I've always thought it was embarrassing that the two people nominated for president in 2016 were Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton and joked it would be great to see both end up in prison.
Well Trump is saying he'll be arrested on Tuesday for paying Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about their affair. Now, while my disgust for Trump and Hilary stemmed from my belief that that the Presidency should be reserved for the best of the best and we have 300 million to choose from,and I was choosing these two would be at the bottomof the list, but I'm not a fan of this Trump arrest.
When electing people, we should hold the candidates to a very high standard. But we should not be prosecuting them for stuff they wouldn't be prosecuted for as normal citizens. That ends up turning the US into a kangaroo court wher the parties just jail the other side once they gain power.
The logic for calling Trump's payment to Stormy a felony election law crime is a stretch.
Reason Mag wrote:
It looks like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, intends to pursue criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. But the charges he seems to have in mind, based on a 2016 hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, are so iffy that they reinforce Trump's reflexive complaint that he is, as always, the victim of a long-running Democratic "witch hunt."
Daniels claims she had a sexual affair with Trump in 2006, when he was married to his current wife, former First Lady Melania Trump. Although Trump denies the affair, he arranged a $130,000 payment to Daniels in the fall of 2016 to keep her story out of the press. There is nothing inherently illegal about that payment. But Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer who paid off Daniels and was reimbursed by Trump, pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating federal law by making an excessive campaign contribution.
The theory underlying that charge was that Cohen "contributed" the hush money at Trump's behest for the "principal purpose of influencing [the] election," as opposed to avoiding personal embarrassment for Trump or sparing Melania Trump's feelings. As former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith noted at the time, that interpretation was open to question.
"The best interpretation of the law is that it simply is not a campaign expense to pay blackmail for things that happened years before one's candidacy—and thus nothing Cohen (or, in this case, Trump, too) did is a campaign finance crime," Smith wrote in a 2018 Reason essay. "But at a minimum, it is unclear whether paying blackmail to a mistress is 'for the purpose of influencing an election,' and so must be paid with campaign funds, or a 'personal use,' and so prohibited from being paid with campaign funds."
If you are going to go out of your way to charge Trump, then certainly Hilary needs to be arrrested for her emails. The head of the FBI basicallys aid what she did was a crime, he just didn't think it was one that warranted prosecution as she didn't do it intentionally.
PS. I guess counter argument would be we need to hold our candidates to even higher standards? I guess that would be ok if we then applied that to everyone, not just the candidates we most dislike. So if you do Trump, you also need to do Hillary.
