Trump Indicted!

Birdjaguar

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Trump indicted by N.Y. grand jury, first ex-president charged with crime​


A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict former president Donald Trump, multiple people familiar the matter said, becoming the first person in U.S. history to serve as commander in chief and then be charged with a crime.

The grand jury had been hearing evidence about hush money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, allegedly to keep her from saying she’d had a sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his investigative team were probing whether Trump falsified business records connected to the payments in a way that could constitute a campaign-finance violation.

Trump, who is seeking to return to the White House in 2024 and leading in most polls of Republican voters, is also the focus of criminal probes in Georgia and Washington, related to his efforts to overturn President Biden’s 2020 election victory and his handling of classified material at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club.

He has repeatedly denied all wrongdoing and maintained that those investigating him were making politically motivated accusations — a posture that energizes the most loyal segments of his base, even as some more mainstream Republicans have expressed interest in finding a new party standard-bearer.

Bragg’s investigation appears to have focused on $130,000 paid by former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who has said he fronted the money involved in the Daniels transactions to ensure her silence ahead of the 2016 election, and was later reimbursed by Trump. The reimbursement payments were erroneously classified as legal fees, previous investigations have found.

Cohen served time in prison after pleading guilty in two federal criminal cases — including one that involved campaign finance violations related to Daniels and another woman who alleged an affair with Trump. He also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, and his credibility has been attacked by Trump’s defenders, which could undermine his strength as a witness.

Bragg’s office already has won a conviction against Trump’s family business, successfully prosecuting the Trump Organization on tax fraud and related counts at a criminal trial in New York Supreme Court late last year. In that proceeding, longtime Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg testified against the Trump family’s company under a plea agreement that called for him to serve five months in prison in exchange for his assistance at the trial. He had been facing up to 15 years in prison after dodging taxes on $1.7 million in income.

As a result of the December conviction, the Trump Organization was ordered to pay a $1.6 million fine to the state, the largest amount allowable under New York law. Trump was not charged in the case.

The district attorney’s investigation of Trump began in 2019, under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.. It resulted in a Supreme Court legal battle over access to Trump’s tax returns and associated records, which were ultimately turned over to Vance’s office.

At the start of Bragg’s tenure in 2022, he declined a push by senior prosecutors to ask a previous grand jury to indict Trump for defrauding lenders and insurance companies by lying about the true value of his properties and other assets. Bragg said at the time that his office would continue to investigate the former president, and a fresh roster of lawyers got involved in the case.
Vance had earlier considered pursuing charges against Trump related to Daniels. But his office ruled that out as a viable option and moved onto other matters, including the Trump Organization’s tax practices and asset valuations.
Federal prosecutors also declined to prosecute Trump in connection with the Daniels payments, even though they did charge Cohen.
Trump said recently that Bragg was falling back on an “old and rebuked case which has been rejected by every prosecutor’s office that has looked.”
 
I guess he should have waited 24 hours....
 
Sort of reminds me of Nancy Grace lauding the Kasey Anthony jury moments before they acquitted her and then turning on them.

And just like that, America is Great Again.

Tonight, on a very special episode of COPS...
 
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving fella.
 
I guess we will see the details soon.
 
As a jurisdictional question, how is Bragg and the Manhattan grand jury able to file campaign finance rules violations? I thought this would be a matter of federal law, not something under their purview.

I don't think we know what the exact charges are yet since everything is still a secret, but they can't be too outrageous or the grand jury would have voted no.


Everything I've read so far indicates this will be a tough case to get a conviction based on the likely charges.

A misdemeanor would be easy, but the felony would be hard.

Trump better hope the DA's confidence has feet of clay, or that not everyone in New York who will form a jury hates him.
 
Seems relevant:
"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
...
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
...
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

**** Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House."
 
But even "indicated" is not "vindicated".
 
Like indicting Al Capone on tax evasion. Assuming he doesn't avoid consequences for his grift yet again. :rolleyes:
 
The GOP is standing behind "Trump is above the law."
 
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