Tucker looks at why Donald Trump might possibly be indicted and questions whether that’s even illegal and punishable at this point. Highlights include:
“The dominant rumor on the internet over the weekend was that Donald Trump will soon be indicted, possibly even handcuffed on camera. Is that true? We can’t say. We do know that Trump is the subject of a grand jury investigation in Manhattan, that’s a city that voted against Donald Trump by almost 80% in the last presidential election. We also know that the grand jury was empaneled by a Soros-funded DA called Alvin Bragg.”
“So we would assume on the basis of that evidence that’s it’s pretty likely Trump does get charged with something at some point, but charged with what? That’s the question that should matter. In a free country, laws are universal. Laws apply to all citizens equally precisely because all citizens are considered equal.”
“Eight years ago as he was running for president, Trump paid a porn actress named Stormy Daniels $130,000. Daniels alleged that she and Trump had at one point had sex. Trump denied that, he still denies it. But in exchange for promising not to repeat that claim in public, Trump through his then attorney Michael Cohen, sent Stormy Daniels a check. Was that legal?.”
“Because there was a campaign in progress at the time, officials at the Federal Election Commission later examined the transaction between Trump and Stormy Daniels. Federal investigators concluded that nothing criminal had taken place, and in fact, settlements like this, whatever you think of them, are common, both among famous people, ‘celebrities’ and in corporate America. The result is usually known as a NDA, a non-disclosure agreement.”
“It didn’t really answer the question. Why are we handcuffing Donald Trump? Liberals don’t seem to care at all as long as it happens, as long as Trump gets handcuffed. But, in fact there’s plenty of evidence that Trump committed no crime in sending money to Stormy Daniels.”
“We don’t have to guess. Consider the case of former North Carolina senator John Edwards. Long after Edwards left office, Barak Obama’s DOJ charged him with federal finance violations. So, the premise of the case against John Edwards was that he had received $1 million in gifts and that he spent that money in ‘hush money’ payments to his mistress with whom he later had a child. Obama’s DOJ argued that the money Edwards sent to his girlfriend amounted to ‘campaign contributions.’ Edwards never reported that money, so Obama’s DOJ tried to send him to prison.”
“Well, in the end, the case fell apart under the weight of its own incoherence. So, Obama’s lawyers argued that any payment that could conceivably help a political candidate politically is by definition a campaign expenditure. There’s no law that says that, by the way, they just made it up. But if you think about it for a second, it doesn’t make sense. If that were true, flip it around. It would mean that candidates could use donor money and also taxpayer money in the form of federal matching funds to pay for any personal expense as long as that expense could conceivably benefit them politically.”
“Not surprisingly, John Edwards was acquitted in that case.”
“What’s interesting is even as Bragg has been single-mindedly focused on Donald Trump and his ‘crimes,’ sending money to a porn star, he has been not only ignoring real crimes, but downgrading felonies to misdemeanors and letting actual violent criminals out of jail as quickly as possible. On his first day in office, first day, Bragg, consistent with the ideas of the man who paid for his campaign, George Soros, issued a memo explaining his office will ‘not seek a corsarial sentence except in cases involving homicides, economic crimes, and a small number of felonies.’”
“Bragg seems to be alleging that Trump violated New York’s Business Record Act by falsely reporting the payout to Stormy Daniels as ‘legal fees.’ Now, if this were true, it would constitute a misdemeanor and the statute of limitations has already run out for that, for the bookkeeping error, assuming it even happened. But Bragg apparently is thinking about charging Trump under a felony version of the Business Records Law, one that punishes businesses for falsifying records as a way to commit another separate crime. That would be the campaign finance violation, which as we mentioned, was not a campaign finance violation, and we know that from the FEC, which policies campaign finance violations. By the way, if it were, that would be a federal crime, not something that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA would be prosecuting.”
“Make no mistake, this is a turning point for the country. Now, the headline here is not that they’re being unfair to Donald Trump again, though of course they are, or even that Trump is the former president of the United States. Who cares? Though, as long as we are indicting retired presidents, where are the charges against George W Bush for invading Iraq under false pretenses and giving permanent normalized trade relations to China, which completely wrecked our economy?”
“What happens if they get away with this? If they use the Justice Department, in full view of everyone, to settle a political score and to keep the White House, just to take a guy out of the race who seems to be doing fairly well? We’ll destroy the justice system, and that’s not a small thing. A functioning justice system has kept this country peaceful for hundreds of years. The purpose of a justice system is to administer justice so that citizens don’t have to do it themselves, you outsource that duty to the government. But what happens when you take that away, when there is no justice system?”
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