election2016
During a presidential debate in 2016, Donald Trump described the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a "great judge" and promised to "appoint judges very much in the mold of Justice Scalia." Trump may not have realized that Scalia was one of those "stupid people" who think flag burning is protected by the First Amendment. Last week, as Reason's Emma Camp noted, the former president said people who burn U.S. flags (even ones they own) should go to jail. He was reiterating a position that he took in November 2016, a month after the debate in which he praised Scalia. "Nobody should be al...
Reason
"In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is," says a new Biden campaign ad. "He's been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud." One of these things is not like the others. Those "34 felonies" sound like Trump's most serious offenses, and they are the only justification for calling him "a convicted criminal," as the ad also does. But those crimes were bookkeeping offenses that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg converted into felonies via a convoluted, legally iffy theory that combined several interacting statutes with questiona...
Reason
"In 2016," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe writes, "Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "while losing the popular vote by 3 million. We now know Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have filled two Supreme Court vacancies and enacted her legislative agenda." Since those 34 felonies involved falsified business records that were produced in 2017, Tribe's claim is logically im...
Reason
When a New York jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 felonies last week, it was relying on a chain of legal reasoning that involved various possible combinations of interacting statutes. That made the case against Trump hard to follow. It also raised a due process issue that Trump's lawyers are likely to highlight on appeal. The charges against Trump involved 11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, paid porn star Stormy Danie...
Reason
The United States doesn't fully meet the definition of a banana republic—we don't have an economy dependent on resources, like bananas. But in terms of unstable politics in which government officials misuse powers and the courts to punish foes, the U.S. resembles that term more every day. The concluded hush-money trial of former (future?) President Donald Trump is a case in point. A Convoluted Case With Political Ramifications"President Donald Trump was convicted yesterday of allegedly altering business records to conceal his alleged payment of money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in order to...
Reason
Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case." That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that point, Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, had already paid porn star Stormy Daniels...
Reason
After deliberating for a little more than a day, a Manhattan jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying 34 business records to aid or conceal "another crime," an intent that turns what would otherwise be misdemeanors into felonies. If you assumed that the jury's conclusions would be driven by political animus, this first-ever criminal conviction of a former president is the result you probably expected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 9 to 1. But in legal terms, the quick verdict is hard to fathom. That's not because there were so many counts to consider...
Reason
To convert a single hush payment into 34 state felonies in the New York case against former President Donald Trump, prosecutors are relying on several interacting statutes, which makes their legal theory convoluted and confusing. Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Trump's trial, added to the confusion on Wednesday when he instructed the jurors on the conclusions they must reach to find Trump guilty. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen, then a lawyer working for Trump, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Tr...
Reason
During his closing argument in Donald Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan on Tuesday, lead defense attorney Todd Blanche hammered at the credibility of the prosecution's star witness, Michael Cohen, the former president's estranged fixer, calling him "the greatest liar of all time." That strategy makes sense given Cohen's role in establishing that Trump "caused" the falsification of the business records at the center of the case. But even if the jury believes Cohen's testimony, it does not prove that Trump falsified those records with the intent of facilitating or concealing "another crime," t...
Reason
閲覧を続けるには、ノアドット株式会社が「プライバシーポリシー」に定める「アクセスデータ」を取得することを含む「nor.利用規約」に同意する必要があります。
「これは何?」という方はこちら