“Election denial” is supposedly a grave sin that places a public figure outside of the bounds of acceptability. Remember how the news media briefly convinced businesses that they had to stop funding “election-denying” lawmakers. But the case against former President Donald Trump eventually boiled down to weaponized election-denial.
New York’s prosecutors and their defenders in the media ultimately argued that Trump’s 2016 win was illegitimate, and this illegitimate win was election fraud, which formed the underlying offense that elevated an accounting misdemeanor to a felony. The true underlying offense was that Trump cheated on his wife, but Democrats and the news media announced decades ago that such matters were none of our business. They were wrong: Trump’s infidelities, like Bill Clinton’s and John F.
Kennedy’s, reflect on his unfitness for the office. But these are the new rules. The actual crime Trump was found to commit, in essence, was lying to his checkbook .
When Trump’s company reimbursed Trump’s crooked lawyer Michael Cohen for his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, the company wrote it down as compensation for legal services. To make such a picayune victimless crime into a felony, they needed to posit that this misleading accounting entry was in service of another, more serious, underlying crime. Let’s let liberal ethics lawyer Norm Eisen explain : “A prison sentence would send a message to Mr.
Trump and his followers that you canno.