Should Donald Trump fail a second time to be re-elected he faces the very real possibility of jail time and massive financial penalties due to the sheer volume of criminal cases and civil lawsuits that are on hold until after the election.
That is the opinion of Syracuse University law professor Greg Germain who explained in an interview with Newsweek that the former president’s only path to get out from under the federal cases he now faces is to beat Vice President Kamala Harris in less than two weeks and then push the Department of Justice to drop the cases filed against him.
As Germain stated, the multiple federal cases Trump is facing are solid and his only path to victory may be having them shut down.
Newsweek source: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-legal-cases-georgia-washington-florida-new-york-stormy-daniels-chutkan-cannon-1974406
criminal cases and civil lawsuits that are on hold until after the election.
Why are they on hold? It’s insane it’s taken so long to push those cases, and it’s even more insane if they are on hold.
Trump is a normal citizen, and shouldn’t enjoy special privileges.
Except USA is no-longer a country of law, it’s a corrupt oligarchy.
Always has been but normal people just finally starting to understand how bad it really is.
Modern oligarchs dont even pretend anymore and they dont have since peasants are fighting each. They dont care who wins elections for the most part as they will mostly get what they want either way
Except USA is no-longer a country of law, it’s a corrupt oligarchy.
It’s always been this way. The internet just does a better job of propagating information about it.
No, Nixon stepped down because of Watergate, you won’t see similar honesty from Republicans today.
They are exploiting the judicial system, and to Prosecute Trump for things he did in the open as president to enrich himself and his family isn’t pursued, even now after 8 years.
After Nixon the Republicans decided to try to control the courts and the political narrative, so they never would lose a case either legally or in the public eye like Watergate again.
Republicans have been systematically undermining USA for 5 decades now.
It’s way past the time to stop it, If Harris doesn’t win, and start the process towards legal and political normalcy, it could easily be to late.
I get the frustration, but I also get where the authorities are coming from. Imagine if precident gets set that a political candidate can be mired down in lawsuits, regardless if they’re plausible or not. Then someone like trump comes along and says cool that worker great against me, I’ll just throw a shit ton of made up lawsuits and cases against all my future opponents.
Except that he’s explicitly choosing to be a political candidate for the purpose of avoiding the lawsuits. A lot of these allegations occurred before he announced he was re-running, and then the lawsuits got put on hold.
Your scenario creates a method for anyone to delay consequences by running for office. Although we both know it wouldn’t really work for anyone. Trump gets his special treatment.
I don’t think the lawsuits are his major problem, and they’re not a good example of badness in the system. Civil suits are often delayed if one of the parties has unavoidable scheduling conflicts, because they can be solved by money, and a month or two here or there doesn’t make a big difference to that, at least not most of the time.
There can be corruption in civil suits, and there are reasons to use delay tactics if you’re trying to spend your money or shift it to offshore accounts, so rich people certainly can and will gain the system. But simply getting your court dates scheduled in November instead of October is not in itself nefarious on the civil stage.
No that’s a false narrative, the criminal cases are based on public prosecutors running them.
What you are claiming is for civil suits, of which a couple have been settled, despite obstruction attempts by Trump.
If it gets to a point where a politician can ask public prosecutors to put opponents in jail, USA has long ceased to be a democracy.
Trump is already a convicted criminal, and cannot vote in several states, still he can run for president, and enjoy privileged treatment.
Where an ordinary person voting because she was told she could, got 5 years prison for voter fraud!
In your scenario, do you imagine that all the Trump-appointed prosecutors and the Trump-appointed judges will willingly delay the cases of Trump’s “enemies of the state” until after the election out of some respect for the sanctity of the democratic process?
It is a horrible, dangerous precedent to say we can’t justly hold the guilty accountable because some bad actor in the future may unjustly hold the innocent accountable.
Why exactly are they on hold until the election? Shouldn’t it be like really important to determine if he’s guilty before they crown him?
I felt the same for a long time, but as much as I hate to admit it, it does kind of make sense in an abhorrent kind of way.
The hierarchy in a democracy is supposed to go…
Voting Public ➡️ Representatives ➡️ Laws ➡️ Courts ➡️ Rulings
That being the case, a Court shouldn’t really hear cases that might undermine the will of the Voting Public.
If courts are empowered by the Voting Public, then a Court should not be in a position to make a Ruling the Voting Public does not want, despite that Ruling being correct in the context of the Law.
Another way of saying the same thing, is that if the Voting Public want’s Trump to have a fair trial they would obviously not elect him as President.
I understand your viewpoint, but disagree.
By that argument any criminal ever could argue against prosecution because they intend to run for a public office. Ridiculous exaggeration of course, but if Trump gets this chance, everyone else should too.
Not really, as you said it’s just not within the realm of possibility for anyone else.
Trump stands a good chance of being elected in a few weeks. An unfavourable court ruling would undermine that. Do you want to live in a country where courts are more powerful than the will of the people?
Also, imagine what would happen if he did get locked up now. It would be pandemonium, and not without reason.
The only way to get rid of Trump is to vote against him, then watch him fade into irrelevance.
Well, if the voting public has ultimate say than why are there rules on who can become president in the first place?
The public electing representatives who make these rules is one thing. Courts undermining elections arbitrarily is entirely another.
The public needs to decide whether they want Trump to be held accountable for his crimes.
While you make a point to consider, an educated and informed electorate is bedrock to a democracy.
Maybe the results of the Discovery process should be public record before a vote.
Yeah but also nah.
Airing dirty laundry in discovery is tantamount to an unfavourable ruling - its still the courts undermining a democratic process.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot - a republican judge digging away for dirt on Kamala during “discovery”.
You would feel that unfair, and that’s exactly how republicans world feel about Trump going through some kind of discovery process now.
Another way of saying the same thing, is that if the Voting Public want’s
If winning the vote entailed an actual public majority, you might have some argument there. But that’s not what we have.
I acknowledge that the electoral college misrepresents the popular vote, but that is the mechanism by which the will of your voting public is polled.
That’s not really relevant to my point, which is simply that in a healthy democracy courts need to avoid influencing elections.
I want to see that orange turd locked up as much as any rational levelheaded person, but my fear is that it would set a dangerous precedent to convict and jail during an election.
Because all the batshit bonkers right-wingers in politics would use it as a baseline to file court cases against any of their political opponents during election season, find some Uber corrupt right-winger judge and miraculously the only ones left on ballots are the repubs
How many times over the last 4 years have I been told “Oh, they really got him now!” Do any wealthy politicians face consequences for the shady stuff they do( I include democrats in this category)?
And then I think about George Floyd who tried to buy a pack of smokes with a phony $20, and possibly didn’t even know it was counterfeit, but was killed shortly thereafter.
This is not the America I want
Four out of the past eleven governors of Illinois did prison time. I think most of those were Democrats.
Yeah, how is being ahead in the polls, with an inherent electoral college advantage, a Congress that’s willing to bend the rules and a supreme court that thinks laws can just be changed depending on the court case ‘having your back against the wall’?
Even if he loses the election he’s still going to be able to pay lawyers to keep him out of jail until he chokes on a Big Mac dies of natural causes.
He has a conviction in one case and is awaiting sentencing. The system has been moving during those 4 years.
The system has been
movingintentionally hamstrung at every opportunity by judges he picked during his first term, to give him a chance to be reelected before he is sentenced during those 4 years.
It has been maddening watching Teflon Trump dodge and evade sentencing, by blatantly cheating the system using pawns he installed.
It’s not, but if you follow federal cases much, this sort of thing is normal. Takes ages to get anything done. Doubly so because when you’re moving on a major figure, the method is to hit the low level people, give them plea deals to turn them against the people above them, and so on. Trump is at the top of that pyramid of cases. You couldn’t get to him before going through the rest. This particularly affects the Jan 6 case.
One big thing that goes beyond Trump is the size of the federal bench. With number of cases judges are seeing, we could easily quadruple the size to bring caseload down to something reasonable. This is only going to get worse with the destruction of Chevron Deference, which opens the floodgates to companies suing to shut down federal regulators.
This also has a more direct effect on Trump. First, it would undo all the bench stuffing he did in the lower federal courts. Second, IIRC, if he files something in the southern district of Florida, he has a out of three chance getting Aileen Cannon. Quadruple everything, and that becomes one in twelve.
He should already have been in prison by now!
I for one am livid that I’ll have to wait until after the election to see the disappointing wrist slaps he might get from whichever cases don’t get sabotaged by sympathetic judges.
