No. of Recommendations: 14
Never mind, I found where in his show he actually makes his argument (it starts at around 14:05).
Anyway, Dersh is completely incorrect in his criticism - because he doesn't understand (or misrepresents) the argument that the prosecutors have actually made.
1) He dismisses the idea that the object crime could have been tax fraud, because Trump wouldn't have known or expected that his accountants would claim the expense as a business deduction some years later (or even that they did, or that they would have been wrong to do so). However, the prosecutors weren't arguing that it was
Trump's taxes that were fraudulent - it was
Cohen's taxes that were fraudulent, because he intentionally misstated his income in order to accommodate Trump's direction to process the payments as legal income to him, rather than payments to Daniels. Dersh is wrong - either he never bothered to read the prosecutor's motions
or listen to the closing argument, or he's just misrepresenting their claims.
2) He dismisses the notion that Trump could have made the payments as a campaign contribution, because....why bother? He wouldn't have to declare until after the election? But the prosecution didn't argue that he wanted to avoid
declaring the contribution - rather, the contribution
is too large to ever be legal. It violated the numeric limits of FECA at the time it was made, not the disclosure requirement. That's one of the crimes that Cohen went to jail for - campaign contributions in excess of the FECA limit. Again, Dersh either is ignorant of or is lying about the actual legal argument.
3) Finally, he claims that the prosecution is trying to prove that Trump defrauded the voters of NY about not having sex with Daniels. Which again, is not what they're arguing. The third object crime is the NY state law that makes it illegal to try to get elected using improper means...which includes committing crimes as a mechanism for getting elected. It's how they're folding in the FECA violation as a state crime, because breaking federal law to win an election is also a violation of NY state law.
If you genuinely are interested in reading about this, the below link is an excellent summary of the prosecution's case. And unlike Dersh's ramblings, it's actually based on the arguments that the prosecutors made in court filings, not what Dersh has
imagined their claims to be.....
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/charting-the-... 