NY: Convicted Felon Donald Trump!

[2016]

Bragg has no case, dismiss it. I hate to defend Trump but I am with him in this case.

[7,052,770]

Bragg has no case, dismiss it. I hate to defend Trump but I am with him in this case.

On what grounds? No one is really disputing the facts of the case, even on Fox News all they ever say it that it just wouldn't be appropriate to convict Trump on this. They never lay out any case for him being innocent, or for it being too ambiguous to convict. It all boils down to "millions of Americans love Trump so therefore he shouldn't be found guilty."

I think if he did it beyond reasonable doubt (and again, no is bothering to try to convince me otherwise), he should be found guilty no matter how many people like him. Being popular shouldn't make someone above the law.

[Ljube]

Bragg has a solid case on falsification of the business records misdemeanor, but no case on the felony charges.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Bragg has no case, dismiss it. I hate to defend Trump but I am with him in this case.

On what grounds? No one is really disputing the facts of the case, even on Fox News all they ever say it that it just wouldn't be appropriate to convict Trump on this. They never lay out any case for him being innocent, or for it being too ambiguous to convict. It all boils down to "millions of Americans love Trump so therefore he shouldn't be found guilty."

I think if he did it beyond reasonable doubt (and again, no is bothering to try to convince me otherwise), he should be found guilty no matter how many people like him. Being popular shouldn't make someone above the law.

And millions more Americans hate him. The millions he has never won the popular vote with.

[emailking]

Bragg has a solid case on falsification of the business records misdemeanor, but no case on the felony charges.

He doesn't have "no case". Cohen said Trump was in the room when they discussed the repayment scheme and also that Trump told him that they just needed to get past the election and then he doesn't care. You may not believe him, it may not be enough to convince you regardless, but it's a case!

[brucejoel99]

Bragg has a solid case on falsification of the business records misdemeanor, but no case on the felony charges.

He doesn't have "no case". Cohen said Trump was in the room when they discussed the repayment scheme and also that Trump told him that they just needed to get past the election and then he doesn't care. You may not believe him, it may not be enough to convince you regardless, but it's a case!

Pecker also testified he, Trump, & Cohen entered into a conspiracy to protect Trump's campaign by stopping the publication of stories damaging to his campaign with hush money, & then Cohen testified he, Trump, & Weisselberg agreed to cover-up payments resulting from the election conspiracy with falsified business records: that's falsifying records (enough for a misdemeanor) to conceal another crime (& qualify for a felony). Only Cohen could testify to Trump causing the cover-up, but prosecutors charge - & convict - with far less evidence from far more unsavory witnesses everyday.

[Ferguson97]

Bragg has no case, dismiss it. I hate to defend Trump but I am with him in this case.

No you don't.

[wbrocks67]

Bragg has a solid case on falsification of the business records misdemeanor, but no case on the felony charges.

He doesn't have "no case". Cohen said Trump was in the room when they discussed the repayment scheme and also that Trump told him that they just needed to get past the election and then he doesn't care. You may not believe him, it may not be enough to convince you regardless, but it's a case!

It's weird how some people are just blatantly ignoring the facts / everything we learned during the trial.

[Yoda]

Bragg has no case, dismiss it. I hate to defend Trump but I am with him in this case.

Wtf are you talking about? A casual observer of the coverage of the trial knows that the prosecution has laid out irrefutable evidence proving each of the charges against trump. They've proven trump was aware of the scheme to cover up the payments to Daniels and directed Cohen to do so personally, they've proven trump intentionally falsified business records, they've proven he personally signed the check to reimburse Cohen, they've proven he knew the money was not for attorney's fees, they've proven he orchestrated the coverup with the intent to conceal the affair from the American public before the '16 election, and they've proven that trump knew about both Daniels and McDougal's stories potentially coming out before the election (from at least three witnesses - Hope Hicks, Cohen and David Pecker) and that he personally thanked Pecker for "his work on the campaign."

You'd have to be a world class idiot to look at all the facts in this case and think that Bragg has no case.

[Badger]

Any predictions for the outcome so far? I have a feeling we're getting a hung jury.

Same here.

Conviction on all felony counts as charged confirmed

[Obama24]

Any predictions for the outcome so far? I have a feeling we're getting a hung jury.

Same here.

Conviction on all felony counts as charged confirmed

Where?

[Progressive Pessimist]

Any predictions for the outcome so far? I have a feeling we're getting a hung jury.

Same here.

Conviction on all felony counts as charged confirmed

Where?

Because SnowLabrador made a prediction. Again, keep letting him. He's doing us all a massive service.

[Obama24]

Any predictions for the outcome so far? I have a feeling we're getting a hung jury.

Same here.

Conviction on all felony counts as charged confirmed

Where?

Because SnowLabrador made a prediction. Again, keep letting him. He's doing us all a massive service.

Trump has incredible luck. I am pessimistic that he will be convicted on felony charges, myself. He has managed to scrape by things that would've ended the careers of 99% of other politicians for nearly a decade. I too can honestly see a hung jury, or a conviction on misdemeanor offenses. I am skeptical he will be convicted of felonious offences purely because he is just that damn lucky.

[Obama24]

Around what date will we have a verdict?

Probably late next week or early the following one.

I kinda wish this trial had been televised. People care about what's on TV. Most young people don't watch or care about the news, but they would've tuned in for a trial. The only people who care about this are those that watch CNN (old people or people that are Democratic anyway), or those that watch Fox (Trump supporters). You might get a couple thousand here, there that do watch their local nightly news but apathy is a massive thing in this country.

This trial should've been televised like OJ's was. Make this the trial of our century. That would have sealed Biden's re-election bid, one way or the other.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Even if they saw it on TV trials are meaningless unless one is convicted, indicting Trump had little meaning period

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Conviction on all felony counts with an outside possibility that the jury tries to compromise by convicting him of some of the felony counts and acquitting him on others simply because juries sometimes do weird things like that.  I stand by my assessment of a 2/3 chance of conviction on all felony counts.  Not a slam dunk, still about a 30% of a hung jury/(or only misdemeanor convictions if misdemeanor stuff is included in jury instructions, but misdemeanor only conviction is much less likely than even a hung jury) and like a 3% chance of acquittal.  

However, conviction on all felony counts is the way to bet.  The Cohen cross was rough, but far from the knockout blow to his credibility the defense needed.  I thought Cohen came off as a sleezeball giving extremely forthright, truthful, and frank testimony.  I also think the fact that he didn’t shy away from acknowledging his own misdeeds or try to minimize them enhances rather than undercuts his testimony’s credibility even though I’m sure the jurors would agree he’s a crook who’d think nothing of stealing from his own mother on her deathbed.  

This is to me a Gravano situation where you hate the guy and what he’s about, but totally believe what he’s saying because he doesn’t try to hide his own misdeeds and is very forthright about them.  The defense needed a Rick Gates situation where the jurors largely disregarded Gates’ testimony (despite still convicting Manafort) b/c he initially tried to downplay/weasel around a direct answer on cross when initially asked about his womanizing (making him look like someone who couldn’t be trusted to tell things as they happened even if it made him look bad) and that was very much not the case with Cohen (which pleasently surprised me as my biggest fear before he took the stand was that he was going to try to strike the pose of a naive friend thrown under the bus and whose only real crime was misplaced loyalty which would’ve rightly destroyed his credibility with the jury).  

And I cannot stress enough that the rest of the trial, including Trump’s behavior during jury selection, were just a complete dumpster fire of incompetence by the defense.  The perfect example is how they started their cross-examination of Pecker by getting chewed out by the Judge for basically attempting to mislead the jury about what a document they were asking Pecker about actually said.  Never a great way to start  And the defense case was a mess.  They couldn’t call their expert witness because they only intended to ask him blatantly improper question.  And Costello was a sh!tshow!  Even without getting chewed out in private by the Judge, he came off horribly and I can’t imagine he made any better an impression on jurors than he did on the Judge.  

Ultimately, someone noted that it doesn’t take a leap of faith to believe all the relevant aspects of Cohen’s testimony, just a tiny skip.  I think that’s pretty much spot on.

[LBJer]

I completely buy the prosecution's factual case.

But the prosecution has done almost nothing to convince me that what Trump did constitutes a crime beyond a reasonable doubt as to the interpretation of the statutes and campaign finance regulations.

I understand that this is really not supposed to be something a lay jury is asked to decide.  But if I'm a juror and the law is as unclear as it seems to be in the case, and I've been given almost no information as to how this vagueness should be resolved, I'd have to feel it was my responsibility to acquit.

This is why I wish the prosecution had a least brought up adultery as a possible underlying crime to elevated the falsification of records to a felony.  Under this theory of the case, I think Trump is 100% guilty with no ambiguity in the law, and I would absolutely convict him.  But unfortunately the prosecution presented no evidence that Trump committed adultery in New York.

Jury nullification is a rarity

You often hear that, but I'm not sure how true it is.  After all, how do you reliably measure how often it happens?  It's not like juries announce it when they do it.  I think there are individual cases where it's clear it happened given how overwhelming the evidence was that the defendant was legally guilty, but I also think measuring its frequency is probably pretty difficult to do.  

Also, jury nullification traditionally refers only to cases where all of the jurors vote "not guilty," giving the defendant an outright acquittal.  But even if only one juror votes to nullify, there's a hung jury--no conviction.  If the prosecution never retries the case because of this happening one or more times, the defendant remains as free as if they had been acquitted (though unlike with an acquittal, they technically always have the possibility of being retried in the future hanging over them if there's no statute of limitations on the crime).

Additionally, even if nullification is indeed rare, that doesn't necessarily mean it's unlikely in a particular case if the circumstances of that case are also rare.  Prosecutions for adultery in New York and other states where it remains illegal have been extremely infrequent at least for decades, and clearly clash with most people's sensibilities today.  Ironically, the New York legislature recently voted overwhelmingly to decriminalize adultery (though the bill still needs the governor's signature to become law).

[LBJer]

Any predictions for the outcome so far? I have a feeling we're getting a hung jury.

Same here.

Conviction on all felony counts as charged confirmed

Where?

Because SnowLabrador made a prediction. Again, keep letting him. He's doing us all a massive service.

Trump has incredible luck. I am pessimistic that he will be convicted on felony charges, myself. He has managed to scrape by things that would've ended the careers of 99% of other politicians for nearly a decade. I too can honestly see a hung jury, or a conviction on misdemeanor offenses. I am skeptical he will be convicted of felonious offences purely because he is just that damn lucky.

He wasn't lucky in 2020.

[Dereich]

Unfortunately yeah, there's too much risk he would just say, yeah those meetings never happened, Cohen and I did it all on their own, Trump knew nothing. He's a hostile witness who wouldn't work with the prosecution.

And even if the prosecution doesn't have Weisselberg locked into particular statements that'd help them prove their case against Trump, or documented evidence that Weisselberg couldn't hope to deny on cross-examination with any shred of credibility, the defense isn't entitled to what they'd really love out of this, the "missing witness" jury instruction to infer the prosecution didn't call him because his testimony would have been exculpatory, because Weisselberg wasn't solely for the prosecution to call; the defense could've too, & they didn't.

The defense doesn't have the obligation to present any case.
The prosecution has to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Not calling Weisselberg creates an opening for a reasonable doubt.

They could have offered him a deal and sealed the case. And they didn't.

Of course, this doesn't go into the jury instructions, but this will be in jurors' minds.

Brucejoel is right in so far as the defense is not allowed to make the argument that the prosecution should have called Weisselberg (or any other witness) or comment on what uncalled witnesses might have testified to when they had the power call them as well. Will the jury still think about it without the attorneys making the argument? Who knows. As I've said before, juries are forces of darkness who do not follow their instructions and instead come to their verdicts based on god-knows-what.

[Ferguson97]

Hung jury.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Any predictions for the outcome so far? I have a feeling we're getting a hung jury.

Same here.

Conviction on all felony counts as charged confirmed

Where?

Because SnowLabrador made a prediction. Again, keep letting him. He's doing us all a massive service.

Trump has incredible luck. I am pessimistic that he will be convicted on felony charges, myself. He has managed to scrape by things that would've ended the careers of 99% of other politicians for nearly a decade. I too can honestly see a hung jury, or a conviction on misdemeanor offenses. I am skeptical he will be convicted of felonious offences purely because he is just that damn lucky.

He wasn't lucky in 2020.

He kind of was. He should have lost by as much as polls suggested he would.

[DaleCooper]

He's not getting convicted. Anyone who ever expected someone like Trump to be held accountable is delusional. Go watch some fantasy show like West Wing.

[brucejoel99]

Proposed jury instructions dropped:

https://twitter.com/frankrunyeon/status/1794177920128471544https://twitter.com/frankrunyeon/status/1794177927569158228https://twitter.com/frankrunyeon/status/1794177935085343020

[emailking]

What's the answer to "How did Merchan rule? 🤐" ? Just that he didn't?

[brucejoel99]

What's the answer to "How did Merchan rule? 🤐" ? Just that he didn't?

He reserved ruling at "the hearing in [their] earlier report" (so "at least for now, it seems we won't know exactly how the judge will decide to charge the jury until it happens").