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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

No. While I don’t like Trump and never did, several of the prosecutions against him were political. By political, I mean they would not have happened if he had not become a politician, in fact, they didn’t until he became one and an unpopular one at that.

And he’s doing much worse now so that’s two.

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> they would not have happened if he had not become a politician

That is a little vague. Some of his crimes only happened because he became a politician, so of course the prosecution would be seen as political in that sense. What I would like to know is which crimes did he commit that were only prosecuted because he was a politician, which would otherwise have been ignored?

One seems to be New York v. Trump, which was a civil lawsuit instead of criminal. The main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans, yet the banks lending the money (mainly Deutsche Bank, if I remember correctly) were sophisticated lenders who were capable of assessing those estimates and the risk of lending. The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact happily made money, and they had no complaint about the deals they'd made with Trump. These were all private deals between sophisticated parties who knew what they were doing, and everyone made money. So, no bank suffered harm leading to the charge and no bank lodged any complaint against Trump—the prosecutor went looking for something with which to charge him, and this was the best she could find.

> main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans > The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact happily made money, and they had no complaint about the deals

The first part is either a crime, or it is not, regardless of the second? Suppose I falsely say I am worth millions, and then actually win the lottery. It being true later doesn't change whether it was lie originally.

That's exactly why my first point was that it was a civil lawsuit brought by the Attorney General, not a criminal case: the underlying overstatement of real estate values was not charged as the crime of fraud, which would have required more proof including proof of intent and actual harm—of which the former would have been hard to prove, and the latter did not exist. The District Attorney (who handles criminal matters like fraud) decided there was no criminal case, but the Attorney General took it as a civil matter despite there being no criminal case and nobody unhappy about the deals. It was purely a political prosecution.

Crimes that are not known about are frequently not punished.

Rubbing it in everyone's face is not a great idea.

But, and this is the much more important point you are missing, is the difference between prosecuted for a crime you comitted regardless of how people learnes about it, and using completely unfounded accusations in order to use the prosecution itself as a punishment.

Trump has been prosecuted, several times, for actual crimes he committed. Hilary clinton as an example, had to deal with the obviously fake prosecution attempts of benghazi and email servers.

This is a gigantic and meaningful difference.

Have other people done some of these trump crimes and not gotten prosecuted? Sure, but that's not exactly a good thing.

Directing the doj to manufacture crimes in order to prosecute is much much worse.

A prosecution can be political even if a crime or tort was committed. Our government prosecutes only a small percent of committed crimes.

If Donald Trump had not run for President, or even had just been a normal President, or maybe even if he’d have done everything he did except for cause January 6, he absolutely would never have been prosecuted for this. The justice system was weaponized against him, even if he was actually guilty, which he surely was.

The main crime seems to have been leaving the Democrat party as it raced leftwards.

Your comment seems to be a roundabout way of illustrating the concept of relativity.

You may be right that they were political in that sense.

But also, they probably should have happened were he not a politician. He's been committing fraud and other white collar crimes for quite a while. Unfortunately, we go far too easy on white collar crime in this country. And he's a master of plausible deniability, where he effectively asks other people to commit crimes on his behalf, but in a plausibly deniable way with no written trail.

Well, yeah. When you turn public office into an ATM for your friends and family, one would expect that.

> I mean they would not have happened if he had not become a politician

His wife in the 1990s accused him of rape and intended to sue him as part of the divorce proceedings. She changed her words when she obtained a generous divorce settlement, moving from outright rape to "not in the criminal sense, I just felt violated".

That was over 20 years before Trump gained political relevance.

Which of the prosecutions were political hit jobs? Enumerate which of the federal and state crimes that Trump was convicted were actually politcal hit jobs.

Your definition of political ("not happening if he wasn't a politician") is not what that definition is.

Yeah, the (untrue accusation) is the important part of the political prosecution phrase.

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