Bragg’s case against Trump seems to be more about the business in bed than business paperwork.
Anyone reading The Daily Doom regularly knows that I am an equal opportunity critic of Trump and Biden and of Republicons and Demonicrats. I don’t think either of the last two entities that form the Uniparty have the answers for our nation’s problems. If they did, the problems wouldn’t constantly be getting worse for decades. Both parties have had plenty of time in charge for things to get better, and they’ve used that time to show they always serve party first and Wall Street second, and the rest of us only much as they have to.
The nation I live in felt worse to me after four years of Trump than ever before; and, after nearly four years of Biden, it feels worse still. So, when I now speak in a way that could be seen as in favor of Trump, just know it is not out of partiality to Trump. It’s impartiality based on a concern for truth and fairness that exceeds my distaste for too much orange. Equal fairness is part of equal-opportunity criticism; and in the present Bragg-v-Trump trial, all I see is a heaping mess of legal manure.
One of the highlighted articles today by constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley basically wants to know where’s the meat in this trial. What crime exactly are they trying? I agree. Having claimed months ago their trial would be about the illegality of falsifying payments that are personal as business expenses, they seem to be spending a lot of time parading porn stars and making it about lurid sex. My thought from the moment Bragg announced his trumped-up 36 counts of crime was that there was no meat on those bones.
How can you claim it is legally wrong for an eponymously named corporation to guard its name against the slimy-but-perfectly-legal trysts of its CEO? If Walt Disney of the Disney Corporation had been sleeping with some famous LA madame (and who is to say he didn’t), do any of us believe the board of Disney Corp. would not agree to spend company hush money (and who is to say they didn’t) to protect the reputation of the company and the value shareholders have in it? If Walt were also running for mayor of LA, would that make the spending of corporate money to guard the corporate name illegal? To me, it’s a stretched case at best. To Turley, too.
Ugly? Sure. Scandalous? Absolutely. But where is the CRIME? So, yes, Alvin Bragg is running a trial desperately in search of a crime, as Turley says, and pulling out the bestseller-novel stuff to keep attention off the fact that he doesn’t have any real crime to show. Sure, Trump was more interested in saving his political reputation than the company’s reputation, but that seems to be a blurry gray zone to me because it is easily possible to be aiming at both and have all the business interest you need. Prove he didn’t.
On top of it being a big stretch to a crime, Bragg is also multiplying the supposed crime of using business funds to protect the CEO’s reputation (undeservedly for sure) into something like 36 separate time-serving offenses because Trump carried out the payoff in twelve installments and handled those installments in the normal professional business manner in three ways—kept a copy of the check, a copy of the invoice off of which he paid the check, and an entry in the corporate check ledger for the check. That turned each monthly installment, according to Bragg, into three separately punishable crimes.
I hate that kind of legal abuse and the attorneys who do that stuff … against anyone. It just feels like juris imprudence to me: “Let’s jack this up with every possible triviality to get as much jail time out of this supposed crime of using corporate cash to spare the company name as possible.” With each count, if I recall correctly from memory, being worth a possible 6 years in prison, can we really say that using and recording checks to make the payments is worth twelve more years than if Trump had paid in company cash and kept only the invoice marked “paid in cash?”
Is it more legal and, therefore, worth less time in jail, if you record your expenses poorly than it is to record them in detail? Is each detail on the same payment worth another six years of someone’s life in prison? With the first definition of “imprudence” I come across being “not showing care for the consequences of an action” the consequence of life in prison feels a little imprudent on Bragg’s part to me. You’re going to stack up offenses high enough to lock even a young man up for longer than life over paying off a film whore for her silence with the business account? Seems like overreach to me. You’d think he had killed her and eaten her.
Lefties and Righties off their righteous rails
Then we have the zany Left and their overreactions toward Israel’s war against Hamas after Hamas’s attack against Israel. The protests are overreach, not because they are against the war, but because they are proving on their own that they are driven by a lot of deep hatred toward Jews as the protests have started turning directly against “Jews,” not just Israel, by the Liberal-embraced multitudes of Jew-haters that were imported from Muslim countries. There is a lot of religious-based hatred driving many of the Palestinian protestors that the Left loves to coddle. That is not to say there is not legitimacy in protesting any war, but the protests in this case often betray all-out hatred of Jews.
Meanwhile, Trump has formed a religious cult around himself of self-appointed prophets who claim he is God’s anointed, here before the second coming of the real Jesus to make the world a better place by righting it’s wrongs in order to bless America with renewed greatness. I never thought a pre-entry cleanup of America was part of the apocalyptic visions for the second coming, so I’m wondering why God would send this newly anointed proud man-of-the-flesh to make Babylon great again, instead of letting Babylon the Great decay into its own judgment to finally be destroyed end-times style, but I don’t speak for God as the Trump prophets all believe they do. So, I can’t put the divine imprimatur on my own opinion. It’s just mine.
I’m glad to see one conservative, evangelical pastor in the headlines below is as equally riled by the odd marriage of MAGA Christians to Trump as I am and is railing before his own mega-but-not-MAGA-church congregation against the Trump Bible as well as the fusion of religion and politics that we see in the MAGA movement. The whole concept of Trump hocking overpriced Bibles seems as incongruous in my mind as a gospel tract rack in the lobby of a brothel. The fact that the Trump Bibles include various American historic documents as if they should be on the same pages as the divine seems to bestow a greatness upon Babylon that almost rises to blasphemy. Are we next going to see the traditional Jesus-knocking-at-the-door picture that hangs in most Sunday schools coming out in versions that look a little orangish with swoopy hair and a broad pearly-white smile that seems to say, “I’m going to eat you for lunch?”
Pastor Loran Livingston tore the church up with this one. pic.twitter.com/jwG9A0fkFL
— Howard Henderson (@hhendersonphd) April 22, 2024