No. of Recommendations: 11
The most bizarre and worrisome thing about these instructions to the jury is that the judge gave jurors an a la carte menu of three choices — three crimes on which jurors may decide for themselves, individually, not unanimously what they think were Trump's motivations for making 34 bookkeeping notations. All Trump's complicity involves, and I'm not making this up, is if he may have been motivated to win the 2016 election, which means they can conclude he's guilty of a federal or state campaign law, or that he violated a tax law, for which there was no evidence offered.Why is that bizarre and worrisome? As I noted in the other thread, this is what New York criminal law provides - jurors do not need to be unanimous on predicate crimes. Regardless of whether you think that they
should be, that's not the law in New York.
As for the rest of this, it's nonsense. The jury wasn't required to find
only that he was motivated to win the election - they had to find affirmatively that he intended to violate FECA. It might help to read the actual jury instructions for yourself:
static01.nyt.com: PDF document
