Wednesday, April 5, 2023

News chunks: About the WI Supreme Court race; Analyzing the indictment

The NYT writes about the bitterness and brute partisan incivility that dominates the radical right. The NYT writes:
The result means that in the next year, the court is likely to reverse the state’s abortion ban and end the use of gerrymandered legislative maps drawn by Republicans. .... With more than 95 percent of votes counted by Wednesday morning, Judge Protasiewicz [the Democrat] led by 11 percentage points, a huge margin in the narrowly divided state.

Justice Kelly [the Republican], 59, evinced the bitterness of the campaign with a testy concession speech that acknowledged his defeat and portended doom for the state. He called his rival’s campaign “truly beneath contempt” and decried “the rancid slanders that were launched against me.”

“I wish that I’d be able to concede to a worthy opponent, but I do not have a worthy opponent. .... I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it.”
What slander? Apparently this:
In the Protasiewicz [advertisement], the narrator says Kelly as an attorney defended child sex predators who posed as ministers to prey on vulnerable young girls by luring them to locations they believed to be safe. The narrator adds, “And Dan Kelly defended those monsters. Do you want someone like that on the Supreme Court?”

Kelly said the ad falsely suggested he represented the defendants through trial. Online court records show Kelly became an attorney in the four cases cited in the ad between early February 1998 and early March of that year. He withdrew as an attorney on Aug. 26, 1998, and the case went to trial that December.  
“There is no intelligence behind it, there is no reasoning and there are no facts, and yet she says it anyway,” Kelly said, adding the spot slanders all attorneys who have handled a defense issue.

Protasiewicz spokesperson Sam Roecker fired back that Kelly’s “entire record is a sham,” dismissing him as an “extreme, right-wing politician who is desperate to hide his record of corruption on the bench and taking radical positions on abortion, Social Security, and more.”
So, is that a legally actionable slander(s) or not? If it is, Kelly should sue Protasiewicz for defamation. Given how bitterly hateful he is, In my opinion he is obligated to sue her or be a hypocrite liar for failing to vindicate the rule of law.

Separately, it is encouraging that the Democratic candidate won by such a large margin for Wisconsin. Maybe public opinion is starting to shift against the radical right and its cruel authoritarian, theocratic agenda.

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Legal analysis of the indictment has started: Analysis of the indictment and the charges against T**** are beginning. According to a NYT analysis published today, the case against the dictator wannabe is reasonably strong. I was led to believe the case was weak, but that might not be true. The NYT writes in an opinion piece by a former Manhattan chief assistant district attorney and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:
For weeks, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has come under heavy fire for pursuing a case against Donald Trump. Potential charges were described as being developed under a novel legal theory. And criticism has come not only from Mr. Trump and his allies, as expected, but also from many who are usually no friends of the former president but who feared it would be a weak case.

With the release of the indictment and accompanying statement of facts, we can now say that there’s nothing novel or weak about this case. The charge of creating false financial records is constantly brought by Mr. Bragg and other New York D.A.s. In particular, the creation of phony documentation to cover up campaign finance violations has been repeatedly prosecuted in New York. That is exactly what Mr. Trump stands accused of.  
First, a note about the Manhattan D.A.’s office that will prosecute this case: It is hardly a typical local cog in the judicial system. In fact, it is unique. Its jurisdiction is the financial capital of the world. That means the office routinely prosecutes complex white-collar cases with crime scenes that involve the likes of the BNP Paribas international banking scandal. Big cases involving powerful, high-profile individuals have been handled by the office for decades.  
While the particulars of Mr. Trump’s case are unique, his behavior is not. Candidates and others have often attempted to skirt the disclosure and dollar limit requirements of campaign finance regulations and falsified records to hide it. Contrary to the protestations of Mr. Trump and his allies, New York prosecutors regularly charge felony violations of the books and records statute — and win convictions — when the crimes covered up were campaign finance violations, resulting in false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity.
The [New York] statute says that a person is guilty of falsifying business records when, “with intent to defraud,” the individual commits certain acts. .... New York appellate courts have held in a long series of cases that intent to defraud includes circumstances in which a defendant acts “for the purpose of frustrating the state’s power” to “faithfully carry out its own law.” To the extent Mr. Trump was covering up campaign contributions that violated New York law, that seems to be exactly what he did.
It’s also worth noting that Mr. Trump was a federal candidate, whereas the other New York cases involved state ones. But court after court across the country has recognized that state authorities can enforce state law in cases relating to federal candidates. 
The 34 felony books and records counts in the Trump indictment turn on the misstatement of the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels arranged by Michael Cohen in the waning days of the 2016 election and the repayment of that amount by Mr. Trump to Mr. Cohen, ostensibly as legal expenses. There are 11 counts for false invoices, 11 for false checks and check stubs and 12 for false general ledger entries. This allegedly violated the false records statute when various entries were made in business documents describing those repayments as legal fees.  
No doubt, radical right legal analyses will come out and completely reject any argument that the case against T**** is even valid, much less strong. 

Worth noting here is the last sentence in the quoted opinion, i.e., the violation of law happened when T**** labeled the disputed documents as “legal fees.” So once again, the weakness in the legal case against T**** is front and center, i.e., how to prove criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt. He will argue the money spent was intended to be for legitimate legal fees, not for illegal payoffs. All it will take for him to avoid legal liability is to create a “reasonable doubt” in the mind of just one juror. 

Concern about proving intent is what leads me to have little faith in the rule of law when it is applied to rich and/or powerful elites who commit white collar crimes. Even if the case against the criminal is strong, the law itself is inherently weak because proving intent is usually nearly impossible. 

What I don’t fully understand is to what extent, if any, the NY law weakens the situation for the accused criminal by reducing the burden of proof the prosecution has to meet. The NY law requires proof of intent “for the purpose of frustrating the state’s power” to “faithfully carry out its own law.” 

I assume, maybe mistakenly, that the same burden of proof of intent applies. But if so, then I misunderstand what the opinion piece is arguing.

The NYT opinion also points out something that I suspect the radical right will vehemently reject, no matter how blatantly false the radical's arguments are. The opinion says:
Whatever happens next, one thing is clear: Mr. Trump cannot persuasively argue he is being singled out for some unprecedented theory of prosecution. He is being treated as any other New Yorker would be with similar evidence against him. .... The indictment is therefore anything but political.
We all know that both T**** and radical Republicans will claim this is a purely political witch hunt by socialist, deep state pedophile tyrants and the evil groomer George Soros. How do we know that? Because they have already made such allegations. And, radical right media such as Faux News will reinforce those lies every day from now until the elections in Nov. 2024.

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