to cough up US$15 million, a scary omen of things to come for the free press. Trump will now forever have a stain on his record as the only US president who broke the law (Nixon resigned before any criminal charges were filed). For many Americans, though, it doesn’t seem to really matter. https://theconversation.com/donald-...ey-trial-is-no-win-for-the-rule-of-law-247144 wrbtrader
The law serves primarily as a regulator, addressing only a fraction of crimes. Trump had a choice: either commit the usual infractions and crimes that typically go unnoticed because they don’t attract much scrutiny, or risk exposure by being in the spotlight. Once he became President, prosecutors were compelled to follow the principle that stands out in the system, 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.' This is how the system is fundamentally designed, it's fairly arbitrary and racked with complex power dynamics thay traditional have bee played out quietly.
The failure of Joe Biden to let Trump walk on all the crimes he committed and get back to The White House makes him one of the worst Presidents ever.Even without his mishandling of Trump he was bottom 10 now he is one of the bottom 3.
The current President (Biden) has no say if and who can prosecute a former President (Trump). Yet, if I misunderstand...you talking about the Supreme Court giving Presidents immunity if the President believes someone, even a political opponent, is a threat to national security or a threat to the world ??? I remember a few jokes by others here at the forum and everywhere else online about the latter (e.g. Supreme Court decision now authorizes immunity for Biden if he were to call SEAL Team 6). My perception is this and I've talked about it before when I labeled it as the Julius Caesar moment after a suicide (an idiot lit himself on fire) at Trump's hush money trial and later two failed assassination attempts by former supporters of Trump along with some members in the Proud Boy's promising to do something if Trump does not keep his promises...these are people who have turned against him. We should not be naive that the same will not continue to occur as the new administration takes control of politics on January 20th. The seeds have been planted for more division in America. Therefore, I believe it will be someone who can easily get to Trump...someone from within his inner circle, a former hater of Trump or someone the FBI (DOJ)/CIA/Secret Service already has intel on someone within Trump's inner circle for having connections to maybe Russia/Iran/Syria. A person who Trump selected and he would not know when that person suddenly flip flopped (no longer loyal) because that person soon have access to tools within a government agency that many say creates the deep state in America. Someone not on Kash Patel's enemy's list. It's been a crazy year and I've seen the worst of America in 2024 involving politics including other countries making more public threats against Trump. Simply, the FBI/CIA/Secret Service will need to be top of their game to keep Trump safe so that he does not need to be looking over his shoulder while President of the United States after January 20th, 2025. I think that's why some are sitting back with the mentality to "let this play out". They feel it's better this way after exhausting the legal system. As I've stated, we're a divided country in America. We recently saw examples of that with a home grown terrorist attack with a truck in New Orleans and a suicide message (Tesla vehicle explosion) at a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. The crazy aspect, I recently mentioned here at ET that my mother and I were in a Facetime meeting during one of her photography documentaries in downtown Chicago. There's a stronger police presence at/near the Trump International Hotel in Chicago soon after the Las Vegas bomb explosion and the terrorist attack in New Orleans. My brothers (one in South Dakota and another in Kentucky) did not see the same attention in their Republican states when the same vigilance to protection should be visibly public. Further, we have two ongoing wars in the world and a third brewing that nobody is talking about except privately among those in the military. The Israel/Hamas war talking about a ceasefire but everybody knows the history of these types of negotiated ceasefires...they do not stick and those two countries will be bombing each other within a year or two after a negotiated ceasefire... This is how more hatred of America is created, distrust of the U.S. military, and more anger towards the President of the United States as we choose sides while both countries...Israel/Hamas (Palestine) are trying to destroy each other. A President who is a convicted felon promising retribution, religious wars in the world, territorial wars in the world, home grown terrorists, more Americans willing to commit suicide to hurt other Americans, tariff war threats, wanting to take control of sovereign countries with military force if necessary et cetera. A convicted felon 34x won the 2024 U.S. Presidential election in a fair election. The losers still do not believe (unable to admit) Trump lost the 2020 election in a fair election...that's the weakness of America as its division slowly chips away at Democracy and the U.S. Constitution. What could possibly go wrong now that we're entering a similar situation when President Reagan took over from President Carter (e.g. hostage release deal...Reagan wanted it to occur when he became President so that he could take credit for the hostage release) ??? #chaos wrbtrader
Lying Trump Took His Own Supporters for Fools: Jack Smith https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-took-his-own-supporters-for-fools-jack-smith/ “The throughline of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit,” the special counsel wrote in a bombshell report. Special Counsel Jack Smith found that Donald Trump’s team took his own MAGA faithful for easily manipulated fools when he and several co-conspirators carried out an “unprecedented criminal effort” to overturn the 2020 election. Smith detailed his conclusion in a report released Tuesday, which explains his decision to indict Trump on four counts for plotting to obstruct the certification of the presidential race he lost to Joe Biden. Smith wrote that Trump’s team “deceived” a group of MAGA hardliners whom they recruited to serve as fraudulent electors in states that Biden won. Most of those eager Trump backers were told, Smith wrote, that they were signing up to act as fail-safe electors in the case that litigation by Trump’s team was successful. Instead, Trump and his allies pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to certify a list of fraudulent electors—which he refused to do. “The co-conspirators deceived Mr. Trump’s elector nominees in the targeted states by falsely claiming that their electoral votes would be used only if ongoing litigation were resolved in Mr. Trump’s favor,” Smith’s report reads. Andrew Hitt, one of the fake electors recruited in Wisconsin, told CBS News last year that Trump’s team had lied to him. “If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.” Smith also wrote that one member of Trump’s team, on a call with Trump and then-Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, “told a lie that the co-conspirators would use to induce the cooperation of many of the fraudulent electors: that Mr. Trump’s electors’ votes would be used only if ongoing litigation in their state proved successful for Mr. Trump.” The special prosecutor made clear his view that the ultimate responsibility for the fake electors plot rests with Trump, who set the plan “in motion” and “ensured that it was carried out by co-conspirators and Campaign agents in the targeted states, and monitored its progress.” He also determined that Trump never believed—despite his public and private lies to the contrary—that he had won the 2020 election, and cynically chose to “leverage” the violence that broke out during the Jan. 6 insurrection because it was “beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification.” “Mr. Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election,” Smith wrote, citing multiple sources. Smith concluded that the evidence his office collected would have been sufficient to obtain a conviction of Trump at trial, but his election to a second term in the White House rendered it a moot issue. Whether through his lying to his supporters or to the American public, Smith emphasized that dishonesty was the one consistent hallmark of Trump’s actions during the fake electors plot and the Capitol riot. “The throughline of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit— knowingly false claims of election fraud—and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” he wrote.
Jayzus, look at the guy: He's a old makeup dandy. Who in his right mind thinks this guy is in his right mind?!