US Politics Thread 2016-2020

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

They have Walmart's in Halifax?

There are over 400 Walmarts in Canada. I don't live in Halifax. My son does. Here on Prince Edward Island there are 2 Walmarts, the place where you can and will see strange people.

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Catfish

^ you should have realized that reality or facts do not longer play a role. Trump can say what he wants, he will always be believed or at least no one calls the bluff.
There are "Women for Trump" who proudly wear T-shirts with "You can grab my pussy anytime, Mr President". What more can you say.

My intent in my post was really just a bit of amusement over Fox News actually:

1.) publishing something contradicting Trump without trying to put a torturous spin on the matter; and,

2.) Using that horrible, awful mainstream media to make the point

...


I threw in the bit about the situation with the CA border barrier as an example of how the Trump administration is trying desperately to either take credit for renovations/construction it had nothing to do with or trying to dupe the public into believing any actual real progress has been made on 'Donny's Folly'. The local news coverage here of the Trump representative trying to sell the idea the section of the barrier that was renovated was really a part of the Trump wall and being shot down when the reporters started to point out the obvious fallacy of the notion was highly amusing; the deafening silence from the Trump administration following was also amusing...








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[vienna]

Well, Cohen got 3 years and, on the heels of Cohen's statement in court he acted on instructions from Trump directly, within hours of the sentencing came the announcement yet another trusted Trump ally is flipping on him:


National Enquirer owner admits to paying off Playboy model to protect Trump --

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecu...fore-election/

AMI "admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election," the office said.

The announcement came hours after former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced in Manhattan to three years in federal prison for violating campaign finance laws for his role in paying off McDougal and Stormy Daniels.

Prosecutors did not say when they reached the agreement not to prosecute AMI for the payment to McDougal, which came in the weeks before the 2016 election. The office said in a press release the company "admitted that it made the $150,000 payment ... in order to ensure that the woman did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate."

"AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election," the news release said.

The case for campaign finance law violations against Trump seems to be getting yet stronger...











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[Rockstar]

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by vienna

The case for campaign finance law violations against Trump seems to be getting yet stronger...

<O>

let's see..

1.-Can a sitting President be indicted? 3+ years until the Supreme Court decides; if no=over; if yes, on to 2

2-Do the facts, even if true, amount to a criminal Campaign finance violation in law? 3+ years until the Supreme Court decides; if no=over; if yes, on to 3

3-Can they prove that a criminal Campaign finance violation occured beyond a reasonable doubt? if no=over; if yes, on to 4

4-Will the guilty verdict be overturned by the Appeals Court 2+ years after 3? if yes=over; if no, on to step 5

5-Will the guilty verdict be overturned by the Supreme Court 2+ years after 4? if yes=over; if no, then Trump will have to pay a fine.

in other words, I would not get my hopes up.

non lawyers are salivating at the thought that this is a smoking gun that will quickly get Trump out of office, but as a lawyer I see little chance this will ever amount to much until he has been out of office for many years. Even then the chances that he would go to jail for this are slim.

now the more interesting discussion is that even if Trump was indicted or even found guilty of criminal Campaign violation, he could still act as President unless he is impeached.

Will the GOP controlled Senate vote to convict him if the criminal Campaign prosecution looks to be politically motivated?

[Mr Quatro]

But Trump did not pay the National Enquirer owner to do that and Trump did not pay him back for his admission of suppressing a story that may or may not have been damaging to his election.

Cohen initially said that it was his money that he paid to Stormy Daniels, but said he lied and that it was paid back to him by Trump. Trump has said a lot of things, but his last statement was that the payments were private funds not campaign funds.

Good luck on any criminal investigation of a sitting US President ... but after Trump leaves office is another matter.

Another twenty-two months of hearing about Cohen and Trump is too much for me to take.

I think a lot of other people are fed up with it too

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

But Trump did not pay the National Enquirer owner to do that and Trump did not pay him back for his admission of suppressing a story that may or may not have been damaging to his election.
...

A payment made on the behalf of a Presidential candidate and/or their campaign is actually considered to be a campaign contribution under the election laws and failure to report such payments is a violation of those laws, regardless of whether there was repayment or direction by the the candidate. Further, if AMI and Trump discussed the payment(s) and the circumvention of the applicable laws, charges of basic criminal conspiracy may attach. The fact that AMI "admitted to "working in concert" with the Trump campaign to pay off a woman who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump in order to squash her story" is an admission of a conspiracy (or, if you will, collusion) by one of the principals in the case; the fact that Cohen was actively involved with AMI in the conspiracy and that other member(s) of the Trump campaign were also involved does not bode well for Trump. If you really want to see the meat of the matter, here is a a link to a PDF of the actual agreement between AMI and the US Attorney's Office , Southern District, New York:


https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr...19501/download


















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[August]

President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, may have been convinced by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to plead guilty to a supposed violation of campaign finance law, but that doesn’t mean that what happened is actually a federal crime.
In fact, neither the Federal Election Commission—which is the independent agency tasked with enforcing the Federal Election Campaign Act—nor its former commissioners would likely agree with the overaggressive view that the Southern District is taking. Indeed, the Southern District’s aggressive stance on this issue might have violated the Justice Department’s own policy.

and

On the one previous occasion that the Justice Department tried to argue that hush money payments to a mistress were a “campaign-related” expense, a jury also did not appear to buy the government’s theory. In the unsuccessful prosecution of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, campaign donors made payments to Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, a videographer who was actually working on his presidential campaign.
Unlike Daniels and McDougal, Hunter was paid $1 million while directly working for the campaign and Edwards. Her payments did not go through the Edwards campaign’s account, but the government tried to claim they were campaign expenditures because they were intended to protect Edwards’ reputation during his presidential run and thus “influence” the election.
Yet a jury acquitted Edwards on the charge of accepting an illegal campaign donation and failed to reach a verdict—resulting in a mistrial—on the other charges, which included filing false reports with the Federal Election Commission for not listing the payments to his mistress.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/12/...her-did-trump/

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

I probably don't agree with your politics very well, but I love your sense of humor.....

[vienna]

Originally Posted by August

and

https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/12/...her-did-trump/

Apples and oranges...

The government implicates Trump and the Trump campaign in federal campaign finance violations --


https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.5eee7fb243d7

“In this case, you’re dealing with a situation where his lawyer who actually admits to doing the transactions says that they broke the law and that Trump knew about it,” Noble said. “This is something that very clearly would have to be considered for criminal prosecution” of Trump — were he not president. Department of Justice guidelines indicate that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

For Trump to be charged — if he weren’t president — it would need to be a “knowing and willful violation,” Noble said. This doesn’t mean, though, that Trump would need to know the specific statutes that his actions were violating. It would be enough for Trump to know that campaign contributions needed to be reported and were subject to limits, which he clearly did, and that the payments were being made to influence the election.

That Cohen and Trump went to great pains to obscure the payments bolsters the latter point. (Cohen “arranged one of the payments through a media company and disguised it as a services contract, and executed the second non-disclosure agreement with aliases and routed the six-figure payment through a shell corporation,” the filing reads.) In that leaked recording from earlier this year, Trump mentions a payment in cash, which would shield the payment from scrutiny. (His legal team insisted he was saying not to make the payment in cash.)

“What’s unusual is you have the person who was the key operator in this” — Cohen — “did it for the purpose of influencing the election, and that the candidate knew about it," Noble said.

That sets this case apart from the case of former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who faced criminal charges for accepting contributions aimed at helping him hide a romantic relationship. In that case, there was no equivalent to Cohen implicating Edwards. (That relationship was brought to light, ironically, by the National Enquirer.)

As with many, many things Trump claims are "the same", this situation is not equal. The basic fact is, if Trump were not a sitting President, but, say, a state governor or a candidate for other office, he would be indicted and face charges and a trial. And, remember, there is no real need to indict and/or convict a President in order to have an impeachment; Nixon was never indicted, nor was Clinton. All that is needed is evidence of conduct involving high crimes and misdemeanors. It is interesting how Trump is being referred to in US Attorney filings as "Individual 1"; kinda sound sa bit like Nixon's "Un-indicted Co-Conspirator...











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[u crank]

Originally Posted by vienna

Apples and oranges...

And of course there are going to be a variety of opinions and we have just started to hear them.

Here's one from a guy who may actually know what he is talking about. Bradley A. Smith is a former Commissioner, Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2000 and 2005. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

This is an article by him in Wednesday's National Review. It is aptly titled 'Michael Cohen Pled Guilty to Something That Is Not a Crime'

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...n-finance-law/

...the law — following our common sense — tells us that the hush-money payments outlined by the U.S. Attorney are clearly not campaign expenditures. There is no violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.

To reach the opposite conclusion, the U.S. Attorney is placing all his chips on the language “for the purpose of influencing an election.” Intuitively, however, we all know that such language cannot be read literally — if it were, virtually every political candidate of the past 45 years has been in near-constant violation.

In short, Michael Cohen is pleading guilty to something that isn’t a crime. Of course, people will do that when a zealous prosecutor is threatening them with decades in prison. But his admissions are not binding on President Trump, and Trump should fight these charges ferociously.

Many Americans have convinced themselves that Trump is a uniquely dangerous and bad man, such that any available tool should be used to expel him from office. But in that way lies the bigger threat to our democracy and rule of law.

We do ourselves no service by distorting and misapplying our campaign-finance laws in the hope of bagging Donald Trump.

[Mr Quatro]

It's a battle for what we think, right?

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

It's a battle for what we think, right?

I would agree. Some are pitching, some are catching and the odd guy is trying to steal home.

[vienna]

Originally Posted by u crank

And of course there are going to be a variety of opinions and we have just started to hear them.

Here's one from a guy who may actually know what he is talking about. Bradley A. Smith is a former Commissioner, Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2000 and 2005. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

This is an article by him in Wednesday's National Review. It is aptly titled 'Michael Cohen Pled Guilty to Something That Is Not a Crime'

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...n-finance-law/

As you said, the above article is just an opinion based on publicly known data and prior experiences. But does Smith have some 'inside' knowledge of the substance and extent of the SCO's investigation or is he, like the rest of us, going on what we got? I would rather doubt his knowledge of actual, specific dtat given how tightly reigned in the SCO is about releasing any data. And that is the gist of what I have been saying; when you hear Trump, his minions, or his Trumpettes rail against the SCO and claim everything coming out is false and they have no case, you have to take into account, other than their own obvious bias and mount desperate need fo self-preservation, they really don't know what cards the SCO is holding. A case in point is this regarding a new criminal investigation into another possible Trump screw-up:

The reported investigation arose in part from materials that federal prosecutors seized in April when it raided the home of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was just sentenced to three years for lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws during Trump’s 2016 campaign when he coordinated payoffs to two women who had alleged affairs with Trump.

A source who spoke with the Journal said that during the Cohen raid, FBI officials obtained a recorded conversation between him and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser to Melania Trump who also worked on inaugural events. In it, she expressed concern about the committee’s spending, the Journal reported.

Trump Inauguration Committee Under Criminal Investigation Over Spending: Report --

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0539b32132fe2


The full extent of what the SCO holds and knows is very uncertain. Who knows what the SCO has harvested from the records of the various participants in the scandals; and given how modern communications media (emails, tweets, DMs, etc.) has an extraordinarily long shelf life and/or are surprisingly easy to resurrect, the possibility the SCO has far more than publicly known is more of a high probability. Trump and his supporters are acting like the mess he's in is a binary process of just one issue and just one resolution when its really more like a web with many threads and intersections. Trump has been able to skate through his life of scams and duplicity because, as a private citizen, the general populace and, to a certain extent, the authorities gave him little or no notice, and, now, he's seeing how much genuine scrutiny a holder of the Oval Office must face, a situation an awful lot of people pointed out in articles posted well before his election. Basically, if Trump or his minions haven't each deleted, shredded, erased, burned, or, in some other manner disposed of possibly incriminating material before the investigations got under way, they are screwed; and they better hope that anyone they interacted with has likewise disposed of those materials...

Its not surprising at all the new campaign/inaugural investigation seems to have come from documents, etc., seized from Cohen; lawyers are notorious for saving everything and documenting everything as just part of their professional CYA SOP; and, remember Cohen was not only so cautious about documenting all transactions with Trump, he also recorded their phone conversations. Who knows: maybe he also recorded their face to face conversations, too?...

And, hey, how about that Maria Butina taking a plea today? Not looking good for the NRA and the GOP, PR-wise, hobnobbing with a now admitted Russian agent...










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[u crank]

Originally Posted by vienna

As you said, the above article is just an opinion based on publicly known data and prior experiences. But does Smith have some 'inside' knowledge of the substance and extent of the SCO's investigation or is he, like the rest of us, going on what we got? I would rather doubt his knowledge of actual, specific dtat given how tightly reigned in the SCO is about releasing any data.

Hmm, judging by that I wonder if you read the article. Bradley is not giving his knowledgeable opinion on what he doesn't know. He is talking about the facts we do know, what Cohen pled guilty to and his expertise in that area. I don't see anything in the article about Bradley claiming to have 'inside' knowledge of the substance and extent of the SCO's investigation. His claim is quite simple and well explained. Micheal Cohen pled guilty to something that is not a crime.