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Trump Goes Full Gotti

Charlemagne

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Jul 19, 2017
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“I KNOW ALL ABOUT FLIPPING”: TRUMP GOES FULL GOTTI

As two more of his associates face jail time, the president is sounding more like a mob boss.

BY TINA NGUYEN
AUGUST 23, 2018 1:25 PM

Following the conviction of two of his top lieutenants, Donald Trump has adopted the gangster parlance of another New Yorker famously terrorized by Robert Mueller: John Gotti. “I know all about flipping, for 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers,” Trump explained in an interview with Fox News that aired Thursday, referring to the deal his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, cut with federal prosecutors this week. “If you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you will go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that,” he told Fox host Ainsley Earhardt, who appeared to be trying her best to maneuver the president toward more advantageous talking points. Instead, Trump lashed out again and again at those he has described as “rats” for speaking with federal law-enforcement officers about the conduct they witnessed in the course of his 2016 campaign.

If the White House was at all concerned about the president of the United States emulating La Cosa Nostra, they did nothing to stop Trump from happily publicizing his remarks on Twitter, where he shared multiple clips from the interview. In perhaps the most revealing moment, he suggested that cooperating with prosecutors should itself be made a crime—and that anything his former associates are telling Mueller about him are lies to save their own skin. “I have seen it many times,” he continued, leaning in toward Earhardt. “I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.”

Trump’s casual admission that he has had “many friends” involved in flipping, or being flipped on themselves, is the sort of thing that would, in another era, shock Republicans and generate weeks of controversy. Instead, party leaders are largely excusing the president’s criminal idiom as just more locker-room talk. “Eight years ago to 10 years ago, Trump was not what I consider to be a pillar of virtue,” Orrin Hatch, the second-highest-ranking official of the U.S. Senate, told The New York Times on Wednesday, after Cohen testified that Trump had directed him to break the law by facilitating hush-money payments to two women who allege they had affairs with the future president. “I think most people in this country realize that Donald Trump comes from a different world. He comes from New York City, he comes from a slam-bang, difficult world.” Trump’s prolonged campaign to tar the Justice Department (often with sarcastic quotation marks around the word “Justice”) has itself been tacitly adopted by all but a few outspoken G.O.P. leaders.

On the campaign trail, Trump’s rough reputation as a brash Manhattan real-estate magnate was part of his appeal. More recently, however, the seedier side of his playboy lifestyle has overwhelmed the gilded facade: associations with criminals and con men, payoffs to women, out-of-court settlements, non-disclosure agreements. Trump’s hard-core fan base appears to be giving him a pass—the interview with Earhardt itself epitomized the casual indifference with which Fox News has treated the majority of the president’s scandals. Trump’s allies in Congress, however, sound increasingly worried that the appearance of criminality surrounding the president’s inner circle—and his tacit support of their behavior—will hurt the party’s chances of holding onto the House in November. The Times reports that “Publicly and privately, Republicans conceded that the guilty pleas did not look good and were not optimal heading into the midterm election—especially as the party struggles to keep its hold on the House.”

Still, as the Times notes, Republican lawmakers aren’t doing much about the convictions, or Trump’s Goodfellas-inspired response, other than to distance themselves from his most overt indulgence of white-collar crime. (On Wednesday, Trump called Manafort “brave” for refusing to “break” under pressure.) “It is bad news for the country, bad news for these people involved who either pled or were found guilty,” Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama told the Times, but said he didn’t want to get too involved while he focused on appropriation bills: “I don’t know other than what I read and see.” Senator Lindsey Graham described his “No. 1 goal right now” as to “keep doing my day job” and let Mueller do his.

For now, Republicans are pinning their hopes on the ability of the Trump-media industrial complex, namely Fox News, to keep the heat off Trump while helping to discredit Mueller’s investigation into the president. Trump himself seems to be betting on the booming economy as a firewall in November. “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” Trump told Earhardt. If he were impeached, he argued, “Everybody would be very poor.” But the president’s habit of talking like a mafioso isn’t doing the party any favors. When asked Thursday whether he agreed with Trump that flipping should be illegal, Texas Senator John Cornyn—a former state Supreme Court justice and attorney general—perfectly encapsulated how the G.O.P. has found itself boxed in by the president’s “slam-bang” understanding of law and order. “Uh, I have to think about that a little more,” Cornyn told reporters on Capitol Hill. “That’s uh—I’ve never heard that argument before.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/donald-trump-flipping-ought-to-be-illegal
 

danmand

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Nov 28, 2003
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To be fair, Trump has a point about the rampant use of immunity and plea deals in Common Law jurisdictions, in order to nail criminals.

I personally find it unsavory to let some criminals off the hook in order to catch other criminals. One of the worst cases we have seen lately was during the Homulka/Bernardo trial.
 

JohnLarue

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Jan 19, 2005
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To be fair, Trump has a point about the rampant use of immunity and plea deals in Common Law jurisdictions, in order to nail criminals.

I personally find it unsavory to let some criminals off the hook in order to catch other criminals. One of the worst cases we have seen lately was during the Homolka/Bernardo trial.
Had that option not been available Bernardo might be still raping / murdering teenage girls
Homolka did time (maybe not enough) but the deal got got the rapist/ murder put away for good & made our society that much safer.
 

danmand

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Had that option not been available Bernardo might be still raping / murdering teenage girls
Homolka did time (maybe not enough) but the deal got got the rapist/ murder put away for good & made our society that much safer.
That is the argument. I personally think the police should be able to catch criminals on their own, as they would have in this particular case, if they had searched the house carefully.

If they had done a better job, both Bernardo and Homulka would have been under lock. Would that not have been better?
 

toguy5252

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Jun 22, 2009
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That is the argument. I personally think the police should be able to catch criminals on their own, as they would have in this particular case, if they had searched the house carefully.

If they had done a better job, both Bernardo and Homulka would have been under lock. Would that not have been better?
The criminal justice system could not work without lower level criminal flipping on those higher up, It is a ground up based system. The godfather didn't pull the trigger.The heads of the cartels do not deliver the drugs. That is just the way it is.
 

danmand

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The criminal justice system could not work without lower level criminal flipping on those higher up, It is a ground up based system. The godfather didn't pull the trigger.The heads of the cartels do not deliver the drugs. That is just the way it is.
Plea deals are not generally used in Civil Justice jurisdictions, i.e. continental Europe. I think you will be hard pressed to prove that justice is not served in European countries.
 

Insidious Von

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Had that option not been available Bernardo might be still raping / murdering teenage girls
Homolka did time (maybe not enough) but the deal got got the rapist/ murder put away for good & made our society that much safer.
Watcha gonna do when blatant stupidity runs wild on you!

I nominate this as the dumbest post of the year, maybe John Larue is American. He's probably not aware that Karla killed her youngest sister and Kristen French. It sent a frozen chill down my spine. Karla said that Kristen had to be gotten rid of so that the Bernardos could make it to the Homolka Easter dinner.

Man did John Larue blow it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrD6cL9AmJ0
 

Jiffy Pop

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May 6, 2003
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Insidious I also did not know that Karla was the actual murderer. I have never seen the videos and I do not want to see it. I know she should still be in jail.
 

Aardvark154

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Von, so Paul Bernardo says. I have little doubt that had the tapes had been discovered in the course of the police searches, Karla Homolka would have been charged with murder. However, it is my understanding that the tapes do not show that she was the leader.
 

toguy5252

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Plea deals are not generally used in Civil Justice jurisdictions, i.e. continental Europe. I think you will be hard pressed to prove that justice is not served in European countries.
I have no idea but I somehow doubt that you are correct. In any event how do you get to the mob bosses without people flipping.
 

islandman4567

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Oct 9, 2002
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I'm just wondering when the Don-ald is going to start the whackings, to prevent the flippers from spilling the beans against him.

This whole drama surrounding him is just like watching the Sopranos, I keep waiting for the sit down scene.
 

danmand

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I have no idea but I somehow doubt that you are correct. In any event how do you get to the mob bosses without people flipping.
You are a lawyer?

The division has traditionally been viewed by legal scholars along common law/ civil law lines; common law countries employ plea bargaining, while civil law countries do not. .

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/fellows_papers/pdf/Givati_39.pdf


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain#Use_in_civil_law_countries

Plea bargaining is extremely difficult in jurisdictions based on the civil law. This is because unlike common law systems, civil law systems have no concept of plea—if the defendant confesses; a confession is entered into evidence, but the prosecution is not absolved of the duty to present a full case. A court may decide that a defendant is innocent even though they presented a full confession. Also, unlike common law systems, prosecutors in civil law countries may have limited or no power to drop or reduce charges after a case has been filed, and in some countries their power to drop or reduce charges before a case has been filed is limited, making plea bargaining impossible.


Denmark
In 2009, in a case about whether witness testimony originating from a plea deal in the United States was admissible in a Danish criminal trial (297/2008 H), the Supreme Court of Denmark (Danish: Højesteret) unanimously ruled that plea bargains are prima facie not legal under Danish law,[44] but that the witnesses in the particular case would be allowed to testify regardless (with the caveat that the lower court consider the possibility that the testimony was untrue or at least influenced by the benefits of the plea bargain).[44] The Supreme Court did however point out that Danish law contains mechanisms similar to plea bargains, such as §82.10 of the Danish Penal Code (Danish: Straffeloven) which states that a sentence may be reduced if the perpetrator of a crime provides information that helps solve a crime perpetrated by others,[45][44] or §23.a of the Danish Competition Law (Danish: Konkurrenceloven) which states that someone can apply to avoid being fined or prosecuted for participating in a cartel if they provide information about the cartel that the authorities did not know at the time.[46][44]

If a defendant admits to having committed a crime, the prosecution doesn't have to file charges against them, and the case can be heard as a so-called "admission case" (Danish: tilståelsessag) under §831 of the Law on the Administration of Justice (Danish: Retsplejeloven) provided that: the confession is supported by other pieces of evidence (meaning that a confession is not enough to convict someone on its own); both the defendant and the prosecutor consent to it; the court does not have any objections; §§ 68, 69, 70 and 73 of the Penal Code do not apply to the case.[a][47]
 
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