> I mean, the former governor of New York just said the New York prosecution against Trump wouldn’t have been brought against anyone else.
Trump is flagrantly corrupt and coordinates crime through lackeys, many of which have been convicted of felonies. No, you don't catch old kingpins on the stuff you get everybody else with. There's definitely a two-tier justice system going on, but it bends in Trump's favor at every turn.
“Trump actually did all these bad things! But we can’t prove any of them, so we’ll prosecute him for influencing an election by covering up an affair after he already won the election. Don’t sweat the details, you gotta get creative with these kingpins.”
This is persuasive to nobody that doesn’t start from the assumption Trump is a criminal. The irony is that I used to share that assumption, because I’m a pretty trusting person. But after almost eight years of the smartest lawyers in the country going after him, I’m not so sure. My former boss at a white shoe law firm in New York helped engineer the New York case, and it’s the same kind of contrived legal theory the firm would use to help a corporate client make it seem like all their income was earned in Bermuda. Utterly unpersuasive.
Well, he hasn’t argued that he’s innocent; that the evidence is fabricated. The evidence is stuff he tweets. He argues that the system allows these mean people too much time to talk and scheme.
As a Canadian who keeps up on the news but has no skin in the game, from up here it does look petty when after seemingly hundreds of unsuccessful attempts to prosecute Trump, their “we got him now” case amounts to “he expensed an invoice from his lawyer to a business instead of paying it personally”.
That's because the things they can't get him on (yet) include inciting violence intending to prevent the lawful transition of power (aka a coup attempt) -- because the judge is deferring the case past the election -- and influencing states to cast votes in the electoral college against what their people voted for -- because the case is on hold pending investigation of the prosecutor. Both of those have already resulted in convictions of multiple Trump staffers; Trump himself has managed to delay justice in both of those more serious cases.
There is a reason they got Al Capone on tax evasion, and it wasn't because that was the worst thing he did. Crime bosses are notoriously slippery.
Trump is flagrantly corrupt and coordinates crime through lackeys, many of which have been convicted of felonies. No, you don't catch old kingpins on the stuff you get everybody else with. There's definitely a two-tier justice system going on, but it bends in Trump's favor at every turn.