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I'm all for seeing trump arrested and all.. .but im so confused...
Hush money isnt illegal... however taking money as a payment to not release personal and damaging information to the public, that is blackmail and IS illegal... so if anything isnt Stormy Daniels the one doing something illegal by blackmailing trump and accepting a pay off to not go public?
@koherecoWatchdog I recently had dealing with lawyers about black mail.. the act does not need to be illegal, it only needs to seek to defame.
While your explanation as to what trump did makes sense, and sure, sounds like it is illegal from an IRS perspective... it is clear stormy daniels taking the money was blackmail in my eyes.
@freemo Stormy Daniels was silent about the affair, not about Trump’s falsification of how what the hush many was for. She didn’t likely know about the illegal act of falsifying the nature of the payment.
@koherecoWatchdog As stated previously, blackmail does not need to be limited to illegal acts. This I know for sure as I have spoken to my own lawyers about it in detail recently.
@freemo You might be right about the defintion, but I also think blackmail requires a threat to be made. The hush money may have been paid in the absence of a threat.
@freemo (an /express/ threat, i should say)
@koherecoWatchdog Perhaps... if she made no indication she was going to go public, and she was paid anyway "just in case" then yea probably wouldnt be blackmail
@freemo Taking hush money and talking anyway is just breach of contract, a civil matter.
What Trump is indicted for AFAIK isn't public yet, but it seems to be that he misused campaign funds for it and fraudulently described it as legal expenses (as in, a lawyer's paycheck). But maybe we should wait and see what specifically he's indicted for, and what the evidence is?
@bjarne If you take hush money, then its blackmail.. the fact that you release the damning information after the fact doesnt stop it from being blackmail...
@freemo as I understand it, the issue is not that money was paid but that because his lawyer paid the money and her going public would have damaged the campaign it is being seen as undeclared campaign finance
@freemo There's more going on than just hush money. It's also about taxes and fraud.
That makes sense
If she directly threatened to make it public unless he paid her, then that's blackmail.
The way these things are usually worked out is that the woman shops her story around to tabloids in a manner so that the target will learn of it. Then the tabloid buys the exclusive rights to the story and it becomes an intellectual property deal and the tabloid then works it out with the target (like selling the rights to them). That's how they usually avoid blackmail law.
That's how Trump did it with another woman, Karen McDougal. (Maybe that's where the whole "Karen" meme started?)
A similar thing happened to David Letterman a couple of decades ago. A boyfriend of his mistress wrote a screenplay about a famous TV personality who had a mistress that exactly paralleled Letterman's situation. He then tried to sell the screenplay directly to Letterman.
Letterman turned the guy into the cops rather than paying the blackmail money and the story was made public.
@freemo You can just Google this stuff.
Michael Cohen went to jail for violating campaign finance law because it was done secretly with the purpose of influencing the election. John Edwards was prosecuted for the same thing.
If the prosecution can prove that Donald Trump directed Cohen to do that and was aware of it, he is guilty of the same crime and would presumably face similar consequences.
@freemo Trump falsified the hush money as a “fees to his attorney for services rendered”. If he would not have falsified the transactions he would be in the clear. I think the term “blackmail” is used in common language far more loosely than the legal definition. Strictly speaking, blackmail is offering silence /about an illegal act/ in exchange for money.