New York City: A New Window for the Attorney-General Investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 Manhattan hush money alleged role in Stormy Daniels

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An Ivy League graduate in his late 20’s rented a studio apartment on Third Avenue and 75th Street in New York City. The window looked out at a water tank.

I was trying to divide it up so it would look bigger. It was still a dark, dingy apartment even after what I did. Donald Trump co-authored with Tony Schwartz a 1987 book called “The Art of the Deal”, in which he wrote “even so I loved it.” When I was a kid from Queens, I moved to New York and found an apartment on the Upper East Side. … I was not a kid from the boroughs, but a city guy.

Ultimately, he’d become the first New Yorker since Franklin D. Roosevelt to make it to the White House. But Trump’s Manhattan saga could be coming to a close on Tuesday only a few miles from where it began, when he is scheduled to appear in a downtown courtroom to face criminal charges.

There is no precedent for the next chapter of the former president’s story, and no way to tell how it will end.

“Though we not yet know the details of the charges, we do know that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had been investigating Trump in connection with his alleged role in a hush money cover-up scheme involving adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign…It is the first time any former president has been criminally charged. We are entering an area that has never been entered before.

“It should be evident that no one is above the law, and that Trump should be held accountable for his actions in the way that any other citizen would be. These charges represent the first step toward accountability, but the journey will be long and winding.”

If Trump is elected president in twenty four, he will be able to argue that the case against him should be thrown out because the Justice Department’s 2000 guidance that a president can’t be indicted was unconstitutional. While in work.

Elie Honig argued that the first hurdle for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is to overcome any motion by Trump’s lawyer to dismiss the charges. He needs to convince a few jurors that he is guilty in order for them to vote unanimously to convict.

“Even if a case was tried in a part of the country where Trump isn’t very popular, statistically you are very likely to end up with one or more Trump voters on the jury of 12 people,” said Honig. I know from my days as a prosecutor that jurors are human beings who are subject to the same emotions, biases, and incentives as any person would be. And the legal bar at trial is far higher than in the grand jury…”

In the political arena, “there is a distinct possibility that Trump not only survives but also thrives,” wrote Julian Zelizer. “Trump has an uncanny instinct for using moments of peril to his advantage and his political career is built on punching back against the people and institutions he claims are unfairly attacking him. He retreated back to the well-worn ploy of presenting himself as a victim of a corrupt establishment and his supporters behind him.

Henry wrote that anyone who cares about fairness in our criminal justice system should be reluctant to support Donald Trump being charged in one of the most liberal countries in the world. By all accounts, this should be a federal case.”

“New York state’s entire judicial process is controlled by Democrats who could lose their positions in party primaries. Even though he was the district attorney overseeing the case, Bragg boasted in his campaign that he filed suits against Trump and his administration more than 100 times while in the state Attorney General’s office, something that could be done to curry favor with the voters who disliked Trump. Every judge in New York who would decide the case or hear an appeal is elected for their own partisan reasons. It would take a lot of courage for a judge to apply the law fairly and potentially ignore their voters’ desire for vengeance.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/trumps-manhattan-story-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The Crumbleys: Bringing the Taliban to justice in Nashville, Tenn., On Tuesday, November 8, 2018 a School Shooting

Sorrow, anger and frustration were some of the emotions people felt after a shooting at a school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday that left six people dead.

The Crumbley’s neglected cries for help from their son for months and dismissed serious concerns from the school the day before and the day of the shooting were some of the allegations against them. Yet even as they apparently ignored warning signs, the Crumbleys bought their son a gun and took him to target practice. Their son pleaded guilty to terrorism and murder in October, fifteen years after the mass shooting.

All of this raises the question of how to prevent shootings. And they argued that on this front, there is a positive development — a move to hold parents accountable in certain cases:

“The parents of a teenager who shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan in November 2021 are set to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter after an appellate court last week rejected their contention that the charges have no legal justification,” Peterson and Densely observed.

At the White House democracy summit co-hosted by Costa Rica, the Netherlands, and South Korea, President Joe Biden spoke about the need to oppose dictators.

“This makes the premise of the democracy summit ring somewhat hollow because while the Biden administration does an excellent job of trumpeting its commitments to democracy and women’s rights, only a year and a half ago, it cavalierly abandoned 40 million Afghans to the Taliban’s misogynistic theocracy.”

There is a bipartisan commission to examine the entire war in Afghanistan, which has been going on for 20 years. “Of course, any examination of the US record in Afghanistan is something of a double-edged sword for Republicans,” Bergen noted, “since it was the Trump administration that signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that set the stage for the total US withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/trumps-manhattan-story-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The Love Better campaign: How much should we do? How can the love better campaign in the US be used to help kids cope with breakups and sexual violence?

It might seem like an arcane issue to ignite a popular uprising, but Israelis quickly decided that their democracy was at stake and what followed was a huge wave of protests inside a democratic country in recent memory.

“On Monday, under nearly unbearable pressure, Netanyahu agreed to postpone the overhaul -— which was being rammed through the Knesset — until the next legislative term. The crisis is not over.

“Breakups suck.” So goes the introductory video for a campaign that New Zealand is conducting to help people cope with relationships that have ended. Holly Thomas wrote that behavior doesn’t have to follow suit.

“The nation’s Love Better campaign … aims to help young people recover from breakups and build resilience. The campaign includes a dedicated phone, text or email helpline run by Youthline, an organization dedicated to supporting people ages 12 to 24.”

A survey of 1,200 16 to 24 year olds found that nearly 70% of them had experienced self harm, substance abuse, risky sexual behavior and violence after rejection, which is part of a broader strategy to eliminate family and sexual violence. It is amazing that these campaigns aren’t used as frequently in other countries as well. At the very least, it would improve our collective mental health. At most, it might save lives.”

“It’s about time,” wrote Alaimo. Parents cannot keep their children safe without the help and safeguards of this law, as social networks in the US have become incredibly dangerous for children. Congress should make it a law to protect every child in this country.

“Parents will also be able to access their kids’ accounts, apps won’t be allowed to show children ads, and accounts for kids won’t be able to be used between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. without parental permission.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/trumps-manhattan-story-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The King of Comics: Victor Kirby and the Rise of Adolf Hitler in the Era of World War II, and in his Memory of Stan Lee

“How Putin’s words have been spun in the West may be a surprise to Moscow — but there’s no doubt it will be a highly gratifying one. Russia has used nuclear weapons before. It used them extremely well without firing them, by trading on empty threats about potential nuclear strikes to very successfully deter the West from helpingUkraine in its fight against Russia.

A year before the US entered World War II, a gutsy artist and his writing colleague introduced a new superhero, with the debut cover of the new comic showing him punching the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

The son of Kirby said he was fearful and furious at the rise of Nazism in Europe and the US. Kristallnacht and the appeasement of Chamberlain. He and Simon created their hero in direct response, and Kirby plainly stated, ‘Captain America was myself.’ When he drew Hitler, it was his own anger coming to the surface.

superheroes fell out of favor and Kirby wrote and drew different genres of comic books after the war. When Stan Lee, by then the editor and head writer at what would soon be named Marvel, asked him to try superheroes again in 1961, the two created together the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther and countless others. This, combined with his artistic innovation, earned Kirby the moniker ‘King of Comics.’ It also made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.”

Defending Donald Trump’s Indictment as a Juvenile Appeals Process: A Post-Independent Analysis of “The State of the Union”

Donald Trump’s legal team will look to challenge “every potential issue” of the indictment once they are public, an attorney for the former president said.

Since we don’t know the indictment, we’re not doing anything at the hearing. We will look at every potential issue that the team can get rid of, and we will challenge it if we can. That is what Joe tacopina told Dana Bash on State of the Union.

The former President will learn the charges that the Manhattan grand jury has approved against him on Tuesday when he makes his first appearance in court.

The lawyers would like the charges to be thrown out. But the full slate of charges still aren’t known. And crucially, a judge will ultimately determine if the law is sound enough for the case to move forward to trial.

Former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday, “We can speculate on what evidence we think they may or may not have, but even with the indictment published, we really will not know what the district attorney’s evidence is and what they would present at trial.”

The business record entries that prosecutors link to Daniels and the hush money payments could help the Trump team challenge the case.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/politics/trump-indictment-joe-tacopina-cnntv/index.html

When they realized there was a misdemeanor, they had to cobble it together and it would have been a felony

“They’re not false entries. But assuming they were, they’re misdemeanors way beyond the statute of limitations, so they had to cobble them together to try and get a felony,” he said.

He told George Stephanopoulos in another interview that there had been no discussion of that. “It’s way too premature to start worrying about venue changes until we really see the indictment and grapple with the legal issues.”