ex-President Trump

Let's see if we can put our thinking glasses on and try to figure out the joke.

For a guy who lives in Italy and apparently prefers biden Lucifer sure does a lot of water carrying for the donald

if billionaires want to completely divest from blue states so they can avoid consequences and/or even the whole country, i'll call that bluff all day. LEAVE.

I suspect that if the crime is "falsification of business records", then jurisdiction is established by where the business is incorporated. The money Cohen Org paid to Daniels is whatever, it's the money Trump Org paid to Cohen/Cohen Org that is the issue.

Yeah that's why I included the part about some of the repayment to Cohen coming from Trump's personal account. At that point I would assume that the paper trail and falsification of records is going to be within the NY jurisdiction if his personal account falls under NY jurisdiction, even if the Trust that the rest of the payments came from had not been.

My understanding is that the predicate crimes are the crimes he was attempting to conceal by falsifying the records.

Example: Drug dealing is the predicate crime to money laundering.

Right. I thought that was what Luciom was saying. He was saying that the drug dealing has not been proved, or not to beyond a reasonable doubt anyway. Or that the drug dealing didn't need to occur, but only intent to deal drugs (which, admittedly, doesn't make sense in this analogy, as there would be no money to launder).

Ahhhh, so it’s the every aspect of the whole trial Lucio is questioning. He must agree with blowies summary.

jjjou you're just wrong in your argument about this. A predicate crime in this context is a specific legal term that refers to the crime that a defendant intended to commit when committing a different misdemeanour. Proving that there was intent to commit the predicate crime "upgrades" the misdemeanour to a felony. In this case there were 3 potential predicate crimes (federal campaign finance violations, falsification of separate business records, and tax violations of tax law) and the prosecution had to prove intent to commit one of them when falsifying the business records.

I was asked what pundits are writing about and I listed that.

Can any one in this forum read?

No I am saying that if your crime is writing false things to hide you murdered someone, and writing false things per SE wouldn't be a crime, it's incredible that you can be convicted for writing false things to cover a murder without being convincted of the murder.

I understand that's the law in NYS, I am just saying it's insane.

That would be campaign financing violations, and I don't know how the relevant law works there, but the jury seemed pretty decided. A unanimous verdict in such short order was surprising. (Well, I wasn't expecting it anyway.)

Did you study latin (I did in high school, normal in good public high schools in Italy at least before the left destroyed education)?

Because that's not pre-dicated lol.

That's from predicatus, IE foretold (predicted).

Dude, that's what I said. Looks like you are in that number of people who can't read.

Fact is that proving intent to commit a crime that is insanely complicated in it's definition and extremely nebolous is an additional absurdity.

Proving intent to steal stuff is fairly easy because people know what stealing is.

Proving intent to violate electoral laws presumes you know electoral laws, you know defendant knows them, and you believe defendant knowingly tried to bypass some specific election law rules with his actions.

It's not enough to claim he wanted to influence elections.

In NYS you can't though*unduly* influence them.

Gl having a perfect definitive definition of that (which the jury would need to think intent for violating that was proven right? Right?), that's what trials and case law are for. Which wasn't discussed at depth in the trial!

Normal influence is allowed, it's called campaigning lol.

And withholding private information which you deem damaging to your campaign is absolutely routine and perfectly legal per se.

Which parts of elections laws did trump intend to violate? We don't know and you could bet your house if you ask the jury they can't point you which specific lines of the law trump knew where illegal and wanted to violate through his falsification of business records.

And that's why trying him only for the falsification, predicted on extremely technical and nebulous hypothetical future violations which didn't happen which you insist he intended to do, is insane

Slighted's description of burglary seems a much better parallel than this. Breaking and entering (misdemeanour) gets upgraded to burglary (felony) if you can prove intent to commit a further crime. This means that say the defendant got disturbed and fled without stealing anything, meaning the only actual crime committed was breaking and entering, it could still be upgraded to burglary if the prosecution can prove they intended to steal something.

The key point being that the law doesn't state that it has to have been done in the process of committing another crime, just that it has to have been done with the intent of committing it. Whether that secondary crime ended up actually being committed (and therefore whether it has/could have been proven) doesn't ultimately matter if the intent to commit it can be proven.

Not only not being in place, but if he violated election laws in 2016 why the **** hasn't he been tried for that?

But the falsification happened and the elections happened so what would have prevented the defendant to unduly influence elections after the falsification? Fact is keeping that fact private isn't a violation of any law even if attempted irregularly

Btw the fact that people here, with IQs and success in life decisively way way way over avg still have the details wrong about the process, should show you that the probability of all 12 members of the jury actually having understood the mechanism exactly is basically 0.

They just (correctly) identified that the falsification happened and (incorrectly) convicted automatically after that because it's too complicated stuff, the abstract logic required here is too high level to believe 12 people of which some that didn't even go to college could all understand it in detail, and you all know that

As far as I know, in every US jurisdiction the defendant always has the right to opt for a bench trial. If he or his defense team decided to go to a jury trial, that was presumably because they thought it was strategically favourable to their case.

Ok but all this post mortem endeavor at least for me isn't about finding purported violations of the law (I don't see any glaring ones, the experts which look trustable in their assessments to me don't either, the rest is possible ultra technical appeal stuff which will take it's time through the appeal process to be discussed).

It's about what should I take away if anything from this verdict

This has some truth in the general case but in this specific case it's really not that difficult or nebulous. Cohen already admitted campaign finance violations directly related to the payments to Daniels. The prosecution just had to prove that the falsification of records intentionally contributed to that and that would be enough for it to be considered a predicate crime, even though Trump himself wasn't a named defendant in the original conviction.

In this case the only difficult part to prove would have been the question of whether Trump "knowingly" was breaking campaign financing laws when he did it, not which specific laws were being broken. The law certainly does get into hazy areas when it comes to the question of whether laws are broken knowingly or due to ignorance but this case would be no different than thousands of others in that aspect.

I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say in this post.

As I have expressed upthread, I think professional juries are a good idea, and would address the issue you raised as well as many other issues present in jury trials.