The indictment is out - and it's not only a nothingburger, but a super-deluxe nothingburger with extra cheese.
Back in the day, when the police wanted to make an example of a stoner who was growing a couple of pot plants under gro-lites in his closet, they would weigh the pot plants - including the pots they were growing in, the dirt, and the rocks at the bottom of the plant pots - and then claim the hapless stoner was "in possession of 45 pounds of marijuana narcotics!"
It was stupid. What he actually was in possession of was less than an ounce of weak weed, that had no more THC in it than lawn clippings and tasted about the same when you smoked it. But cops - and district attorneys - love to overcharge.
It is like these situations where you read about some guy who was "in possession of" thousands of images of child pornography. What a pervert, right? Well, what they found, on his hard drive, was a cached 30-second portion of a video, which, at 60 frames per second, comes out to a whopping 1800 "images". And it is possible to e-mail someone a link to a video - or a video itself - and if the person clicks on it, the video will load into their buffer. If the recipient closes the window in horror, well, they still "downloaded" it onto their hard drive, and portions of it are not erased, unless you do a sector-by-sector scrubbing or reformatting of your hard drive. Yes, if you want to "get even" with someone, you could send them such a link and then report them to the police (but you yourself would be guilty of possession as well!). Worse yet, a government agency could do this to a citizen - if they were corrupt. But that never happens - or let's hope it doesn't.
The point is, prosecutors love to play these sort of games, claiming that a perpetrator did more than they actually did - counting each bullet as an illegal possession of a firearm, for example, or indicting people on numerous counts for the same act. The reason is simple - if you have a number of charges, it scares the crap out of the defendant, as they are looking at decades in jail. So you over-charge and then offer a plea bargain on one or two charges and the defendant goes for it. Justice served, except that we are finding out today that many a defendant (particularly minorities and the poor) take these plea deals even if they didn't commit the crime, because they are scared a jury will convict on all the charges and put them in jail forever - which has also happened.
How ironic - Donald J. Trump finding himself in the same legal meatgrinder that young black men face. Maybe he will develop empathy as a result, but I doubt it.
If you read the indictment and have any sort of legal background, you'll have a good chuckle. The "34 felonies" are all related to the same event, and they really should have been charged as one misdemeanor and the fine paid the day Trump was arraigned. And I say this, not as a Trump supporter, but as a (former) lawyer and Democrat. On a personal level, I just find him to be plebeian and gross - his choice of banging a porn star is an example of his baseness - as well as his tastes in food, women, fashion, and architecture. He is everything that is wrong about America.
But that doesn't mean I mindlessly agree with how this was handled.
In case you missed the bus, the "crime" goes like this:
1. Trump has an affair with a trashy porn star. Trashy is as trashy does - and Trump is trashy.
2. He decides to run for office, but realizes that the evangelicals won't like his personal life. Funny thing, they didn't care - they are as trashy as Trump (highest rate of teen pregnancies and divorce is among evangelicals).
3. He hires hapless attorney Micheal Cohen to pay the porn star $130,000 - and odd amount. I am guessing that Trump being Trump, he offered $100,000, thinking a porn star would think this was "a lot of money" and they haggled over the amount. She countered with $150,000 and they finally settled at $130,000. The art of the deal - right? (Stormy won).
4. The porn star signs a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for $130,000. Up to now, no crime has been committed - it is not illegal to pay someone to sign a non-disclosure agreement. If it was, every corporation in America is guilty of this crime.
5. Cohen sends a bill to the Trump Org for $130,000 plus his fees, categorizing all of it as "legal services" - which is billing fraud. Not really a crime per se, but enough to get you into trouble with the State Bar. I had a boss who did this once. Yes, there was an investigation. No, nothing ever came of it. So long as the client doesn't complain, it is not a huge issue. But apparently, it was enough to scare the crap out of Cohen and get him to testify.
6. The Trump org pays off Cohen in a series of smaller payments - and enters the invoices in their system as legal expenses. This is where the 34 charges come from. Each check is considered a "falsified business record" and even each check stub, invoice, voucher, and money transfer from the Donald J. Trump irrevocable trust. Even just receiving Cohen's invoices and filing them is deemed "falsifying a business record."
So 34 charges for one crime - not atypical of any district attorney's filing strategy. But not 34 crimes. And in the greater scheme of things, not a great crime. Note that it does not appear that the DA is claiming tax fraud. And that is probably because the Trump Org pays little or no taxes in some years, so a $130,000 fraudulent "deduction" isn't going to make a dent in his tax bill. Besides, since the Trump Org is basically a licensing operation of the Trump name (no, he doesn't own all those golf courses and buildings that his name is being chiseled off of), they could argue that preserving his image is, in fact, a business expense.
But of course, that isn't stopping the full-on Trump haters from thinking this is the "smoking gun" that will put Trump in jail. But I doubt it will. In fact, the whole thing will backfire. Once people realize it is a nothingburger, they will say, "Well, that settles it, Trump did nothing wrong!" And that makes me think that either the Democrats are being particularly stupid, the DA is using this to advance higher ambitions, or that somehow this is being engineered to make all accusations against Trump look insignificant.
It is like the Bush/National Guard thing. 60 Minutes (which has always had a shitty track record - stop acting shocked about Leslie Stahl) did a piece claiming that Bush II ducked out on his National Guard duty. The "smoking gun" was a letter clearly created using Microsoft Word, supposedly from an era of IBM Selectric typewriters. It was laughably stupid - and again, people said, "Well, there was nothing there, there must be nothing to the other accusations!" One has to wonder if Bush himself didn't plant that letter. It is a strategy that is commonly used to deflect criticism.
As a friend of mine remarked, it would have been better if indictments from Georgia came out first. They have Trump on record asking our Governor and Secretary of State to "find" over 30,000 votes. That's a significant fraud. That's treason. But now that will be swept under the rug in favor of the "Stormy Daniels" sex scandal.
And this is a shame, not because Trump is a decent person - he isn't. It is a shame because it has become part of this tit-for-tat investigation and accusation and impeachment attempts that go back to Watergate. The GOP was pissed about Watergate - and Iran-Contra. So they ginned up the "whitewater investigation(s)" which, after years of painstaking research revealed that Bill Clinton got a blowjob in the White House. That was it. And Republicans thought the rest of America was so revolted by sex as they are (but of course, they just feel bad about what they do - right Lindsey Graham?) that this revelation would be enough to destroy Clinton.
Sadly, they did fail to prosecute a real crime - offering Monica Lewinsky a government job in exchange for her silence on the matter. Of course, the whole whitewater thing came to nothing, but it spurred more investigations on both sides. A President is elected, and a standing committee on investigating the President is created - strategically releasing damning claims at particular times to either discredit the President at a critical moment or to deflect attention from something their side is doing.
So we have "Benghazi! The Musical!" now running on London's West End, followed by The Hunter Biden Laptop Story - another super-deluxe nothingburger, this time with special sauce.
And maybe, over time, people will see through this. Nothing ever comes of these "investigations" ever, it seems. Is Hillary in jail yet? How long does it take to go through the hard drive of a laptop? What people will start to realize is that there is no "there" there. And maybe they become jaded by all these investigations and start to ignore them.
Which, of course, could be a strategy, as I noted above. Indictments of Trump have been promised since the day he ran for office. And here we are, six years later, prosecuting Trump over what is probably the most trivial offense of his career. He's done a lot of egregious things over the years, banging Stormy Daniels wasn't one of them.
Sadly, I think this indictment will just add more momentum to the investigation/counter-investigation flywheel and keep it spinning forever. Expect bombshell announcements from the Hunter Biden Laptop committee shortly. Would you like to supersize that nothingburger meal?
What is really sad is that your average American didn't read the actual indictment or even the statement of facts (which is not a legal charge) but instead relied on some talking head on the channel of their choice, which told them what they wanted to hear. And what they want to hear is "Hooray for our side! Too bad for the other guy!" and this partisan "divide" that the media finds so profitable is fueled even further.
People blindly love Trump or blindly hate him. Most cannot articulate an actual policy that he enacted that they are for or against. They root for politicians like NASCAR fans root for their favorite driver. It is mindless and stupid, of the first order.
Choose your battles wisely. Insurrection and trying to illegally alter the outcome of a legitimate election are real issues and real crimes. Paying off a stripper, which might seem tawdry and generates a lot of headlines, really isn't.
Sadly, people just don't get this.
