- Joined
- Sep 20, 2012
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- Political Leaning
- Very Conservative
- Hollywood’s king caught on tape.
- The president’s children caught in emails.
Manhattan’s district attorney has no good excuse for letting them all walk.
For a prosecutor the factual question is whether Weinstein in fact made sexual contact with her without her consent. That’s the charge, and the victim will testify to that, and the tape strongly corroborates her account. Vance’s claim that the crime is not prosecutable because there is insufficient evidence of criminal intent is not only unconvincing, it is preposterous.
Moreover, Vance’s criticism of the police for not involving his office in the victim’s taping of Weinstein is a very weak excuse. Whatever the protocols for police-prosecution cooperation, it’s not clear how the DA’s involvement in the recorded trap of Weinstein would have made a difference, or would have made the case more probative, or Weinstein’s guilt more convincing. The recording is damning as is.
As with the Weinstein case, Vance has given a number of explanations for dropping the Trump case. He claimed there was insufficient evidence that the Trumps had broken the law, but also that the victims were really not victims and in any event they were unwilling to cooperate with his office.
Vance’s refusal to prosecute the Trumps is just as disheartening, and just as difficult to explain.
Last week, as reported in an exhaustive report by The New Yorker, ProPublica, and WNYC, Vance overruled prosecutors in his office who were making a clearly prosecutable case against Ivanka and Donald Jr. for luring prospective buyers of a Trump luxury development in SoHo by making false and deceptive promotions. The Trumps, as the prosecution’s evidence shows convincingly, used Enron-like come-ons to intentionally inflate the value of the development to induce investors to buy units.
The prosecutors discovered numerous emails by the Trumps which showed how they repeatedly lied to buyers. The emails, according to persons who viewed them, had the Trumps discuss how to coordinate the false information they had given to prospective buyers; Donald Jr. tell a broker that nobody would ever find out because people on the email chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception; and that the Trumps approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales. In other words, the emails proved the Trumps knew what they were doing was wrong.
Based on these emails, documentary evidence, and interviews with buyers, the prosecutors had assembled sufficient evidence of the Trumps’ criminal conduct to impanel a grand jury. But that was before Vance met with the Trumps’ lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. Before and after Vance overruled his prosecutors, Kasowitz made large donations to his re-eletion campaign.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/prosecutor-threw-away-slam-dunk-cases-against-weinstein-and-trump-kids
... and who says Privilege doesn't have The Power?