Tl;DR: a key witness that was set to testify against trump in his hush money case might not testify because of a separate deal for his possible perjury
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
183 points (97.9% liked)
News
22926 readers
3473 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Not quiet. This is a key witness that testified in trump's defense, and even went to jail for trump. Now, however, he's struck a new deal in a different case to testify against trump... which isn't great for the ongoing case where he already testified for trump.
In other words, this is terrible news for both Trump AND Weisselberg.
Should he take the deal, Weisselberg would admit to committing perjury during his October testimony in the fraud trial. In exchange, he would not have to be a witness against Trump in the hush-money trial, which is scheduled for March.
I will caveat that I’m not familiar with the case details at all, but my reading of that suggests that because of the deal he will not be testifying against trump, not that he will have to as part of the deal.
He already testified in this fraud trial that's finished but awaiting a verdict. He may be confessing to committing perjury in that testimony. That would make the already super fucked Trump even more fucked since Weisselberg testified in Trump's defense.
But you're right that he won't have to testify in a future trial.
I wonder if Team Trump is trying a strategy of sacrificing Trump's fuckage level in certain trials to try to reduce his fuckage in others, rather than spreading his fuckedness around evenly among them all.
IANAL, but...
This is just a civil trial but it's pretty high stakes. Engoran already found him guilty of fraud and revoked his business license in NY (which was stayed for now). If he rules that Trump must pay $300M, Trump will have to put up a $360M bond to appeal it or else they'll pretty quickly start coming after his assets. And there's no way he'll get protected by bankruptcy for willful fraud either.
I actually can't remember the potential penalty for the hush money case though. Maybe they figure he's already fucked to the max here so it couldn't get much worse?
It's also important to factor that Trump has the worst lawyers.
Do you get a prize if you have done so much purgury and fraud that when you admit to it, people can't figure out if this is a good or bad thing?
Yes. The prize is generally prison.
Edit: unless you're rich or a politician, then it's a toss-up.
If he admits perjury, his credibility is gone, and nobody would want to use him in any other case regardless of any deal.