Steve Bannon's hopes of avoiding prison suffer blow
Steve Bannon's hopes of avoiding prison suffer blow
Top Trump ally is trying to overturn his 2022 contempt of congress conviction, citing executive privilege defense.
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Every day that this man and his allies walk free is a day that proves there are two tiers of justice in this country.
And if you're rich, you can do things like walk around as a free man while your appeals all play out while us plebs would be rotting in jail.
And what about the whole notion of "ignorance of the law is not a defense for violating the law."? If his argument were to stand, what's to stop an unscrupulous lawyer from saying "My client was acting under the advice of his legal team" as if it were a get-out-of-jail-free card?
"I was acting under the advice of counsel" isn't a free license to do what you want and get away with it. It just means that you got bad advice.
Yeah check out Alex Jones for another example. The guy is making and spending to the tune of 100k per month, and yet he's crying poor to the courts and getting away with it.
He also admitted from the day the judgements came down against him that he was planning to use this exact strategy, and that he had every intention of hiding his wealth so the victims will never touch it.
he's crying poor to the courts and getting away with it.
Ehhhhh yeah not so much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/alex-jones-sandy-hook.html
I'll believe it when I see it, cause he's still living like a millionaire
I literally posted the article with an order that he cannot "get away with it." He isn't. There is a timetable for payment on the damages.
Doubling-down on cynicism derived from ignorance in spite of having just received information is fucking INFURIATING.
Unless he's living in a one bedroom apartment in a shitty neighborhood, there is no equal justice there. Any one of us would have been wrecked and forced to pay right away, and have our wages garnished, which isn't being done to him clearly.
No, you wouldn't because you wouldn't have an incompetent layer failing to exhaust all avenues of appeal. Also you WOULDNT have a media empire to fucking argue over. You know nothing about how any of this works.
I'm so tired I actually forgot these two pieces of shit are not the same piece of shit
They were conjoined turds separated at birth, they both came out of Satan's asshole.
Somewhere in here is a poop knife joke
This is fairly old (1961), but Advice of Counsel is a legitimate defense in some cases.
What's at issue, especially with Trump, is that if he relies on Advice of Counsel as a defense, it's elementary to show that many legal advisers told him "No, you can't do that," and he chose to listen to the advisers who said he could. IANAL, but it would seem that that personal choice of which counsel to take advice from ("This is what I want to do; I'm going to find a lawyer who tells me I can.") would make an Advice of Counsel defense void.
Right, but my point was the "advice of counsel" defense isn't the get out of jail free card that Trump and Bannon are trying to portray it as. There's a whole ordeal that has to occur for that defense to be valid. It's much more than the "Hey, my lawyer said it was OK, so I went with it. We're good now, right?" argument that they're trying to make.
Oh, I wasn't trying to argue your point. I was adding to it.
That's actually the defense they're trying to use in Trump's NY civil fraud case, and you can use "advice of council" as a viable defense if you can prove:
- The lawyer(s) in question did indeed provide you bad advice (putting the lawyers in jeopardy of committing a crime)
- The other evidence doesn't point to you as having criminal intent.
Right. And it works if you can prove you had good faith reasons to believe the advice you were given was sound and otherwise had no criminal intent. But Trump isn't arguing that. Neither is Bannon. Both are using "advice of counsel" as if it were a do-whatever-you-want certificate.
If Trump or Bannon's arguments were allowed to stand, it would usher in a whole new breed of unscrupulous lawyers willing to help their clients get away with crimes by just saying "My client was acting under the advice of counsel". Imagine what someone like Trump and his team of crony lawyers would be getting away with if they were allowed to make that argument.
It's laughable on its face, but it's scary that it's not out of the realm of possibility if people like them ever come close to the levers of power again.
The fact that I can't dismiss that possibility out of hand is terrifying.
When the bottom tier no longer believes the foundation is working, they'll start to work against it. When it collapses, the top tier will fall.
No one wants this outside of a fringe set of people. But it may have to happen.