Oh and important fact:
The judge stipulated that the fines CANNOT BE PAID VIA CAMPAIGN FUNDS.
Fat Ass can’t run to his useful idiots. It has to be paid via assets and company funds.
#FIRE SALE FRIDAY!
But if you grow weed you to prison for life. How are people ok with this?
Because growing weed is a criminal offense. It probably shouldn’t be, but that’s how the law works.
What happened here was not a criminal case. So given the limited available punishment this is pretty severe. I mean does the idiot even have 300 million dollars?
That’s not common anymore.
That’s not true, people regularly get a decade in jail for growing cannabis in prohibition states
You can literally beat your wife nearly to death and get less time
The only reason it is kept illegal is to keep our prisons filled
The judgement is for 355M. How do you round off 55M?
Headline at NBC now says “more than $350 million”. I imagine it was a typo earlier rushing to get the story posted.
Sounds like NBC needs to care a little more about accuracy and a little less about being first.
Three years? Are you shitting me?
It could be a lifetime sentence!
Inshallah
Think of it like a three year ban from the NFL. In theory it’s not permanent, but in practice it is.
Is it? I mean I’d prefer it if Trump didn’t live to 80, but Rupert Murdoch is 92 and still clinging on to power.
The problem is resuming operations after a three year hiatus.
I would be very surprised if they didn’t have some sort of contingency plan set up for this since they knew it was a possibility.
Sure, but it’s still a problem. Trump could abandon New York, but re-entering the NY market after three years would be like starting over. Probably not worth it.
Or he could turn over control to someone like Ivanka. But for it to survive, she will have to put in her own people and make new contacts of her own. After three years it will effectively be her company, nobody involved will want to see Donald return.
So is this another OJ Simpson-type situation? Don’t go to jail for what you did, just pay a fine for what you did? So no criminal consequences, but some civil ones for the same offense? I mean fraud must be a criminal offense in the US too, right?
This case involved charges of fraud made against Trump’s company by the State of New York. This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The consequences were not supposed to be criminal.
The defamation lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll were also civil cases. She was not charging Trump with the crime of raping her many years ago; She was suing him (twice) for lying about whether he raped her many years ago. (She won both times.)
I think I get where you are coming from, though. When a person is rich enough to pay the fine, and also shameless enough to revel in the infamy of being found liable in a civil dispute, it can seem like that person doesn’t end up suffering any significant consequence for their actions at all.
$355M is a lot of money. Add in the $83M owed to Carroll and these recent fines top $400M, which is an estimated amount of Trump’s liquid assets. Trump is now likely running out of cash-on-hand, which could explain his recent takeover of the Republican National Committee – the GOP’s fundraising (and fund-spending) organization.
Criminal consequences come from criminal cases. Trump has invested most of his legal defense against the criminal cases he is facing. Pending criminal cases involving Trump include:
1.) A RICO (“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”) case charged by the State of Georgia, against Trump and several others who allegedly conspired to steal the state’s 16 electoral votes, including by having the President call (Republican) Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and ask him to “find 11,780 votes” for him. Four people in that case have already accepted a plea deal. This case is currently delayed by a motion to disqualify the DA because she had a romantic relationship with a lawyer her office hired to help prosecute the case.
2.) A federal case against Trump for retaining classified documents. A year or so ago, it was found that former President Trump and former VP Mike Pence had kept classified documents after they left office, and that when Joe Biden left the office of VP in 2017, he also kept some classified documents. Both Pence and Biden complied with federal investigation and surrendered the documents immediately when asked. Unlike Pence and Biden, Trump did not comply with federal investigation, and instead took action to conceal the classified documents in his possession. This case is being heard in a Florida courtroom, because Trump was storing these stolen national secrets in a spare bathroom at Mar-A-Lago. The judge is a Trump appointee, and has demonstrated a tendency to rule in Trumps favor whenever she can, but if she shows too much bias she may get taken off the case.
3.) A federal case against Trump for his involvement in the insurrectionist attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count in congress on January 6, 2021. Trump has been indicted on four charges in this case: “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.” Trump’s defense has been that he has “absolute immunity” for any actions he took while serving as President. This claim of immunity has been denied and appealed multiple times. Trump has now asked the SCOTUS to hear his appeal, but they haven’t said if they will yet. Until they do, that case is on hold, but there’s no one else to appeal to higher than them. If SCOTUS chooses not to hear Trump’s immunity appeal, the lower court’s denial of it will stand and the case will go forward.
