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If one is being objective and not paying attention to his former job or publicity, he's a first time offender convicted of non-violent offenses with a business footprint that makes him low risk for probation violation.
He would also place a burden on the penal system if incarcerated, and his current state of having round the clock law enforcement presence further lowers the likelihood that he goes to prison.
On the flip side, he has done a lot to actively antagonize the person who will be mostly in charge of his fate, and he's got a good month to build a body of evidence that says he'll immediately disrespect probation.
So almost certainly not, but it's not as close to zero as you would expect for a former president.
Cohen got prison time for the same exact crime, also a first offense. To my mind, being a former president should make them hold to to a higher standard, not a lesser one.
Cohen was convicted of tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance crimes. Trump was not charged with any of these. So not the same crimes.
I don't recall hearing a lot of evidence that Trump conspired with Cohen to evade Cohen's income taxes, or to lie to Cohen's bank.
I don't think Trump is capable of making illegal campaign contributions to his own campaign. There are no limits on self funding an election campaign in this country.
I believe they meant "crime" as in "the criminal act of paying hush money and hiding it to illegally influence an election", not the specific criminal charges.
Trump was convicted of campaign finance crimes, from the same incident though.
Negative. Trump was convicted of general business record crimes. Now these business record crimes are predicted in some other underlying crimes (including the campaign finance ones) that were not charged in the New York court. Trump was not charged with those underlying crimes, and he was not proven to be guilty of them. He was shown to be guilty in the business records case that sits on top.
Finally, I want to restate that Trump cannot ever be guilty of the same campaign violation that Cohen was convicted of, for a simple reason: like any American he is allowed to make unlimited contributions to his own campaign.
That’s still untrue, the jury convicted on the charges that he falsified business records in order to further campaign fraud. The business record crimes were only part of the piece; the jury could have found him guilty on those charges alone but also convicted him on the rest. You keep denying it in this thread but the court records and jury verdicts on the specific charges as well as the jury instructions are all public.
And the crime isn’t Trump funding himself, I’m not sure why you keep strawmanning that. The crime was that he took campaign money and used it for hush money payments and then falsified the records to make it seem like other legal work. We have those records, Trump’s signatures on the checks, witnesses describing the conversations and plans to hide the story, and even the payment system to launder the money through Cohen and even give him extra to cover the taxes so it wouldn’t raise suspicion.
Edit: plenty of people in New York are in jail for the same crime, why should Trump be treated any different than the average citizen?
This is true*. What I was trying to convey was that this statement does not claim that Trump himself perpetrated a campaign finance violation, only that he falsified the business records, etc, etc, so that a campaign violation occurred.
The jury did not have to find that Trump directly participated** in any of the underlying crimes to convict. The conviction is for the false business records. Trump was not on trial for the predicate crimes.
The "strawman" example, as you put it, was too show how absurd it would be to try to claim that Trump himself participated directly in this underlying election crime.
**For instance, if they thought that Trump was helping to cover up one of the underlying crimes, that's enough to convict.
I would entirely agree. But, the world is what it is, and it might be untenable for the justice system or the judge might decide it creates too many opportunities for everything to go wrong on appeal.
Time will tell though, and July is just around the corner.
What about the risk of recidivism though?
Pretty clear that he will do exactly the same thing again.
That's fair. Being openly remorseless does tend to encourage the judge to give the full extent of what they're allowed to do.
I'm just cynical about anyone wanting to be the first person to sentence a former president to prison, and maybe finding any possible reasonable way to skirt over that for whatever reason or just "the good of the country", justice or not.
Or not, and they'll just seize the opportunity to show that justice is blind.
We'll find out in July. 😊
Prisons, on paper, have a responsibility to ensure a degree of prisoner safety. The level of effort required to give a former president that safety is beyond what even a white collar criminal oriented prison is going to be able to easily provide without disruption. For example, who would be preparing his food? How many guards would have access to him while he slept?
It's possible to do, but it's the sort of thing that could factor into the decision.