§ 175.10. Falsifying business records in the first degree
“A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
Falsifying business records in the first degree is a class E felony.”
This is a criminal case that should not survive a motion to dismiss. It is an attempt to convert misdemeanors regarding alleged inaccurate business records, and beyond the statute of limitation misdemeanors at that, into felonies, without having the essential element of establishing that the alleged inaccurate business records were in furtherance of a crime.
This indictment reads like work done by a prosecutor who just passed the bar and has been on the job one day. Just from a legal workmanship standard, this prosecution is utter crap. Thus we see a tradition of not prosecuting former presidents stretching back to the beginning of the Republic overturned for this waste of paper. Trump is the first former president to face criminal indictment, he will not be the last now that a precedent has been set, and we take another step towards Civil War II.
I don’t believe that we’re on the verge of Civil War, but if Republicans ever behaved like Democrats instead of always following Queensberry Rules the nation would become such a Wild West it could destroy the Republic.
All that’s missing is the verbal taunting, “nah nah, Hillary and Joe deserve this soooo much more but you can’t do this.” They keep pushing the envelope while thinking things will never ever be turned around. Weird.
Fun or maybe not so fun fact, which I just discovered a couple of hours ago: Trump is NOT the first president to ever be arrested. In 1872, then-president Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding — in a horse and buggy — down the streets of Washington D.C. He was fined $20 (equivalent to about $500 today). Grant had a thing for fast horses, but he had no grudge against the police officer who stopped him (who happened to be Black) and in fact praised him for doing his duty. The arrest didn’t become public knowledge until 1908, when the police officer (by then retired) gave an interview to a DC newspaper.
The case assignment system in New York County is corrupt. Of the dozens of state Supreme Court* judges in Manhattan, the case was assigned to the same one who presided over Letitia James sketchy tax fraud prosecution.
*In New York, the court of last resort has since 1846 been called the “Court of Appeals”. The court of intermediate appellate review is called “the Appellate Division” and is made up of those elected as trial court judges and assigned by the governor (with advice and consent from the legislature) to appellate work for terms of years; they very seldom drop back to the trial courts before they retire. The “State Supreme Court” was named that in 1846 with the understanding it was the highest court of original jurisdiction. In New York City, it is a general superior court which takes any kind of case not allocated to the municipal courts, the Surrogate’s Courts, the Family Courts, or the state Court of Claims. Outside New York City, the Supreme Court justices have a formal remit that is quite broad, extending to just about anything that does not belong in the municipal courts or the state Court of Claims, but as a matter of course spend the bulk of their time presiding over civil disputes (including divorce cases).
I wonder if Braggs is secretly auditioning for Idiocracy II?
If they will impeach him 2x on falsified evidence , so will the others falsify and charge.
I’ve lived in NYC for nearly 30 years now. The liberals that infest this place are even more rabid than you could even imagine. You can bet your bottom dollar that these people (judges, prosecutors and jurors) will fight tooth and nail to be on this garbage case. They all want to be the ones who finally get Trump. They will wear it like a badge of honor to their grave. Facts of the law be damned. I don’t see this case being dismissed. At most they toss a couple of the bogus counts just to give the appearance of a fair trial. I hope I’m wrong.
After Trump is convicted and his appeals in New York State fail, which in agreement with JMJ I view as inevitable, the question will be: Whether the SCOTUS, which was so concerned with preserving “the system” that it refused to accept the case challenging the 2020 election results despite it being clearly within their Constitutional original jurisdiction, will grant certiorari to hear the case. With the spineless Roberts still there, it’s no better than a 50-50 proposition, and even if cert is granted he will look for any reason to vote against overturning the conviction. Federalism, dontcha know. Or something like that. That’s how spineless people behave.
I will also predict that the pretrial motions, trial, and any appeals will be disposed of in record time, i.e., before the 2024 “election.” This whole thing is designed to have Trump in jail on election day, and no one in the New York State judiciary is going to do anything to prevent that.
Kruiser’s Morning Briefing, “America’s banana republic malaise hit a new low with the indictment of former President Donald Trump for, well, nothing. Yesterday’s photo-op circus may have provided some red meat entertainment for the frothing Democrat hordes but people who aren’t blinded by a toxic combination of ignorance, hate, and daddy issues know it was a sad day for the Republic.”
A felon cannot hold public office. Hillary Clinton wanted imprisoned felons to vote. Citizenship is a public office instituted by consent of the governed. Change the rule of which I hold is true and this trial will end if and when Trump can hold public office as a convicted felon.
(If Pelosi and Biden and Shumer can hold public office then any felon can hold public office.)
A felon cannot hold public office.
Untrue as to the President. The requirements for that office are set forth in the Constitution. The requirements cannot be added to without a Constitutional amendment.
Bragg knows that the accusations are BS, but he doesn’t care. He has not been shy about his intention to find a crime to hit Trump with, and most of the people who voted for him voted for him for that reason.
There is just enough of an actual legal system left in the country that this particular attempt may not work. But things are dire for the future in that a large portion of the country will see such an outcome as a failure of the legal system that needs to be rectified. For a large chunk of the population the legal system is there to punish your enemies and reward your friends, nothing more and nothing less.
There is no way out of this that does not involve prosecuting prominent leftist politicians. If we get back to an actual system of laws it will be necessary to do because of their real crimes, and to demonstrate that no one is above the laws. If we lose an actual system of laws and it devolves into a way to punish enemies, then we will need to punish our own enemies as a survival mechanism.
Mary DeVoe: In 1920 Eugene V. Debs, a convicted felon then in federal prison for sedition (based on his outspoken opposition to the WWI military draft) and, as part of his sentence, stripped of his voting rights for life, was the official Socialist Party candidate for President. He received 919,000 votes, or 3.4 percent of all votes cast that year. Even though he could not vote himself, it didn’t prevent him from running.
I have a suspicion that the administrative judge or the clerk of the court in New York County rigged the case assignment because other judges could not be counted on to be unprofessional. There are 20-odd appellate judges in the1st department. It will be heard by a 3 judge or 5 judge panel. Whoever does not get a satisfactory decision there will petition for an en banc rehearing. There’s a menu of reasons to hear an appeal that the state constitution commands the Court of Appeals hear, though I doubt any would apply in this case. They could beg off entirely. The only body which has to hear an appeal is the appellate panel selected in the first instance. I’d like to believe the case assignment system in the 1st department is on the up and up, but I’m not hopeful.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/05/yielding-to-temptation-why-the-trump-case-is-a-test-for-not-just-for-the-president-but-the-legal-system/#more-203231
Jonathan Turley’s remarks on this travesty. You’ll notice the ActBlue recruits are infuriated with him. Street level Democrats are not your friend.
Hi Don. I’m not a lawyer and know nothing about the law at all. Any chance for a change of venue? Even if it went upstate New York somewhere. May have a better chance of finding some unbiased jurors.
Perhaps. That will be the first test of whether the Judge is a complete partisan hack.
Jonathan Turley is that rarity, a completely honest liberal. He is a throwback to far better days than these.
From the air being let out of the balloons on the left today, I’m beginning to wonder if there will even be a hearing in December (!). That’s a whole lot of time for this to be quietly dismissed and then ejected from the Lamestream news cycles.
The memory-span-of-a-goldfish hate eaters in the zombie army won’t even, once somebody pops another contrivance out of their backsides for them to frenzy feed over.
Bragg could have added a 35th count: Trump didn’t turn in his gold money in April 1933.
FDR’s other day of infamy.
“On this 90th anniversary of the seizure [of Americans’ money, i.e., gold coinage], it behooves us to recall the details of it, for multiple reasons: It ranks as one of the most notorious abuses of power in a decade when there were almost too many to count. It’s an example of bad policy imposed on the guiltless by the government that created the conditions it used to justify it. And the very fact of compliance, however minimal, is a scary testimony to how fragile freedom is in the middle of a crisis.
“Ninety years ago, Franklin Roosevelt told {Congress? I don’t need no stinking Congress] Americans they had less than a month to hand over their gold or face up to ten years in prison.” Lawrence W. Reed, FEE Stories.
Reporter, “Bu, he wasn’t even born.”
Bragg, ‘No one is above the diktat.”
We did not benefit from a gold standard in 1929-33 and would not benefit from one now.
Art,
Sorry.
I thought you’d come back with that “barbaric relic” trope but commented anyway.
My point was the illegality, injustice and unconstitutional nature of the tyrannical money confiscation.
I’m not advocating return to the gold standard. That is almost as impossible as returning the US to fair elections and the Constitutional republic.
Fair elections are valuable. A gold standard is not. It’s not ‘barbaric’, just a lousy monetary regime.
In other matters, maybe our moderator can explain how one can be charged with ‘falsification of business records’ when the indictment states that the ‘falsifier’ paid Michael Cohen out of personal accounts and family trusts.
Because it was claimed as attorney fees, a deductible business expense. This has Cohen’s little rat feet all over it, as he billed his reimbursement as attorney’s fees. The actual payoff could have been legally written off as a business expense to protect the Trump Brand. Cohen was a miserably incompetent attorney, assuming this Rube Goldberg mechanism was his idea.
Because it was claimed as attorney fees, a deductible business expense.
Did he actually take the deduction? New York has a state income tax. (If I’m not mistaken, people are very seldom prosecuted for disallowed deductions).
I can’t imagine it would be prosecuted as the actual expense, the payoff, could also be claimed as a business expense.
The genie is out of the bottle and won’t be put back.
Too many millions are deluded by the ‘we know better’ and the ‘barbaric relic’ propaganda pushed by [failed] central planners, ideolog econ profs, et al.
Too many millions are deluded by the ‘we know better’ and the ‘barbaric relic’ propaganda pushed by [failed] central planners, ideolog econ profs, et al.
I learned my monetary economics a generation ago from a man who’d worked as an adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He was dismissive of a gold standard, which had some exponents at the time. Again, there was no discussion of ‘barbaric relics’, but there was discussion of the problems as they manifested themselves in the 1920s. You didn’t need a gold standard to re-stabilize prices in 1981-82, you needed central bankers committed to the project and politicians who were behind them and not badgering them.
They needed two [1980 and 1982] recessions and prolonged high rates [20.5% prime rate August 1981; 18% 30-year fixed rate mortgage] o] to ‘find’ stable prices in 1986 [1.9% headline number]. Then, inflation recurred to 5.4% through 1990. My pal FRED.
The English. I bought some of my gold @ $250/ounce when the BoE [told the world] was selling its gold reserves.
I’m so old. I remember when the pound was worth $5 US, an ounce of gold was $35 [it was $20.67 per from 1837 to 1934, when FDR confiscated all the money and devalued the Federal Reserve Notes 69% to $35/ounce]. I bought a house in September 1979 for about $50,000 and in September 1984 sold it for $105,000.
They needed two [1980 and 1982] recessions and prolonged high rates [20.5% prime rate August 1981; 18% 30-year fixed rate mortgage] o] to ‘find’ stable prices in 1986 [1.9% headline number]. Then, inflation recurred to 5.4% through 1990. My pal FRED.
They didn’t need that at all. Paul Volcker instituted controls on monetary aggregates in October 1979. Jimmy Carter insisted in March of 1980 that he replace his program with ineffective credit controls. Volcker’s program was reimposed when Carter left office and completed in 22 months (January 1981 to November 1982), It took longer than it might have because the reversal of policy Carter insisted upon vitiated the Fed’s credibility. Note, the genesis of the destructive inflation began in 1966 when Wm. Martin caved in to Lyndon Johnson’s insistence on monetary expansion. During the period running from 1970 to 1979, the Federal Reserve was under the influence of addled economists and politicians who did not have much principle (Nixon) and didn’t have much sense (Ford, Carter). The Nixon Administration had a clear opportunity to restabilize prices in 1969-70 as they had been restabilized in 1951-52 and they got cold feet. As bad as the policy decisions were, they did not have the horrendous consequences of the gold standard in 1929-33.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403889.php
One thing that distinguishes the red mentality and the blue mentality is that the former incorporates a normal sense of agency and the latter does not.
And all the woulda’s, coulda’s, shoulda’s on Earth don’t mean nothing.
Was there a run on gold at the Fed in 1929 – 33?
FDR, his gang and the compliant super majority Congress could not control [Life, Liberty, Property be damned] America if the People could control their property/wealth, i.e., the value of their money by keeping gold coins. Now some of us can.
Since 1971, we’ve had seven recessions, three or four easy credit fueled booms/bubbles and busts [now it’s everything-except-debt-securities bubbles], expanding global trade imbalances, soaring debt, escalating median home prices, declining real wages, and the massive rise of the 1% at the expense of the rest of you.
I not only have gold. I have a lifetime supply of Scotch whisky for the imminent collapse.
Was there a run on gold at the Fed in 1929 – 33?
No, there was a 30% decline in industrial production consequent to widespread bankruptcies and real interest rates on the order of 12% per annum. You had real interest rates in that realm because you had double-digit deflation. You had double-digit deflation because for 2.5 years, the Federal Reserve did not respond at all to the increased demand for real balances. They did not respond due to the gold standard. The monetary base actually declined during those years. Britain devalued its currency in September 1931 and their economy began to recover immediately. The devaluation of the currency and the change to a gold bullion standard were crucial and immediately tonic aspects of Roosevelt’s program. Per capita product, having declined in real terms by 8.6% a year during 1929-33 increased by 6.7% per year during 1933-41. The increase in per capital product over the whole period (1929-41) averaged 1.3% per year, precisely the average maintained over the period running from 1883 to 1929. Production levels recovered. The labor market remained scarred.
A lot of ill considered policies were adopted during the Roosevelt years. Kind of perverse complaining about the ones which produced salutary outcomes.
Art,
Gid bless you and Happy Easter.