Re: Stormy Daniels Gave "Disastrous" Testimony In Trump Trial, CNN Legal Analyst Says

shawn <nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com> wrote:

Tue, 14 May 2024 15:35:30 -0000 (UTC), Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com>:

suzeeq <suzeeq@imbris.com> wrote:

On 5/14/2024 4:25 AM, NoBody wrote:

Sun, 12 May 2024 04:30:46 -0400, Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:

The article that Ubi the shithead plagarized is this:

Stormy Daniels Gave 'Disastrous' Testimony In Trump Trial, CNN Legal
Analyst Says
By Daniel Chaitin
The Daily Wire
May 8, 2024
https://www.dailywire.com/news/stormy-daniels-gave-disastrous-testimony-in-trump-trial-cnn-legal-analyst-says

. . .

The prosecutors have yet to produce ANY evidence that Trump committed
any crime.

He's charged with covering up payments to her for killing her story to
interfere with his 2016 campaign. That's the crime and they have proved
it with other witnesses.

Just a moment. You need to explain this in full.

She was looking for a payout. She approached people close to Trump
seeking money and wanted to speed the process along by threating to sell
her story to someone else if she didn't receive her payout.

That's extortion. No one has yet explained why her actions couldn't have
been prosecuted under state law.

Because that's not how the story has been told.

Yes, it is. This is how it was presented to the jury.

Instead it is Trump approaching her through Cohen to keep the story
a secret while he was running for office. So if it was Trump's people
approaching her then she did nothing wrong.

How can you plausibly believe this? Trump couldn't have possibly known.
She had a story to sell. She's the one who made the approach.

If it was as you said then she did something wrong, but there may be a
limitation on how long they had to charge her for that crime.

It's not "as I said" but the case as presented to the jury. She
initiated the criminal conduct. We're talking about the same crime.

Trump's first instinct was to treat her like he treated subcontractors
on developments: Stall the payment or not pay at all. At first he wanted
to wait till after the election, for if he lost, nothing she was selling
would be of value. He was advised to spend the money to make problem go
away.

None of this is criminal.

My understanding is that his paying her off to keep the information
secret because he was running for office is exactly what he is being
charged with.

That's not a criminal act being committed by Trump. The criminal act was
committed by her in offering her story for sale then telling Trump's
intermediaries that she'd offer her story for sale elsewhere if she
didn't get paid.

Trump has had his people say he was paying her just to protect his wife,
but all the testimony from various people suggests Trump only cared
about keeping the information about the sex/affair secret because he
was running for office.

That's Trump's defense at trial. He's permitted to defend himself. He
had to offer a reason that wasn't illegal for the coverup.

I'm not even sure if paying extortion is a criminal act on the part of
the victim.

The payment to her was a crime, not because buying rights so she won't
publish what she claimed was her story is a crime, but because keeping
it from being published was of some benefit to Trump as a candidate and
it wasn't disclosed as required in federal law. This is what Michael
Cohen was convicted of, but Trump was not prosecuted for this.

It always seemed like Trump should have been tried for this back when
Cohen was convicted as there's no way for Cohen to be guilty and Trump
to be innocent given how much of a micro-manager Trump has been
reported to be.

I just don't agree that this should have ever been tried.

What Trump is being prosecuted for is ordering that the payment to
reimburse Cohen be written from one of the companies Trump controlled
and taken as a business expense of that company.

The coverup was illegal in and of itself but if there was an underlying
crime being covered up, it was extortion committed by her. There was no
underlying crime committed by Trump to cover up.

Again my understanding was that she didn't extort him

You haven't explained your understanding here and why it's different
from the case the prosecution is putting to the jury.

and that Trump's trying to hide the payment while running for office is
the crime that he committed.

No, that's not the charge as that's not a crime in state law. You
yourself just said that Trump should have been prosecuted for that along
with Michael Cohen but wasn't.

That's the motive for the state crime but not the state crime itself.