One of Trump's Crimes: He Overpaid Taxes 🙄

Y’all, I presumed this was a crap case, but I didn’t know it would amount to that pile of poop from Jurassic Park. It is far, far weaker than even I expected, and you don’t have to believe Republicans, Trump fans, or me. Lots of Democrats and progressives who want him thrown in prison are saying the same.

One of the charges is actually that Trump paid New York too much in taxes. The allegation is that he somehow was able to mischaracterize the business of his company by paying more in taxes than otherwise, and he made payments to people that should not have been deductible, treated them as deductible, but paid the taxes on them as if they were not deductible. Here is this from Politico:

The charges against Trump do not include any tax fraud offenses that some legal experts said they hoped to see to buttress the seriousness of the case. However, the statement of facts Bragg filed along with the indictment makes a surprising claim: that Trump and his associates engaged in deception by paying New York state more in taxes than it was owed.

Another charge is that Trump induced people to commit fraud through internal accounting paperwork that those people never saw. This may be the weakest charge of all. A elements of fraud include (1) knowingly make a statement to another (2) designed to deceive and (3) the reasonable reliance of the victim on that statement. One cannot change internal paperwork that no one else ever sees and have that be fraud, but Alvin Bragg is trying to make that case anyway.

Then there’s the overarching crime that ties all these things together to elevate them to felonies. Alvin Bragg never says what that is. He suggests Trump violated campaign finance law and, therefore, violated New York law, but New York itself, in its own laws and judicial opinions, makes clear that a federal candidate cannot be charged with violating New York campaign law. Likewise, federal campaign law makes clear New York cannot prosecute someone for federal campaign law.

Bragg is not going to be able to go the whole time alleging an overarching felony to tie everything together, but that’s exactly how he has started.

This is just so terribly weak. Read this thread from Jed Shugerman, decidedly not a Trump fan. Ian Millhiser, the deeply despondant Vox kid who hates Trump, conservaties, and the Supreme Court is just beside himself in despair over the weakness of the case.

You should also read Dan McLaughlin at National Review, who practices in New York and has one of the most level heads out there. Dan is not of the left and knows the law well and is always deeply insightful.

It is also a bizarre perversion of campaign-finance law to theorize that Cohen committed a crime by making illegal contributions to the Trump campaign that were reimbursed by Trump. Trump, after all, is allowed to make unlimited contributions to his own campaign; if his goal was just to support his campaign, he could legally make the payments directly. I suppose there may be a theory that using some Trump Organization entities as a conduit for this was illegal, but we are really stretching at this point to find a felony in a man paying, in effect, his own money to back himself as a candidate.

The next hearing on this matter won’t even be till December, if the Trump team doesn’t get it thrown out before then. This really is a ridiculous case.