It’s why they didn’t stick him on emoluments, nepotism, tax dodging - even “improperly storing classified documents” somehow turned out to be a brush too broad.
So now Alvin Bragg is (supposedly) indicting him for campaign finance violations. Okay. He’s probably guilty. But both Obama and Hillary paid fines for the exact same crime. So did John Edwards, for a VERY similar situation to the Stormy Daniels thing iirc.
This isn’t whataboutism - my point is that, if this indictment goes forward with the rumored rationale, every single politician will now have to watch their ass on campaign funds for the foreseeable future lest the opposing party find out.
That’s a good thing for America and a very obnoxious thing for the entire political class. I suspect Alvin Bragg is getting many angry phone calls tonight from folks who would otherwise like to fire Trump into the sun.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/08/22/election-law-violatio...
Potentially we could see several other indictments. Such as the Federal cases for the classified documents and the Georgia case for interfering with an election.
This is just the first one. Doesn’t have to be the last nor does it mean he is instantly ruled guilty and is going to prison or paying a fine. He will have his chance in court to make a case for his innocence in the face of these specific charges.
The United States has many local prosecutors that operate independently within their jurisdictions and are not bound to hold their charges in deference to some other charges that may be more serious coming later.
It's not the job of all those intelligence agencies to do that. This is a law and order question, which must be handled by the legal system, not the NSA and CIA.
They very clearly have the capability to coordinate the entire media apparatus, law enforcement, etc to cuff a sitting Governor and quickly send him to a federal pit and down the memory hole for essentially the exact same sort of quid pro quo that was underpinning the first Trump impeachment.
Trump isn’t Phoenix Wright, he’s only still a free man because the Blob either can’t come to a consensus on “Blago’ing” him - or else the constant “The walls are closing in on Drumpf THIS time” drama is serving a larger purpose.
The alleged crime happened 8 years ago by now. Some more recent misdeeds might still yield more indictments.
The jurisdiction is New York state, where Trump's status as former president is irrelevant (unlike insurrection related issues, which I guess are federal, and therefore for which his status as sitting president would've made impeachment the remedy rather than criminal prosecution).
There is a cooperating witness spilling the beans on this one. On his mini coup attempt, maybe they were a bit better at containing associates.
I'm sorry, I'll try to reword it to come across differently. My whole question is: Why hasn't he been indicted of bigger/harsher crimes already?
did he or did he not incite an insurrection on January 6th? there was an entire committee about it. he did, right? ok... so... not indicted, got it, moves slowly
did he have classified documents when he shouldn't have? yes. not indicted
did he do something wrong in regards to votes in georgia? yes. not indicted
i guess i just don't get it shrug it's as if like... based on the fact that he hasn't been indicted, you can conclude... he didn't do anything illegal, because if he did, he'd be indicted, right?
EDIT: To back this up, from Wikipedia:
In the United States, impeachment is a remedial rather than penal process,[13][14]: 8 intended to "effectively 'maintain constitutional government' by removing individuals unfit for office";[14]: 8 persons subject to impeachment and removal remain "liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to LawDoes it suck that it’s taking so long? Of course. Unfortunately, that’s how the system works.
At the federal level, Jack Smith is currently investigating the January 6th case, the related forgery of documents, and the classified documents. Since he's a special prosecutor if he declines to indict on the things in his remit he's required to file a report to Merrick Garland with his declination decision and reasoning. That hasn't happened yet.
Similarly for Georgia, a Special Grand Jury made a report recommending he be indicted. That then goes to a Grand Jury, which will make the decision on whether he be indicted. That Grand Jury hasn't sat yet, so that's also in process.
So, all of those things are in process. They haven't made a decision not to indict yet, so it's incorrect to draw conclusions assuming he won't be indicted for those things yet. It's too early to say, for each of the things you identified.
> did he or did he not incite an insurrection on January 6th? there was an entire committee about it. he did, right? ok... so... not indicted, got it, moves slowly
The latest on this is that Mike Pence is going to appear before that grand jury: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/28/judge-says-pence-mu...
So the correct status is not yet indicted.
> did he have classified documents when he shouldn't have? yes. not indicted
Latest status: Some of Trump's lawyer's records must be presented to the court:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/22/trump-court-rejects...
not yet indicted.
> did he do something wrong in regards to votes in georgia? yes. not indicted
Trump's lawyer there is fighting to avoid him being indicted (as you'd expect):
In a 483-page filing, Trump’s attorney Drew Findling urged a state court in Georgia to prohibit an Atlanta-area district attorney there from filing charges related to Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/20/trump-georgia-indic...
not yet indicted.
The legal system is slow, but I think it's fair to say that in all these cases the legal teams are being very careful because bringing a case against a former President is unprecedented, and they want to be sure it is a good case.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable question. The basic answer I'd give is that the bigger/harsher a crime is the longer it takes to build as a case.
The bigger or harsher a crime is, it usually has more protections and requirements in order to prove. It takes longer to gather the relevant evidence, longer to put together a theory of the case, and longer to button everything down and present to a grand jury.
It's kind of like asking why it takes developers longer to build the biggest/coolest features in a video games. It's a lot more work!
This was also a question that came up quite frequently when the first Jan 6th defendants were charged. The first wave of defendants were charged with things like "trespassing" and other fairly mild charges. A lot of people were upset about that. But they just came first because they were much easier cases to proves and make. Eventually more serious charges such as "assault with a deadly weapon", "obstructing congress" and "seditious conspiracy" were later charged and convicted in front of a jury.
So, I generally wouldn't be surprised to see the easier/simpler cases come before more complicated cases. That's not to say that he will be charged with bigger/harsher crimes. Maybe the facts won't bear those cases out, and they won't be charged. But the ordering doesn't seem like it should be particularly surprising.
Prosecutors in their respective jurisdictions should look for crimes and prosecute if they see malfeasance. In the case of NY, these are the charges that were at the top of the priority list for that one prosecutor. Multiple other prosecutors are looking at crimes in other jurisdictions and I would expect Trump to be facing charges in at least 2 and maybe 3 or 4 courtrooms on entirely independent indictments.
They will do ANYTHING to stop him out of fear, anger, arrogance etc. The problem here is Trump is an expert at reflection. This HAS ALREADY empowered his base, and strengthened Ron Desantis.
I think the hardest part to accept is nearly half the nation DOES NOT AGREE with progressive principles at their very core.
There's a reason we don't do popular vote; California and New York would pretty much pick the president every election.
Take a look at the geographic distribution of red v blue by county in the 2020 presidential election [1].
Relying on only the popular vote could devolve the country into a hunger games type dystopian hellscape where 90% of the country is controlled by a few dense urban clusters.
Electoral college was a sop to slavers and should be deleted. It doesn't empower small states, it empowers large states which happen to be swing states.
Founders’ intent is pretty irrelevant to today’s problems. They ran forced labor plantations, hadn’t mastered electricity or germ theory of disease, and the biggest city was ~30K people.
1 person = 1 vote, get rid of all the rural planter rigs.
This is defensible, and I'm sure you would not balk at being called "anti-majoritarian", but lets be clear about what is going on.
Also, post-Civil War, this "we're a republic not a democracy" stuff really changed significantly. While it may have been absolutely true in 1776, it became much less true in the 1800s, and has continued to become even less so in the 1900s. It may have been better if the Constitution had been amended to reflect this (since it was happening anyway), but it's burying your head in the sand to pretend that the original conception is reality on the ground today.
The universe doesn't owe unpopular ideas equal footing. People who don't like what cities think might feel like the odds are stacked against them in a popular contest. They are correct.
We don't give new chess players extra queens, either.
I'll do it too:
Republicans have won 8 out of the past 14 elections, and won the popular vote as well as the electoral college in six out of eight [1].
Or, looking at it another way, of the past 14 elections, republicans won the popular vote by an average of 7.42%, while democrats only won by 5.28%, which if you took that pointless cherry picked data seriously could convince you that on average republican candidates are significantly more popular than democrats.
The fact is, this country is split fairly evenly along the nonsensical left/right axis.
A more interesting evaluation would be along the authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian axis. I think a much larger percentage of Americans fall along the antiauthoritarian axis, and that the noise in the left/right false dichotomy is a result of that more than anything.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
If they didn't go to absurd lengths to chop up districts and make it harder for poor people to vote, it wouldn't even be a close fight.
Your own link shows that Democrats have won the popular vote 7 out of the last 8.
Here are more complex ones:
"[Party A] is actively censoring speech that they don't agree with, calling it misinformation, even though their 'fact checkers' have shown strong political bias. Do you support this?"
and
"[Party B] wants to restrict your right to your body and self-ownership by limiting access to healthcare like abortion and gender affirming care for adults. Do you support this?"
These are the sorts of political "points" that both parties try to score. There are lots more examples.
What's the common theme?
There's an underlying message of "scary authoritarian government controlling me".
I think that most Americans, regardless of political party, have fairly strong antiauthoritarian leanings. I think both political parties attempt to exploit this in political messaging, but neither actually mean it.
By definition, a political party seeks power.
Of course, no one wants to point out their own power-seeking, so the only option is to point out your opponent's.
The sort of authoritarian instincts I was thinking of involve things more like: incarceration camps for people with national origins in the wrong place, immigration policies denying entry to people from the wrong place, ignoring Constitutional separation between church & state to allow "just a little" theocratic bleed-through (imagine if the "church" in question was a mosque), using the army for law enforcement, outlawing more strikes by "critical workers", seeking to restrain the behavior of corporate persons (previously established as subject to the first amendment by SCOTUS) ... and we could go on. Basically, "fascism light" - nothing too horrible, just round one of Pastor Niemoller's famous anecdote.
Wasn't that just a political play? Given that America as a society at large is pretty conservative, even within the Democrats base, pandering to opposing gay marriage gives a net positive voting.
Also, broadly speaking, being progressive means wanting change and being conservative means being more comfortable with the status quo. It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote, more of those would be latent conservatives. Or at least, it’s very hard to see a progressive majority in there.
Could be true, but it's certainly not "obvious". There are myriad reasons (especially in the USA) why people might not vote that nothing to do with their political opinions (ideology or intensity). I am sure that a significant number of the 120 million non-voters were "not motivated", but not all of them. And of the "not motivated", it is hard to know the real reasons why and what it means. Some of them, for example, would never vote, regardless of who ran or what the platforms were. Maybe some of them would vote for radical progressive if there was one with credible chance of winning. Maybe some of them would vote for a blatantly Mussolini-inspired candidate. Either way, it isn't obvious that motivation was the reason to not vote for all of them and it certainly isn't clear that they are more likely to be "latent conservatives".
Regarding the original point, Pew published some interesting stats on voter preferences:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v...
According to this, progressives are a very small slice of the population, and nowhere near a majority even if you include adjacent groups.
Alas, we appear unlikely to find out, since no presidential/senate candidate is going to do anything truly populist with economic policy for fear of pissing off the big donors.
But anyway, I do not consider Trump as having been rendered ineffective, and he certainly isn't buried.
More centrally, there's no obligation of those with the (literal or metaphorical) printing presses to spread the good word Our Favorite Populist of the moment. In the USA, we ceded control of "the press" to the private sector, without any expectation that they would ever act against the interests of their owners. There's no reason why any multi-(m|b)illion corporation is ever going to champion Bernie Sander's policies. On the other hand, Trump's policies (from day one) were just fine for the largest news organization on the planet, precisely because they were never threatening to the status quo.
If people actually want to hear populist policies, they're going to have to pay attention to something other than corporate owned media, regardless of its nominal political orientation.
It's like if your baseball team lost a game and saying "yeah, but they had the fewest batters struck out!" OK... but that's not how the winner is determined, and both teams would have played differently if it were. We can't know what the outcome would have been, in that case.
ANYTHING, eh? Please tell me, what did they do? Trump won an election (thanks to the mechanics of the Electoral College), he served as president, he passed laws (some of which the courts overturned, as happens with most presidents), he handed out pardons (some wise, some not), and then he lost an election.
What is this "ANYTHING" that has been done to stop him?
Attempting to take a popular political figure out by blatant abuse of the legal abuse is a bit more concerning.
I assume murder. What else?
The issue here is that people went looking for a crime for almost a decade, singling out Trump in a deranged crusade. Bush levelled entire countries. Obama put the foundations of the global spying apparatus in place. Biden might be on the verge of igniting WWIII with the policies of escalation that the US is employing.
Then in that background, there is speculation that Trump is going to be arrested for something related to Stormy Daniels after the levels of effort put in to pinning something on him. The people who feel that is appropriate can't serious. Based on what we've seen of the Trump saga so far, this is probably abuse of process. If that level of effort was put into another politician, they'd be in jail too.