1y ago

Crime

146 comments

Please don't perpetuate this myth. He was tried, and found guilty, for falsifying business records to cover up payments that he made for purposes that many of his voters would find objectionable in order to hide that objectionable information from those voters to prevent them from making an informed decision and affecting an election.
- Election interference and Fraud.
  He is a literal, convicted, fraud.
- It's really no different than saying Clinton got impeached for a blowjob.
  He wasn't, it was perjury. Though I'd say that election interference is a bit more severe than lying about a beej.
  
  No, both damaged institutions are fundamental to our government. Fuck them both.
- Bush Jr should have been convicted for mass murder. Obama should have been convicted for drone strikes.
  
  I’m not disagreeing with you, but at least those awful actions are plausibly covered as a presidential act made in the country’s interests. I’m not saying they were good for the US, just that they could argue that was the process.
  Trump’s shit is all self-serving and against the interests of the United States.
  
  Trump increased drone strikes 432%, so same there.
  
  I agree, but apparently presidents are immune from prosecution for anything done in office. I really hope that can get overturned, but it's the current state of the law.
  
  Yeah, we know. That has no bearing on this case.
  
  Trump and Clinton raped women. Probably not the only presidents.
  Edit: I'm not talking about Lewinsky. See my comment below.
- Linkerbaan is a shill. Look at their posts. The terrorists in the Kremlin pay them to get Trump elected.
  
  I don't think they're a shill: they're probably just an idiot.
  
  Only a terminally online liberal could look at someone criticizing a justice system that serves the rich rather than the protection of basic human rights (especifically saying that Trump has worse things to get convicted for) and think: "Hmm, yes, this is a Russian shill, lest I even take into consideration that they might actually have a good point".
- That's a very long way of saying "Hush money to a porn star".
  Its not even as though Trump didn't commit additional financial crimes while in office. He took money from the Saudis for state secrets. He traded insider information to his son-in-law for fundraising money. He staffed his departments with hedge fund insiders as a quid pro quo for personal financial favors. And that's before we get to the illegal use of military force or the illegal direction of federal money for his pet border projects or the illegal arrest and unconstitutional prosecution of migrants and dissidents or the J6 shit.
  91 fucking indictments. One trial. For the hooker hush money.
  Say what you will about kickbacks to Stormy Daniels, but its the least lethal policy on the Trump docket. And that's a real window into the soul of America. Rounding up and incarcerating people without trial is fine. Bombing foreigners is fine. Marching a high-on-their-own-supply fascist mob through Congress is fine. Just don't get caught slipping your mistress a tenner to keep her mouth shut during an election season.
  
  This trial isn't about those things, and most of the US hates those events, so keep on preaching to the choir.

It's for lying about paying hush money to a porn star.
- Technically, it's for a combination of election fraud and falsifying business records.
  But "paying hush money to a porn star" is definitely a sexier headline.
  
  Aside from the sexier headline saying 2024 Trump business fraud trial doesn't narrow it down enough to know which case someone is talking about.
- Also incorrect. It's about fraud.
  
  Fraud is just lying in an official capacity.

It is NOT for pushing money to a porn star. It is for marking the hush money as legal fees. That's ALL it is. They didn't even get him on the moral high ground, but nitpicked his books.
This country is so beyond fucked... Cannot even get basic details correct...
- But the elevation to a felony is the important part. It's a felony because it's part of a conspiracy to illegally defraud the voters and affect the election.
  It's a crime in furtherance of a more serious crime, which elevates its severity.
  
  and it should be elevated clear to jail time at minimum, but it won't, because this country not only has no idea what justice is, but also has no idea how to literally defend itself from "threats within".
- Election fraud
- Al Capone was only able to be arrested for tax fraud, because it was very hard to prove he and not one of his lackeys. I think this akin to that
  
  Exactly. They really really wanted to get him, and this was the only thing they could get to stick.
- Cannot even get basic details correct
  The rich being above the law is the correct "basic details" of liberal nation states.

Actually, no.
It's for committing fraud while trying to hide these payments. It's tangentially related, sure, but it's not the reason why he was convicted.
Funnily enough though, I'd say this sounds like prostitution. Pay a girl after sex? If I do that I can go to jail, they should go for Donald Trump for that one.
- I was thinking about the prostitution thing earlier. My guess is they didn't want to charge Stormy in turn.
- You can pay her for sex, you just need to sell the tapes.

And we got Al Capone on tax evasion instead of murder as well. So what?
- Judge Meachum is explicitly on record saying he doesn't want to put Trump in prison.
  Even past that, "we got Capone on tax evasion" is a more oblique way of saying "the local and state governments were too corrupt to successfully prosecute Capone, so we needed a federal department to get involved".
  I would say the Capone case is ALSO a classic example of the deep flaws in the American justice system. Its just more focused on how wealthy crooks can manipulate local prosecutions.
  
  I thought he just said he didn't want to put Trump in jail for contempt?

He's also got 2 other criminal trials being held up by SCOTUS and Judge Cannon, which includes charges of Insurrection, so there is that to think about.
- That's as good as never going to happen and we all know.
  
  If he loses the election I'm sure they'll go forward.
  If he wins they'll make it all go away.
  
  Half of red ties in congress dislike Trump and it probably won't take much of his appointee's bullshit to start impeaching the judges from Cannon to SCOTUS.

It's for electorial fraud

I can never tell if these memes are astroturfing by monied interests/russian bots pretending to be progressives, if populism leads to the same brainwashed takes as the right, or if progressives are actually this dumb.
I consider myself a socialist and a progressive, and I understand that this was a case of defrauding electors and why the case was a felony. It’s not “paying hush money to a porn star”.
I can’t imagine someone on the right saying this in earnest, as they’d never care about Native Americans or any minority. Only thing I can think is that it’s the right trying to sow discord on the left by feigning moral outrage, or the populist progressives on the left being unable to understand how the world works at all. I honestly can’t tell who is making these brain dead memes.
- It is BadEmpanada, who I mostly know from his videos debunking PragerU. He is a non-American who routinely criticizes America though, which gives people a cause to demonize him thoroughly.
  Though I think most recently I saw him clowning on Vaush for outing himself as a pedophile that is also into bestiality, which seems to have riled up the kind of people still holding onto Vaush as an example of ideal internet politics.
  So overall it seems like he has a decent trajectory calling out grifters.
- If I remember correctly bad empanada is a flavor of tankie mixed with peronist.
- Instead of judging everything by whether it is a Russian bot consider if there is any merit to the argument instead.
  Also this guy lives in Argentina.
  
  I’m not saying the argument doesn’t have merit. I’m saying that this case wasn’t about “paying hush money to a porn star”. I really don’t care who he is if he can’t be nuanced. The world is not black and white. Bad Empanada is guilty of a straw man here and the result is that people who generally agree with the argument can’t tell if this is for or against Trump. Read a certain way it minimizes what Trump did. “Oh those other presidents did war crimes but THIS? This itty bitty little fraud is what gets a former president indicted?”

So, for an European who hasn't been following this: criminal conviction does not bar him from running for president?
- The U.S. Constitution sets out three eligibility requirements for the presidency:
  The person must be a natural-born citizen of the United States
  At least 35 years old
  A resident of the United States for at least 14 years.
  There are no restrictions regarding criminal records.
  
  which is actually good, because otherwise they could convict you for the pettiest shit or simply invent a law to convict you over, thus barring you from presidency when you haven't done anything that people dislike.
  the problem now is that there's a large group of people who don't consider "being convicted of fraud" as a reason to stop voting for trump, and in fact will mos likely NEVER find any reason to stop voting for him or whoever the republicans put forward.
  
  As a convicted felon and resident of Florida, though...he shouldn't be allowed to vote. How could you rub for an office you can't vote for?
  
  “But why isn’t there a restriction on criminal convictions for being president?”
  A: before now, nobody thought we needed to explicitly write them.
  We live in insane times.
- No it's mostly a giant theater that so far has had zero actual impact on the election. But it makes some cultists feel like the justice system is still intact and definitely proscecutes billionaires.
  Trump will get off with some BS excuse like they always do at the end of it.
  
  This verdict has done the opposite of your claim: make the cultists feel like the justice system is political and not working because they don't like the verdict.

Really? Was your truth social account broken so you transitioned to Lemmy to try to minimize this historic event? The obvious difference was the tangible personal responsibility here. Not to divorce responsibility for all the other stuff, but I'm confident even you realize how complex it was to convict your precious Trump for things he personally did with a trail of direct evidence. Putting one person in jail for things like war crimes is a whole different level of grey and frankly there aren't readily available systems built to deal consequences for this things like there are for personal fraud.
- There not being systems built to deal with the big crimes is exactly what the post is complaining about, I think.

Shows what the priorities are in the us justice system.
- The laws weren't really designed to hold leaders to account. It's just that Trump is more of a lying, workshy, petulant criminal than he is an effective leader.
  
  Also, those other things were mostly the fallout of military actions performed as part of the job, rather than assorted felonies while a private citizen.

Campaign finance fraud

The only reason why it's not for Jan 6th, selling top secret documents to other countries or election interference in Georgia is because Trump is surrounded by corrupt fucks that are running interference for him.

Its not even for paying her. Its for paying her to nok speak. People are ok with him paying for whatever sexual fantasy or lust he may have had. But not ok with him paging her to not tell
- It's not for either of those things. It's for cooking the books to hide the transaction. Falsifying financial records is the crime. And it would be a misdemeanor except that it was done to further a conspiracy to defraud the public which makes it a felony. It's not a crime to drive, but it is if it's a getaway car.
  
  so it wouldn't have been a crime if he had just paid her to not tell, in order to protect his presidential candidacy? The actual crime was that he tried to hide that he had paid her not to tell?

I geniunely dislike BadEmpanada - definitely a star of the creepier parts of leftube - but when he's right he's right.
- What did he do wrong? From what I've seen of him his takes are usually pretty based but so ascended from neoliberalim that without much knowledge of geopolitical context it can be difficult to follow
  
  Don't get me wrong... BE had some really good takes back when I was watching them - but their "holier than thou" attitude turned me off. I stopped watching them after they made the "All US military personel are murderers" claim - which is just such a Hollywood-leftist take I couldn't believe it.

Deleted

But you're living in the most peaceful time because of us. Just forget all the destabilization and wars we caused all over the world to build that hegemony.
If it wasn't for us, those pesky kids were gonna grow up and nuke the whole planet. Those wars were completely necessary and we won every one of them.
You're welcome
-Every USApe ever
- USApe
  Explains why they needed all those bananas.
  
  What are all the bananas comments about? I've seen it a few times now.
- Are you generalizing an entire population because it's where they were born... Seems fair :/
  
  Its lemmy.ml, so it's propaganda. Don't take it personally.
  Dimitri, Yuri, or whoever wrote it would probably move to the US in a heart beat if they could.
- And the EU is living in an unprecedented era because of it.
  
  Mostly because the USSR collapsed, not because of the USA

146 comments