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A court-ordered financial auditor has caught Donald Trump quietly moving $40 million from the Trump Organization into a personal bank account—seemingly so the former president could pay his whopping $29 million tax bill.
Trump isn’t supposed to be moving any money around without alerting Barbara S. Jones, a former federal judge in New York tasked with babysitting the Trump Organization for its relentlessly shady business practices. But on Wednesday, she notified a New York state court about some major bank transfers that were never brought to her attention by the Trumps.
Because the US has never had a former president get caught so badly and there isn’t precedent for this.
Particularly in that he’s running for president again, is the presumptive GOP nominee based on poll data, and the Supreme Court is functionally in his pocket.
That last part is important. Courts are bending over backwards to accommodate him, because they don’t want to give him any way to claim his trials were unfair. You can only appeal a ruling on the basis of mistrial. Basically, you have to show the appeals court that your previous trial was unfair in some way. So the lower courts are doing everything they can to avoid giving him ammo for that appeal.
Because the lower courts know that if it successfully gets appealed, the courts get exponentially more conservative as they go up. So his chances of getting away with it dramatically increase with each subsequent appeal. And if it makes it all the way to the SCOTUS, they’ll happily light the constitution on fire to let him walk. So their best chance is to nip it in the bud now, by making the courtroom proceedings as appeals-proof as possible. And the only way to do that is to avoid seeming unfair at every opportunity.
In a legal sense, it’s only unprecedented if you start from the assumption that the law doesn’t apply to former presidents the way it does to anyone else.
The real issue is they’ve never tried to prosecute a tinpot dictator with an army would-be terrorists and a bunch of collaborators in key positions in the federal government.
There is precedent, the GOP just likes to forget that. Ulysses S Grant was prosecuted as a sitting president. It was for a misdemeanor of “speeding on horseback while in the city limits of Washington DC,” but that just reinforces that we absolutely can and will prosecute even a sitting president for minor crimes, much less a “former president,” which is just a normal citizen, for 96 felonies.
Fair. Didn’t know about that(the grant speeding arrest).
Looking it up, there is a marked difference in that Grant accepted that he’d been fairly caught(even if his compatriots didn’t) whereas the guy who gives orange a bad rap looks for all appearances to be willing to get rid of the democratic process entirely to evade consequences.
It is unfortunate that Watergate and the Bush Administration’s legalizing of Torture never got their proper treatment. Perhaps if they did the current situation wouldn’t have happened.
I only know about the Grant thing because I found out that was the third time he had been pulled over, the previous two he was a General, and there was a small war going on at the time, while I was looking into the illegal shit that caused Qualified Immunity.
*Because the US is a kleptocracy masquerading as a democracy.
I’m no fan of the current court, but to say it’s in Trump’s pocket is ludicrous. If they were, they would not have rejected his election challenge appeals related to the 2020 election.
Yeah people need to accept that he’s never going to jail. Best we can hope for is to keep him bogged down in lawsuits and appeals until he dies of big Mac overdose
I honestly never imagined anything would actually make it to court, so I’m not so sure of that anymore.
Or just have the mysterious and illustrious Deep State assassinate him or something.