#HUSH MONEY

[strawlessandbraless]

Convicted felon, Donald Trump is legally banned from entering these countries, how can he possibly serve as President of the United States?

🇬🇧 UK

🇮🇱 Israel

🇨🇦 Canada

🇨🇺 Cuba

🇨🇳 China

🇯🇵 Japan

🇮🇷 Iran

🇮🇳 India

🇦🇺 Australia

🇳🇿 New Zealand

🇹🇼 Taiwan

🇿🇦 South Africa

🇲🇽 Mexico

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇧🇷 Brazil

🇮🇪 Ireland

[reasonsforhope]

Former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies by the jury in his "hush money" trial in New York on Thursday, making him the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime.

The jury, composed of 12 Manhattan residents, found that Trump illegally falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. They found him guilty on all counts on their second day of deliberations.

The presumptive Republican nominee for president is now also a convicted felon, a label that could reverberate across the electorate in the months between now and Election Day in November.

The verdict was handed down in the same Manhattan courtroom where Trump has been on trial for the past six weeks. Trump stared at each juror as they confirmed their vote to convict and angrily denounced the decision in the hallway outside the courtroom, vowing to fight the conviction.

Jurors sided with prosecutors who said that Trump authorized the plan to falsify checks and related records in an effort to prevent voters from learning of an alleged sexual encounter with Daniels. Prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office said the conspiracy spanned his 2016 campaign and continued well into his first year in the White House. Trump denied having sex with Daniels and pleaded not guilty.

Justice Juan Merchan set a sentencing date of July 11, just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention, where Trump will be formally nominated as the party's standard-bearer. He could face up to four years in prison and a $5,000 fine for each count, but Merchan has broad discretion when imposing a sentence, and could limit the punishment to a fine, probation, home confinement or other options...

The Biden campaign warned that former Trump's conviction doesn't prevent him from winning another term in the White House from a legal standpoint. 

"There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president," the campaign's communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement.

-via CBS News, May 30, 2024. Live updates: 7:36 pm, 7:23 pm Eastern Time

--

Note: Even if Trump gets reelected, he cannot pardon himself in this case, because this is a state-level conviction. The president can only pardon people convicted of federal crimes, not people convicted by the states. (x, x)

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[sbrown82]

LMFAOOOOOOOO!!!

[philosophicalconservatism]

According to New York, a married man paying hush money to a mistress to conceal a sexual affair is campaign financing. This city can prosecute someone on the basis of the most tortured and bizarre logic I have ever encountered in any major court case, but it cannot prosecute rapists, thieves, drug dealers, and other hard criminals who are guilty of entirely straightforward crimes?

[dailyhush]

Batman: Streets of Gotham (2009) #3 - Hush Money by Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen, Derek Fridolfs, John Kalisz, and Steve Wands

[nando161mando]

This motherfucker…

[strawlessandbraless]

Genuinely forgot November 5th was the US Presidential Election and was like ya Don, Destiel is the only thing that can save us

[ID: A tweet from @/DonaldJTrumpJr reading: Guilty on all counts. The Democrats have succeeded in their years long attempt to turn America into a third-world shithole. November 5 is our last chance to save it. /End ID]

ID by @diamond-rings-and-gutter-bones

[aunti-christ-ine]

[remarkablebookbean]

YALL KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS! CRAB RAVE!

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[batboyblog]

link

[thingstrumperssay]

My grandma just texted me "he's guilty," and that's how i found out that Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts in the hush money trial.

I guess drugging him to shut him up didn't work.

[tomorrowusa]

The Donald Trump hush money trial starts today in NYC.

Jury selection is the first order of business. In normal trials that may take a day or two. With Trump's legal foot-dragging, that could go into weeks.

There had been some doubts about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's approach to this case. There is some new ground here. But Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, an attorney who initially had some reservations about the prosecution, is now "fully onboard" with it.

Over the past year, though, I have realized that my initial doubts about Bragg’s indictment were misplaced. It now seems clear that Trump’s New York trial, slated to begin this week, will be the former president’s only criminal trial before the November election. The other three strong indictments against him in other jurisdictions have unfortunately been delayed by a corrupt judge, a foot-dragging Supreme Court, and a district attorney’s questionable conduct in an already complex case. This, combined with Bragg’s excellent pretrial briefing, has substantially strengthened the case for this prosecution. It is important to American democracy that Trump be forced to defend at least some of his alleged criminal conduct before a jury of his peers in advance of Election Day. [ ... ] Shortly before the 2020 election, Trump wanted to kill a story about his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress. So he allegedly directed his longtime fixer Michael Cohen to pay off Daniels, through a shell company, for her silence. Afterward, Trump funneled $420,000 to Cohen in installments. But he allegedly concealed the payments by listing them as legal expenses for a retainer that did not exist. Last year, I was uncertain whether this scheme, while sordid, rose to the level of a felony offense. I am now convinced that, if proved that he took these actions, it surely does. The falsification of business records is, by itself, a misdemeanor under New York law, but it’s a felony when it’s done with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” In his indictment, Bragg claims that Trump lied about the payments with the intent to violate election law, which is what elevates the crime to a felony. Initially, I was suspicious of this theory; what election law, exactly, was the former president attempting to violate? The district attorney’s initial statement of facts was hazy on this crucial point, raising the possibility that he couldn’t tie the underlying fraud to a state or federal statute. Turns out he could. Bragg has argued, convincingly, that the former president intended to violate at least two election laws—one state, one federal. First, Bragg asserted that Trump and Cohen ran afoul of the Federal Election Campaign Act by making unlawful campaign contributions (in the form of a payoff) at the direction of a candidate (that is, Trump).

As a criminal defendant, Trump has to be in court for the trial. And except for holidays, court will be in session four days a week.

So Trump will be in Lower Manhattan quite a bit for the next couple of months. The New York County (Manhattan) Courthouse is at 100 Centre Street. And he owns a major property at 40 Wall Street (modestly called The Trump Building) where he might occasionally be seen. Google Maps puts the walking distance between the two locations at 0.8 miles (1.28 km). So if you're tempted to exercise your First Amendment right to express your opinions to Trump...