May 25, 2024
Almonte, Ontario

Interested to know…

Toss it out, acquit, hang or send him to jail—what does your legal mind say to you, Bill?

I would so love to be in the jury room to hear the debates that will probably go on and teflon Donald likely will slip thru the noose once more but from my monitoring of trial thru transcripts, I would find him guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt but then I wouldn’t get picked as an impartial jury member!

Karen H.

It is tempting upon the most cursory review of the facts surrounding this case to conclude that the inculpating behaviour is criminal in nature; that is, that the esoteric legal preoccupation with “beyond a reasonable doubt” (whatever that means) seems to be entirely irrelevant to the legitimacy of the prosecution. In addition however – and perhaps of a more persuasive application – is that a good deal of the proper analysis of the recently publicized court proceedings involving the former president of the United States of America and porn star Stormy Daniels is the candid acknowledgement of bias against Trump.

Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford (born Stephanie A. Gregory; March 17, 1979), known professionally as Stormy Daniels, is an American pornographic film actress, director and former stripper. She has won many industry awards and is a member of the NightMoves Hall of Fame, AVN Hall of Fame and XRCO Hall of Fame. In 2009, a recruitment effort led her to consider challenging incumbent David Vitter in the 2010 Senate election in her native Louisiana.

Daniels became involved in a legal dispute with U.S. president Donald Trumpin 2018. Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen paid $130,000 in hush money to silence her about an affair she says she had with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied the affair and accused her of lying. Trump faces 34 State of New York felony charges of falsifying business records with the intent to commit or conceal other crimes relating to these payments. His trial on these charges began on April 15, 2024.

The bias which arises against Trump is predominantly the overriding acceptance that Trump and Daniels had a fling.  This is an assertion supported by Daniels, the fact that she was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement and Trump’s own notoriety for mendacity.  The fact that Trump has denied it all is only good judgement in a court of law unless you haven’t the money to pay for useless defence.

What however is at issue is not the affair; rather it is the intentional falsifying of accounting records to conceal the truth from political scandal. It is an egregious though not dissimilar example of writing off your vacation to the Caribbean as a business expense. Basically it wasn’t the trip that was the crime; it was lying about the purpose of the trip.

The other reality to be kept in mind is that there are many people watching this drama unfold who haven’t a preference for Trump or the Republican Party. Nor is this lack of preference to be dismissed out-of-hand because if it were adopted as the acid test of Trump’s criminality it screams bias. Descending from the rarefied gas of political vendetta, the basic issue of proving the mens rea surrounding an intention to falsify records is much less vulgar or captivating and is purely a question of fact.  When it comes to facts surrounding matters within the Trump orbit, the words of Michael Cohen are as readily attacked as those of Trump for sincerity. And there is always the further suggestion that, “I was only doing what my accountant told me to do!”

In criminal law, mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind“) is the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime. In common law jurisdictions, most crimes require proof both of mens rea and actus reus (“guilty act”) before the defendant can be found guilty.

Yet as in many instances involving private criminal matters the truth often depends upon a balance of probabilities (which is a credential more commonly applicable to civil actions involving tortious behaviour such as allowing a sack of corn to fall from a window on the head of a person below). Among a jury of commoners the distinction between probabilities and reasonable doubt is likely moot, something which in my opinion will work against Trump in this instance because his sexual misbehaviour is so persuasive that it would inadvertently taint everything else on the criminal side whether relevant or not.

Looking at this spectacle from my agèd vantage, I feel the necessity to remind myself that one can easily adopt a self-righteous attitude to matters if one has not done some of one’s own critical examination. The regrettable truth to many contests is that both sides consider themselves fully justified in drawing their own conclusions.  While this may expedite the dissection of detail it does not overcome the detail. There are for example those on Trump’s side who might feel justified pooh-poohing the criminal indictment as purely political (as Trump himself so regularly asserts) because, after all, he’s rich and famous, and that’s what playboys do, namely whore around and who hasn’t had at least one fling on the side? And while this proposition may not be one which you would currently adopt, it is worth imaging whether you might think differently if it were you. And by extension if you currently find life is hard, being unemployed or working for peanuts, you might well feel disposed to want to blame someone or something; and, maybe in that case, Trump is the man who is your vicarious anger and hatred.  And – by further extension – if you’re a schmuck who is currently a GOP member of congress and you owe more money than is good for you for your house, your cars, your cottage and your children’s education, you might just say, “What the Hell! Who am I to say that Trump is a liar!”

All of which is to say only that given the side of the fence from which you’re looking at things they might appear differently. But even if we were to dissolve our prejudices (though I am a far-stretch from doing so with FOX NEWS) we’re still left with what I anticipate to be the overall taste of the fodder, which is a distasteful one even for everyday Americans because I think that everyday Americans (for whatever instinctive reason) by and large (if not indeed unanimously) expect better from their president than the conduct of a teenage brat.  Certainly there are those who see nothing but the ideal in Trump (including religious flavour) but those people are demonstrably suffering inadequacy of their own of such an overwhelming nature that their alliance is neither factual nor legal but purely psychotic.  I might add parenthetically that in my opinion the only reason Trump made any headway in 2016 was because of the reaction by the same “deplorables” against the previous election of the first black president.  I call them deplorables not because they are honest, hardworking men and women but because they relish the elevation of racism; that is, they seek to raise themselves by standing on others. Nor is it a minimal infection; it has also filtered into the Supreme Court.