Her case is next month.
He didn’t pay her through his own account, it was paid through his business via his legal team. He then wrote it as a business expense.
If he had paid it himself, and not lied about it this would not be an issue
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If she hadn’t been called to testify… Trump corner would have argued the defence didn’t want her on the stand because she would have committed perjury by telling lies about an encounter (that didn’t happen) - This guy is so full of shit
Yep, greed is part of this too. If the orange idiot would have dipped his hand into his own pocket - stop laughing, I know he never does - then this isn’t even a case.
It’s a rich man suppressing an embarrassing story to stop his wife from finding out. Not great ethically, but not a crime, and in NYC it is met with a shrug of the shoulders, as presumably many people have done that.
But because Trump is such a miser - witness the long list of lawsuits from contractors and vendors who haven’t been paid over the years - he tried to make a personal thing a business thing. Now it is under the gaze of the law, as that is not right. But it gets worse, because when someone is doing that sort of low-level misdemeanor, it is usually an indicator of a bigger crime underneath.
So now the stupid bugger has this case being played out in public, at great embarrassment, and with some risk to him legally, because it is election interference. Had this come out in a timely manner, it is quite possible it would have swayed the 2016 election, as plenty of people were wavering over Trump for myriad reasons, including grab ‘em by the pussy.
He killed the story with help from his tabloid friend, and thought the matter was all smoothed over, but because he is a cheapskate, and didn’t dip his own hand into his pocket to clean up his own mess, it has led us to where we are today.
I hope he is found guilty and the judge has the balls to give him a custodial sentence. He deserves it, even if his other three lawsuits are significantly worse than this one. Unfortunately they won’t see the light of day this side of the Presidential election, and if he wins, they probably never will.
So you play the cards you have been dealt, and this is the lawsuit we have.
Here’s hoping that the rule of law means something…
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Wouldn’t it be possible for Trump to have given himself a pre-emptive pardon when he was still the president?
He hasn’t done that.
Long story short, no, according to two centuries of established norms, understanding, and practice. So he would probably try it and see if his pet Supreme Court would wave it through.
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I remember him tweeting that he had the power to pardon himself. .
I guess if he could have , he really would have done that by now.
Still don’t understand. The trail is about the non disclosure and how it was paid, nobody is denying that. The judge has even said that certain details are not needed. Trump is denying he has had a sexual encounter with her. So I stand by my original stance that it is there to cause embarrassment. It makes the case weaker imo. The focus over the entire storm testimony has been did he do it or didn’t he (sex), rather than the payment, so once again irrelevant, the payment has been made, not denied.
I do agree.
It’s damning though that the Biden administration feels the need to go down this route in an attempt to win the elections. Reflects rather poorly on Biden.
This election in most circumstances would have been an easy win for Biden without needing to have these hearings.
And the Biden Administration has absolutely no power over “State Prosecutors” ?
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It has nothing to do with if they had sex or not.
It is down to how he payed the hush money to shut her up. He paid it through his business and tried to have it passed as a business expense rather than a personal expense, so has he committed fraud?
Had he just paid it himself, then it would be like umpteen hundred other NDA’s that businessmen pay to stop women revealing affairs to their wives and families. But Trump being SmRTer than the rest of us, could not help himself but try to get around it by using his business and business assocciates to hide the payment
That is the heart of why her testimony is relevant. If Trump’s defence did not include the assertion that the sex never happened, evidence establishing that it in fact did would not be relevant. How far into the details that evidence needs to go to establish that his claim is false is really up to the judge to decide. Evidently, he thought it initially went too far, but then the defence’s own cross-examination brought the veracity of those details into the scope of the questions the trial needs to consider. It is a well-established point of law that once you establish that a witness has made one false statements, all of their statements come into question. Trump’s lies are the entire case.
I see you swallowed the Kool-Aid. This has absolutely nothing to do with DOJ or the Biden administration. It is a case brought by State prosecutors in NY.
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Correct.
If the Federal DoJ had authority over state prosecutions, most of the NY cases would have died in 2016-2020 - which is what happened to the federal ones.
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The crux is it has been considered a campaign expense. The prosecutor’s case requires they demonstrate the motivation for paying for the story to go away was the election vs protecting other interests like his marriage. That difference is a fuzzy one, but there are important differences with other seemingly similar cases (most familiar is the John Edwards case from 2008) and Stormy’s testimony is a big part of elucidating those differences - mainly that there are embarrassing elements they’d want to hide beyond the infidelity.
As it is a campaign expense it is still subject to campaign finance law, and while Cohen paying for it makes the restrictions stricter, even had Trump paid for it that would have required him to disclose it as an expense and shine light on something they wanted to cover up.
This is the idea of separation of powers and why this election is so important.
Trump doesn’t believe in the concept and will do everything to destroy it if he gets in.
It’s an essential part of democracy. Without it, you just have a dictatorship.
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Yes, it is critical to understand that the main reason the SDNY (Federal) investigation into campaign finance violations that brought down Cohen did not touch Trump directly was because Barr, inappropriately, shut that down and then tried to ruin the career of the man leading that office.
From a country who’s leader can appoint Supreme Court Judges and other Judges based on political preferences ? Seperation of powers is a myth.
Indeed, he does not.