New York State Investigations of Trump and Related

[keith]

Off Topic

Have been from Chicago to Arizona on old Route 66. I can't remember exactly where we ended it in AZ. Have been on all the Blue Ridge Highway.

Probably visited the Grand Canyon then back to Flagstaff and down to Phoenix (perhaps via Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona)?

[johnpcapitalist]

I don't think Trump will be found guilty in a court of law. But he could go broke trying to stay out of prison.

I would suggest that he is just as likely as anyone else to be found guilty of financial crimes. Typically, those involve lots of documentary evidence that can be easily followed. It's much harder for defense attorneys to discredit a document trail than it is to create reasonable doubt around witness testimony. So I strongly suspect that Trump would be convicted if the NY state folks go after him for tax fraud. And given what they're talking about for things like the Seven Springs property in Westchester County NY (a $7.5 million purchase in 1996 which he valued at $291 million only 15 years later), it's so egregious that no jury is going to be sympathetic to him.

Typically, what happens in white collar crime cases is that the perpetrators have a moat of invincibility that they believe in because their lawyers are able to threaten to bury the investigating agency with the cost of a trial, until the moat gets breached somehow. At that point, the whole criminal enterprise gets upended. That's what is happening with Trump: there is finally a way in to unravel the whole thing, and it has now become enough of a motivation to invest the $$ in overcoming the defendant's economic advantage.

I think Trump may be able to beat charges for election tampering in Georgia because of difficulty explaining how his behavior on those recorded phone calls actually crosses the line into criminal conduct rather than just free speech. Even an eduated, liberal jury would have to take a lot of time to think about that. And if there are just a couple paint chip-eaters in the jury pool, it increases the chances of acquittal. But if NYS goes for it and charges him, they will convict him. They're very good at their jobs. It's not like going up against the overworked DA in some rural county.

[AndyinPA]

Off Topic

Have been from Chicago to Arizona on old Route 66. I can't remember exactly where we ended it in AZ. Have been on all the Blue Ridge Highway.

Probably visited the Grand Canyon then back to Flagstaff and down to Phoenix (perhaps via Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona)?

Off Topic

Yep. Going back to Grand Canyon, South and North Rim, in June.

[SlimSloSlider]

I don't think Trump will be found guilty in a court of law. But he could go broke trying to stay out of prison.

I think Trump may be able to beat charges for election tampering in Georgia because of difficulty explaining how his behavior on those recorded phone calls actually crosses the line into criminal conduct rather than just free speech. Even an eduated, liberal jury would have to take a lot of time to think about that. And if there are just a couple paint chip-eaters in the jury pool, it increases the chances of acquittal. But if NYS goes for it and charges him, they will convict him. They're very good at their jobs. It's not like going up against the overworked DA in some rural county.

From your lips ...

[filly]

The County Seat of Fulton County is Atlanta. It's the largest county in Georgia with a population over 1 million. The new DA there, Fani Willis, is an experienced prosecutor and has hired a racketeering expert (she's successfully tried racketeering cases there herself) and an evidence expert to work on this investigation. There's also a great deal of pattern evidence in the Georgia case which is very persuasive to jurors. No trial is a slam dunk. Let's see what happens.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Also, too, jurors are registered voters. How many presidents have called a state secretary of state REPEATEDLY looking for votes? The jurors have likely seen either The Godfather movie or The Soprano TV series as well.

[northland10]

I don’t think DFO is only out of friends, I don’t think he’s ever had any real friends. Acquaintances and business associates, yes, but not actual friends. His main leisure activity seems to be golf and there too, he golfs with people he knows as opposed to people who are really friends. This isn’t surprising to me, since he certainly has never shown he understands what it is to be a friend to someone. He’s well-known as a user of people and also a taker, neither of which are attributes that encourage friendship as most of us understand it.

He has never had friends. He only has acquaintances he has not tried to destroy, yet. "Friends" are intended to bow before his greatness and show their undying loyalty. He might shower some trinkets on them as a meager reward for their effort, but they are not to expect that. He is king and his "friends" must accept that or else, they are enemies to be destroyed.

[AndyinPA]

Speaking of trinkets:

https://nypost.com/2016/06/21/trump-has ... for-years/

Donald Trump has been doling out diamond cuff links to unsuspecting pals as presents — but they’re actually fabulous fakes, sources say.

At least three recipients later learned that the glittery gifts were valuable only as mementos from Trump.

Actor Charlie Sheen recently called out The Donald for the ruse, saying Trump once gave him his own cuff links as a wedding present and boasted that they came from one of the city’s leading jewelers.

“He says . . . ‘I want to give you an early wedding gift as a gesture from me and Melania’ — and she doesn’t say a word, she’s very sweet and very pretty but just kinda sits there,” Sheen told the BBC, referring to a time he ran into Trump and his wife in a restaurant about five years ago.

[somerset]

I don't think Trump will be found guilty in a court of law. But he could go broke trying to stay out of prison.

I would suggest that he is just as likely as anyone else to be found guilty of financial crimes. Typically, those involve lots of documentary evidence that can be easily followed. It's much harder for defense attorneys to discredit a document trail than it is to create reasonable doubt around witness testimony. So I strongly suspect that Trump would be convicted if the NY state folks go after him for tax fraud. And given what they're talking about for things like the Seven Springs property in Westchester County NY (a $7.5 million purchase in 1996 which he valued at $291 million only 15 years later), it's so egregious that no jury is going to be sympathetic to him.



But if NYS goes for it and charges him, they will convict him. They're very good at their jobs. It's not like going up against the overworked DA in some rural county.

What do you think the odds are of a conviction turning into incarceration? I realize this is way out of your area of expertise, but I'm curious about how often "high-end" financial crimes like this are settled by fines and how often they result in folks going to prison, in particular at the state level.

[LM K]

I don't think Trump will be found guilty in a court of law. But he could go broke trying to stay out of prison.

I would suggest that he is just as likely as anyone else to be found guilty of financial crimes. Typically, those involve lots of documentary evidence that can be easily followed. It's much harder for defense attorneys to discredit a document trail than it is to create reasonable doubt around witness testimony. So I strongly suspect that Trump would be convicted if the NY state folks go after him for tax fraud. And given what they're talking about for things like the Seven Springs property in Westchester County NY (a $7.5 million purchase in 1996 which he valued at $291 million only 15 years later), it's so egregious that no jury is going to be sympathetic to him.

Typically, what happens in white collar crime cases is that the perpetrators have a moat of invincibility that they believe in because their lawyers are able to threaten to bury the investigating agency with the cost of a trial, until the moat gets breached somehow. At that point, the whole criminal enterprise gets upended. That's what is happening with Trump: there is finally a way in to unravel the whole thing, and it has now become enough of a motivation to invest the $$ in overcoming the defendant's economic advantage.

I think Trump may be able to beat charges for election tampering in Georgia because of difficulty explaining how his behavior on those recorded phone calls actually crosses the line into criminal conduct rather than just free speech. Even an eduated, liberal jury would have to take a lot of time to think about that. And if there are just a couple paint chip-eaters in the jury pool, it increases the chances of acquittal. But if NYS goes for it and charges him, they will convict him. They're very good at their jobs. It's not like going up against the overworked DA in some rural county.

Thank you! You make excellent points.

[LM K]

Speaking of trinkets:

https://nypost.com/2016/06/21/trump-has ... for-years/

Donald Trump has been doling out diamond cuff links to unsuspecting pals as presents — but they’re actually fabulous fakes, sources say.

At least three recipients later learned that the glittery gifts were valuable only as mementos from Trump.

Actor Charlie Sheen recently called out The Donald for the ruse, saying Trump once gave him his own cuff links as a wedding present and boasted that they came from one of the city’s leading jewelers.

“He says . . . ‘I want to give you an early wedding gift as a gesture from me and Melania’ — and she doesn’t say a word, she’s very sweet and very pretty but just kinda sits there,” Sheen told the BBC, referring to a time he ran into Trump and his wife in a restaurant about five years ago.

[johnpcapitalist]

What do you think the odds are of a conviction turning into incarceration? I realize this is way out of your area of expertise, but I'm curious about how often "high-end" financial crimes like this are settled by fines and how often they result in folks going to prison, in particular at the state level.

I think that incarceration is more the rule now than in the past. In the 1980s, a lot of egregious white collar criminals were sentenced to home detention with relatively minimal sentences. In many cases, prosecutors may have felt that the reputational damage of being convicted would be a sufficient deterrent on top of surrendering ill-gotten gains plus paying a fine. In other words, "genteel" Wall Street people would never associate with someone convicted of a financial crime. But it became increasingly apparent that the deterrent value of this strategy was insufficient.

It seems to me that in the last 10 years at least, prosecutors have been bringing fewer cases, probably due to budget cuts, but when they do bring charges, they routinely seek jail terms. That has upped the deterrent value significantly, in my view. The other key component of a deterrent strategy is making sure that the win rate remains high, so that rich white collar criminals are not going to use the strategy of unleashing more lawyers than the government, drowning the case in an avalanche of bullshit that a jury has to sit through.

In the white collar crimes where I've been involved as one of many witnesses, they've focused the case and put together only a small subset of the charges, the ones they're most certain that they can prove. In one case, that of Raj Rajratnam, the billionaire hedge funder behind Galleon Capital, his reputation for dirty trading on insider information was well established on the Street at least 10-15 years before he was finally charged. While the prosecutors reviewed literally thousands of suspect trades, they ultimately decided to charge him with only (IIRC) eight counts of fraud. Note that they did not take the approach of charging him with 500 counts of fraud and figuring that the jury would convict on some significant fraction of the ones they threw at the poor jurors to sort through. Instead, they sought 8 counts and won convictions on all of them.

My thoughts above lead me to conclude that the prosecutors will focus the charges in the case against Trump to those where they are extremely confident of winning convictions. And when he is convicted, they will not argue for leniency in sentencing because Trump is a former president, but they will put the pedal to the metal because he abused his office in attempting to delay the course of justice and to obstruct their investigations. So my read is that if Trump is charged, he will ultimately be convicted and he will absoutely, positively spend time in jail. He'll probably be put in solitary for his safety, but his narcissism will mean that he won't last long there, and when you factor in his overall poor health, he probably won't last long.

[Slim Cognito]

Speaking of trinkets:

https://nypost.com/2016/06/21/trump-has ... for-years/

Donald Trump has been doling out diamond cuff links to unsuspecting pals as presents — but they’re actually fabulous fakes, sources say.

At least three recipients later learned that the glittery gifts were valuable only as mementos from Trump.

Actor Charlie Sheen recently called out The Donald for the ruse, saying Trump once gave him his own cuff links as a wedding present and boasted that they came from one of the city’s leading jewelers.

“He says . . . ‘I want to give you an early wedding gift as a gesture from me and Melania’ — and she doesn’t say a word, she’s very sweet and very pretty but just kinda sits there,” Sheen told the BBC, referring to a time he ran into Trump and his wife in a restaurant about five years ago.

I saw the interview with Sheen. It was a hoot. He had an appraiser over, looking at some of his good stuff then, off the cuff, asked her to take a look at the links. He dug them out from somewhere, hinting he already knew they were worthless

He said she cracked up the instant she laid eyes on them.

[Foggy]

I think that incarceration is more the rule now than in the past.

Except none of the banksters went to jail in 2008 when we damned near went into the second Great Depression. I'd like to know why that happened, other than the fact Obama was a "nice guy".

[filly]

What do you think the odds are of a conviction turning into incarceration? I realize this is way out of your area of expertise, but I'm curious about how often "high-end" financial crimes like this are settled by fines and how often they result in folks going to prison, in particular at the state level.

I think that incarceration is more the rule now than in the past. In the 1980s, a lot of egregious white collar criminals were sentenced to home detention with relatively minimal sentences. In many cases, prosecutors may have felt that the reputational damage of being convicted would be a sufficient deterrent on top of surrendering ill-gotten gains plus paying a fine. In other words, "genteel" Wall Street people would never associate with someone convicted of a financial crime. But it became increasingly apparent that the deterrent value of this strategy was insufficient.

It seems to me that in the last 10 years at least, prosecutors have been bringing fewer cases, probably due to budget cuts, but when they do bring charges, they routinely seek jail terms. That has upped the deterrent value significantly, in my view. The other key component of a deterrent strategy is making sure that the win rate remains high, so that rich white collar criminals are not going to use the strategy of unleashing more lawyers than the government, drowning the case in an avalanche of bullshit that a jury has to sit through.

In the white collar crimes where I've been involved as one of many witnesses, they've focused the case and put together only a small subset of the charges, the ones they're most certain that they can prove. In one case, that of Raj Rajratnam, the billionaire hedge funder behind Galleon Capital, his reputation for dirty trading on insider information was well established on the Street at least 10-15 years before he was finally charged. While the prosecutors reviewed literally thousands of suspect trades, they ultimately decided to charge him with only (IIRC) eight counts of fraud. Note that they did not take the approach of charging him with 500 counts of fraud and figuring that the jury would convict on some significant fraction of the ones they threw at the poor jurors to sort through. Instead, they sought 8 counts and won convictions on all of them.

My thoughts above lead me to conclude that the prosecutors will focus the charges in the case against Trump to those where they are extremely confident of winning convictions. And when he is convicted, they will not argue for leniency in sentencing because Trump is a former president, but they will put the pedal to the metal because he abused his office in attempting to delay the course of justice and to obstruct their investigations. So my read is that if Trump is charged, he will ultimately be convicted and he will absoutely, positively spend time in jail. He'll probably be put in solitary for his safety, but his narcissism will mean that he won't last long there, and when you factor in his overall poor health, he probably won't last long.

Raj Rajratnam was convicted of all 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy. As we know, a federal conspiracy conviction can carry a 20 year prison sentence. Raj got 11 years and was released after 8. His lawyer was the infamous John Dowd. It was during this trials that Dowd famously gave the press the finger, the video of which was shown hundreds of times when he was representing the Former Guy.

[Suranis]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

[fierceredpanda]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow definitely went to jail.

[somerset]

What do you think the odds are of a conviction turning into incarceration? I realize this is way out of your area of expertise, but I'm curious about how often "high-end" financial crimes like this are settled by fines and how often they result in folks going to prison, in particular at the state level.

My thoughts above lead me to conclude that the prosecutors will focus the charges in the case against Trump to those where they are extremely confident of winning convictions. And when he is convicted, they will not argue for leniency in sentencing because Trump is a former president, but they will put the pedal to the metal because he abused his office in attempting to delay the course of justice and to obstruct their investigations. So my read is that if Trump is charged, he will ultimately be convicted and he will absoutely, positively spend time in jail. He'll probably be put in solitary for his safety, but his narcissism will mean that he won't last long there, and when you factor in his overall poor health, he probably won't last long.

Thanks, JPC. Really great perspective. Let's hope it plays out this way

(NADT)

[somerset]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow definitely went to jail.

And "Kenny Boy" was almost certainly on his way before he died of a heart attack.

[chancery]

William K. Black, former bank regulator, later law professor, pointed out in a Bill Moyers interview that there were over a thousand "major" felony convictions in the wake of the savings and loan industry scandals of the 1990s, but only a handful after the 2008 crash, mostly of small fry.

https://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundr ... ank-crisis

[Suranis]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow definitely went to jail.

Good to hear. I didn't know that.

[noblepa]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow definitely went to jail.

Wasn't there another high-ranking Enron executive who was convicted and sentenced, but died before he could begin serving his time? I forget his name.

[fierceredpanda]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow definitely went to jail.

Wasn't there another high-ranking Enron executive who was convicted and sentenced, but died before he could begin serving his time? I forget his name.

Ken Lay (the CEO and notable friend of the Bush family) died before he could be prosecuted. A lot of lefty conspiracy theorists claimed his death was staged by his friends at the CIA.

[somerset]

I'm not sure anyone went to Jail over Enron, certainly not anywhere near enough people.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow definitely went to jail.

Wasn't there another high-ranking Enron executive who was convicted and sentenced, but died before he could begin serving his time? I forget his name.

https://thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8379#p8379

(three posts above yours. Don't people read threads anymore?)

[Fiascoist]

Ken Lay was convicted, but died before sentencing. There were others such as Andrew Fastow, Rick Causey and Michael Kopper, who did prison time. Lots of appeals out of this mess, which, of course, continued the saga for years. Inn the end, it is amazing how long a corporation can be used as a personal piggy bank by SOmany people before there are any consequences.