Because it shows politically motivated use of legal power, which is especially bad. I'm all for prosecuting Trump and Clinton and all the rest of them, but to only prosecute Trump when there's a sea of malfeasance stinking up the place seems like an overwhelmingly bad idea.
The article referred to in the parent asserts that Clinton was also prosecuted (albeit for a different, and lesser charge). As many others have been. So the argument you're making here seems rather weak.
Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted, for anything, nor was she charged for anything. Regarding the campaign fund violation, her campaign was fined $8000 by the FEC and the DNC was fined too. As the article states:
> The Clinton campaign agreed to a civil penalty of $8,000
It really helps to know the difference between civil, criminal, charge, prosecution and indictment when reading such things, and to keep note of who is being charged etc by whom.
Regarding the email server farrago, she was not prosecuted for that either. As this helpful article[0] comparing the raids on Mar-a-Lago to the email stuff points out:
> So prosecutors decided "there was no basis" to charge Clinton or her aides, the inspector general said.
and
> "The biggest difference right now between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump" is that with Clinton, "we know there was no prosecution -- that ship has sailed,"
The NYT article also backs this up by not mentioning any charge, indictment or prosecution. I certainly didn't notice it. Hillary Clinton is mentioned once.
> Some Democrats pointedly recalled Trump supporters’ calls during the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, to be arrested.
> “Those lock her up chants that people were chanting like hyenas in a stadium around the country were never funny,” Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, said in a Twitter post. “Perhaps they now understand why.”
b) It's an example of lack of discrimination, not a wish or obligation to have them prosecuted - I'm all for prosecuting Trump and Clinton. I could've written Biden or Pelosi, or Clinton B.
c) You're tumbling in the weeds now.
My advice, you mucked up in your reading - of the article you mentioned and of my comments - and you're clearly finding it hard to deal with having that pointed out. Just take it, learn from it, and move on. Arguing about it like I care about Republicans or Trump isn't going to get you anywhere. It's certainly not going to magic up anything that matches what's happening to Trump, like a charge for Hillary.
How were similar cases treated in the past? One case that keeps being discussed is the John Edwards case. Edwards was a presidential candidate; he had an affair with his videographer and had a child by her while his wife was dying of cancer. He paid a very large sum to the woman as hush money and was charged similarly with campaign finance violations. He specifically solicited money from wealthy donors to pay the hush money. Jury acquitted him on one charge and deadlocked on the rest; the DOJ dropped the rest of the charges.
Similarly the DOJ looked at the Trump hush money case and declined to prosecute.
Campaign finance laws in the US are a land mine and need reform. There is too much prosecutorial discretion and not enough clarity for people to know whether they are breaking the law. Campaign finance laws have become a way to fish for a crime against political enemies.
To wit: Bragg actively campaigned for his position promising to investigate Trump.
Rule of law should be about observing and then prosecuting crimes, not about spending years and millions investigating people looking for a crime that they committed.
I think this is the best comment here! It helps resolve the dissonance I feel here where I really don't love that this is the thing he's being charged for, but I also hate the idea that things that are illegal can't be prosecuted due to purely political considerations. But your point about prosecutorial discretion in campaign finance cases helps square this circle for me.
But I'd still say that we need to see more details of the case than have been released yet before drawing any conclusions.
Equality under the law matters greatly and when officials of any type use their discretion to obtain outcomes that are not in the fat part of the bell curve for how said discretion is usually applied to similar fact patterns it needs to be well justified.
We haven't seen the indictment yet so it may be well justified but the scuttlebutt so far does not seem to strongly indicate that.
> How does it show that? The campaign broke the law, was caught, and punished (fined).
> Degree of severity and attempts to conceal a crime are both considered serious factors in punishment a crime merits.
Which do you consider a more direct violation of campaign finance law with direct intent to benefit a campaign?
1. Paying a lawyer to pay a woman to not speak about an elicit affair from a decade prior.
2. Paying a lawyer to pay a private investigator to compile a negative dossier about your political opponent in the, at the time, current US general election.
As you have written it, neither of those two things are illegal to do, funnily enough.
Maybe reflect then on why one campaign settled a law suit, and Trump is being indicted at the moment, if again, neither is actually illegal under campaign finance law.
Hint: it's legal to pay for opposition research, but a violation to not disclose that you're doing it.
It's also legal to pay for an NDA, but not legal for the NDA to be created by direction of one's private lawyer, and then subsequently to use campaign finances to reimburse and list bonuses to that lawyer for legal services they never rendered to the campaign.
The comparison is that if it’s indeed illegal, how is one that is clearly only directly benefiting the campaign a mere misdemeanor fine and the other a felony?
It's very likely Bragg's attempt to push this to a felony fails. It's just speculation (SINCE WE DON'T KNOW THE CHARGES) about what evidence is available and what people might be doing.
If Trump gets a $1000 fine for this, I feel like that's justice.
You wrote this like it's obvious which one is worse under current law, but I have no idea. We also don't know what the actual charges against Trump are yet.
The solution is either to punish them all or none at all? That doesn't help, at all, to bring some kind of justice. Or would it be the case that given it's a sea of malfeasance and it's impossible to prosecute all of them to simply give up on the law and let it be a free-for-all?
It’s not an odd take, in the context of what op is saying is that in has the overt appearance of bias and weaponisation of the legal system against your political opponents. This is the sort of thing Putin did to Nevsky.
It's normal in our legal system to have a scale of punishment based on the scale of lawbreaking. We don't know enough here to know whether the laws broken in the two cases are of the same scale. Some things are punished with minor fines and others are major fines and possible jail time. The details of the case determine which.
