(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Prison [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-30 Donald Trump should be sentenced to prison for using fraud to interfere in the 2016 presidential vote in the State of New York. His apologists plead that he’s a tired old man who can hardly take a prison sentence. And anyway, his trial was politically motivated, and he wouldn’t have been found guilty if only the District Attorney hadn’t prosecuted him. Besides, it’s not such a terrible crime. It’s just a Class E felony, hardly a bump up from a misdemeanor. I’m completely unmoved. This is a very difficult subject with a lot of ground to cover, so I’ve divided this presentation into three articles. The first is this one, where I cover the myths that I’ve seen around the trial and how Donald Trump should be sentenced. I will follow that Wednesday with an article on factors in sentencing, and one Thursday on the judgment. I doubt this treatise will impact the sentence the defendant gets because I’m not in a position to take any official action or get anyone with influence to pay attention. So this is for your entertainment and to give you something to think about. When the sentence is handed down, I will be just as interested as you to find out what it is. So, first, let’s deal with some myths about the trial and how Donald Trump fits into the verdict. Myth: Donald Trump’s Trial Was Politically Motivated Yeah, so? Politics? In the U.S.? It’s like Renault discovering gambling at Rick's Café Américain. One of the premises of a multi-party system is that each party is supposed to keep watch over the other parties. Each party is supposed to blow the whistle if the other party does something it shouldn’t. Like breaking the law, for example. To a certain extent, what we have here is the system working as designed. In any case, all the evidence that Donald Trump committed these crimes was in the public domain well in advance of the day DA Alvin Bragg took this to a grand jury. As soon as Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to various crimes related to his involvement with Trump in August 2018, it was clear that Trump was probably guilty as part of that conspiracy. It was even clearer in December 2018 when it was revealed Trump was “Individual-1” in the court filings for the Cohen case. And really, Andrew Weissman found this fraud while working on the Mueller Investigation some time between when he started working on that investigation in June 2017 and before Individual-1 appeared in the December 2018 court filings. Donald Trump announced his run for the presidency in November 2022. New York officials and everyone else had evidence of his involvement almost four years earlier. Cyrus Vance, Jr., as DA, looked into Trump finances when he got access to the records in February 2021. When Bragg took over the DA office in January 2022, he inherited the information Vance had already obtained. Initially, Bragg refused to pursue charges against Donald Trump, leading to resignations from Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz (lead prosecutors on the case). But later (probably after reviewing all the evidence), Bragg revived the case and took it to a grand jury in January 2023. They indicted Trump in March 2023. The claim this was political rests on the fact that this case didn’t go to the grand jury until after Trump announced his candidacy. But probable cause was really established by the filings for Cohen’s case in 2018. Both Vance and Bragg apparently did their due diligence looking at the evidence before Bragg concluded this case was ready to go to trial. What this probably shows is that Donald Trump got more due process than the typical suspect. But let’s say that Bragg was politically motivated to put Trump on trial because Bragg is a Democrat. He still put the case to a grand jury. If the evidence wasn’t there, they could have declined to indict. Grand juries have subpoena power to obtain evidence, so they are in a good position to determine the truth. They might indict a ham sandwich, but only if they really believed the sandwich was guilty of the crime alleged. And if Bragg had decided not to turn this over to a grand jury, then criticism from Dunne and Pomerantz would have been valid. That would indicate Bragg blocked a trial where there was abundant evidence of a crime. (We know there was abundant evidence because the evidence was presented and the jury found the defendant guilty.) That would have cheated the public out of a verdict on those accusations. Trump apologists also claim that this trial was instigated and maybe controlled by President Biden, possibly through Matthew Colangelo, who previously worked for the Justice Department. But, as near as I can tell, at the DOJ, he was not involved in any case touching on Donald Trump. At Justice, he was in the Antitrust Division, Civil Division, Civil Rights Division, Environment and Natural Resources Division, and Tax Division. Those are not places where he would have been involved in anything related to Trump. The closest he came to any involvement with Donald Trump was participation into the investigation into the Trump Foundation at the New York Attorney General’s office, not with the federal government. Basically, Colangelo is a professional who worked in various government legal agencies. There’s no evidence he ever talked with President Biden or any Biden officials about Donald Trump. What this really comes down to is that many people in the Trump orbit have such low morals that they would abuse the justice system to bring charges and even find someone guilty for political reasons, even if they knew they weren’t guilty. That’s what they are accusing Democrats of doing, and it just shows what they think they would do in a similar circumstance. This suggests they should never be allowed anywhere near the levers of power or a jury pool. Myth: It’s Unfair To Try Him in Manhattan Another common myth is that it was unfair to try Donald Trump in Manhattan. This myth says that Manhattan is “Democratic”, so he could never get a fair trial there. That’s hooey. First of all, if you look at the statistics, Manhattan isn’t uniformly Democratic. While it is true that Trump only got about 8% of the vote in 2020, 34.77% of eligible voters didn’t vote. That means that if you picked jurors in a way that represented their votes, nearly 43% would be non-Democratic jurors. The probability was that this jury didn’t have more than about 7 or 8 Democrats on it. In fact, it is entirely possible that the entire jury consisted of people who voted for Donald Trump, because it is only 12 people out of hundreds of thousands that voted for him in Manhattan. It is also possible that the jury had no Democrats on it at all. Based on information from voir dire, that’s pretty unlikely, since we have their media preferences. But the claim that he couldn’t get a fair trial because New York is all Democratic falls apart on the basis of numbers. And speaking of voir dire, each side got six peremptory challenges. That means that anyone who was a flaming Democrat could be spotted and removed without cause by Trump’s attorneys. But even all this is just preliminary. The hard problem with this myth is that the jurors swore to judge the trial based on the facts and law as presented in court. That means the claim that he couldn’t get a fair trial is based on the assumption that the jurors in New York would be like the people making the claim: devoid of duty and honor, willing to swear one thing and then do the other. It’s based on the disgusting idea that Democrats would be as totally lacking in morals as the claimant. That’s not my experience of Democrats. In fact, that’s not my experience of jurors. And, it isn’t my experience of Americans. This is a claim that comes from outside that sphere. Myth: Donald Trump Is a First-Time Offender While it is true that this is the first time Donald Trump has been found guilty on a criminal charge, it is not the first time he’s caused fraud to be committed. There are numerous other instances where organizations he led were adjudicated in a court of law to have committed fraud. In 2013, the State of New York filed a civil suit against Trump University for making false statements and defrauding consumers. Trump eventually paid $25 million to settle this and two other cases. the State of New York filed a civil suit against Trump University for making false statements and defrauding consumers. Trump eventually paid $25 million to settle this and two other cases. In 1988, Trump created The Donald J. Trump Foundation. In November 2019, a judge ordered him to pay $2 million to a group of charities for misusing the foundation's funds, in part to finance his presidential campaign. a judge ordered him to pay $2 million to a group of charities for misusing the foundation's funds, in part to finance his presidential campaign. A judge ruled in September 2023 that Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Organization repeatedly committed fraud. The judge ultimately ordered him to pay a penalty of more than $350 million plus interest. The criminal trial in Manhattan is only the latest example in a sequence of frauds. It’s the first time he’s been criminally convicted of fraud, but he is not a “first-time offender”. Given the list above, he’s a fourth-time offender. And that doesn’t even take into account his shady prior history. According to repeated reports he stiffed contractors for years. In fact, he took Allen Weisselberg to task for paying full price on their invoices. He wanted Weisselberg to shake them down until they were willing to take pennies on the dollar. That’s fraud. Myth: Donald Trump Is a Non-Violent Offender One of the claims of apologists is that Donald Trump is a non-violent offender. It’s not like he’s raped or murdered anyone, right? Oh, yeah. There is that. But more to the point, he’s not a violent offender. He doesn’t own a gun and go around… Oh, yeah. He did own guns and had to surrender them. But he doesn’t go around shooting people on Fifth Avenue, now does he? No, but apparently he doesn’t feel restrained from doing that, either. I say this in jest at the absurdity of this claim, but there’s a more serious issue. Donald Trump is part of a very large crime organization, one that has violently attacked others. He doesn’t get his hands dirty killing people, but he gives others permission to kill them on his behalf. He is actually a dangerous criminal, one who is a clear danger to the public. He had to be restrained from verbally attacking the witnesses and jury during the trial, because the court concluded what he said had a high probability of inciting one of his supporters to physically attack or maybe try to kill someone. And even though the judge didn’t restrain him from verbal attacks on the judge or the DA, that was an act of bravery that doesn’t mean someone won’t, eventually, kill either Justice Merchan or DA Alvin Bragg. Or a member of their families. Right now, he and others in his mob have a claim out that the FBI was ordered to kill him, which is just the sort of lie that might get another of his followers to attack the FBI. Like one did in Cincinnati. Donald Trump’s criminal reach is so extensive that he even has members of Congress in his thrall. No honorable officer of the government would attack the justice system, accuse the trial of being rigged, or accuse the judge of corruption without solid, provable evidence, but Republican members of both the House and the Senate have done just that. In an honest, functional world these people would be censured by their respective houses of Congress. Donald Trump is perpetrating obstruction of justice on a massive scale. He is attacking the justice system. A foreseeable consequence of that attack is violence to people involved in that justice system. His followers are not subtle about their desire to start a civil war so that they can go around killing people. They are delusional in thinking this will be easy for them, but delusional people commit violence all the time. Especially if they are stocked with firearms easy to acquire. What these people are saying is that they will be serial killers to avenge the conviction of their dear leader. It’s violent and anti-American. But it is a real and credible threat. And it is at the behest of this offender, who instigates violence to fight back against a system holding him accountable. This may be a white-collar crime, but Donald Trump is not a white-collar criminal. Please join me Wednesday when I discuss factors in sentencing, such as whether or not the defendant accepts responsibility or shows remorse. 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