In the 1980s, New York real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley renovated her palatial weekend home in Connecticut. But she stiffed the contractors. They sued her, and they sent some documents to the New York Post that showed she was billing some of the work to her businesses.
That triggered a federal criminal tax fraud investigation. In the end, some United States Attorney named, um ... I think, Giuliani—is that how you spell it?—prosecuted her.
A jury convicted her of one count of conspiracy to defraud the US, three counts of tax evasion, three counts of filing false personal tax returns, sixteen counts of assisting in the filing of false corporate and partnership tax returns, and ten counts of mail fraud.
On Tax Day, April 15, 1992, she reported to a federal prison and served nineteen months.
After prison, she led the rest of her life in relative isolation; her few friends included Imelda Marcos and Manuel Noriega.
She died in 2007 at the age of 87. She left the bulk of her estate, which had dropped to $12 million, to her little Maltese, named Trouble. A probate judge knocked the dog's share of the estate down to $2 million.
As I’m sure many of you have, I’ve been thinking a lot about the electoral choice we have in 2020 with more focus over the past few days, and I keep returning to a conclusion I reached a while back, but felt was not realistic enough as a scenario to be worth expressing.
And that is that, for the good of the country and their own good, both of the major-party presidential candidates should retire.
Joe Biden has served his country honorably for over a half-century. He deserves our thanks for that, and in particular for saving our Constitution, our democracy, and the rule of law by running for president and winning in 2020.
Absolutely agree with @Delavegalaw, @MichaelCohen212, and @meiselasb. I was in the courtroom that day, and I found that moment to be a good one for the defense, but felt it was only a small one and essentially the only good moment during a rather long, meandering, and ineffective cross-examination.
I was astonished—shocked, in fact—when I learned that television viewers, particularly on @CNN, had been misled into believing that the defense had dealt some kind of death blow to the prosecution’s case.
Some of the mainstream media coverage of the case has been downright bizarre, and remains so. 🤷🏻♂️
Here’s what I said about that day right after court, at 5:04 pm EDT on May 16, 2024. I’m not patting myself on the back for being right; I’m just expressing mystification about how many others could have been so wrong.
I think it may have the herd instinct we all have. If just one legal analyst sitting in a studio vigorously pronounces a misguided, albeit well-meaning, take (let’s leave aside the Trump shills the networks absurdly decided to air), that can influence how others (particularly the nonlegal journalists) how they perceive or express things (because they want to appear to play things down the middle). And the public gets misled.
Chris defends the Goldwater rule in his “deep dive.” It has been the subject of severe criticism among many mental health professionals. Their informed criticisms are far more persuasive than Chris’s cursory defense. I attach a (small) sampling of their articles:
Yep. Even if Cohen had advanced the money in October 2016 on his own without any expectation of repayment by Trump—a ludicrous lie—Cohen would have committed a campaign finance violation (which is why he pleaded guilty to one).
Hicks’s testimony establishes beyond any question that Trump knew about that illegal and undisclosed contribution, and knew that his reimbursement of Cohen was not a payment for legal services.
And that means, beyond any reasonable doubt, that means that Donald Trump intentionally created false business records—including the checks that he himself signed—to cover up the underlying campaign finance violations.