The Jan. 6 Investigation

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Random said:
Actually, it gets pretty interesting. Tax Fraud requires Mens Rea (intention or knowledge of wrongdoing), so more than one Sovereign Citizen/FOTLer/Tax Protester has managed to escape criminal liability for tax evasion by convincing a judge or jury that they genuinely did not know that tax law applied to them.

They still owed the IRS the money though, even if found not guilty by reason of stupidity.
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You think decades of telling tax authorities and creditors two drastically different evaluations doesn't provide the necessary mens rea? Or saying that an apartment that is 10,000 sq feet is 30,000 square feet doesn't either?

"Mens rea" doesn't mean the perpetrator knew what they were doing was a crime, but that their intent was to commit a particular action.

The question is did Trump know he was exaggerating? The answer based on available evidence is obviously yes.
 
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Meh. Trump was born a liar, lived and profited as a liar, and will die a liar. The only question is if he'll go to prison for being a liar.

I think that if America wants to heal from the indignity of having had such a jackass as president, there's really no alternative but to lower the boom on this pathetic scofflaw.
 
Sidney Powell intends to testify before the House committee, and she's going to prove that she's right!

Sidney Powell’s Got A Really Bad Idea

On Tuesday, the January 6 Select Committee issued subpoenas to multiple Trumpland lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
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Suffice it to say, Powell has some very bad ideas. And yet, even we were surprised to see that she is willing, even eager to appear before the January 6 Committee.

From the website of Defending the Republic, her non-profit, which paid a fine in Florida for failing to comply with fundraising laws and was recently subpoenaed by a grand jury in DC in connection to the events leading up to the Capitol Riot:

"Ms. Powell has received the January 6 Committee’s subpoena, and she looks forward to providing the Committee with significant evidence in support of the election fraud statements and claims she presented on behalf of the electors and clients she represented. Those claims are supported by expert reports and affidavits of witnesses that no court took the time to hear. Ms. Powell is a practicing lawyer, and she will comply to the full extent required by law and legal ethics.

Ms. Powell looks forward to appearing before the Committee to answer questions, walk through the evidence, and present a full picture of the fraud and other misconduct that took place during the 2020 Election, including the myriad of election fraud allegations only now being examined by state officials in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania."
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Powell appears to think she’s going to use the hearing to show, once and for all, that her widely debunked election claims are FULLY BUNKED. That it is more likely that she proves the election was stolen than that she makes a lot of incendiary allegations that immediately show up as evidence in Dominion and Smartmatic’s defamation suits.

Luckily, Powell has an excellent track record dominating her interrogators. She’ll really show those congressmen what’s what!
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:dl:

More likely, she gets ripped several new ones.
 
acbytesla said:
You think decades of telling tax authorities and creditors two drastically different evaluations doesn't provide the necessary mens rea? Or saying that an apartment that is 10,000 sq feet is 30,000 square feet doesn't either?

"Mens rea" doesn't mean the perpetrator knew what they were doing was a crime, but that their intent was to commit a particular action.

The question is did Trump know he was exaggerating lying? The answer based on available evidence is obviously yes.
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FTFY
 
shemp said:
Sidney Powell intends to testify before the House committee, and she's going to prove that she's right!
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One of the many legal insights of Rumpole is that a witness who is eager to testify is pure poison to their own side of the case.
 
BobTheCoward said:
If there is a mens rea requirement or probably isn't.
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The "alternate electors" signed their vote for Trump as the official State Electors - which is perjury and unlawful assumption of authority.
Just because you think you're a Sovereign Citizen doesn't mean you can declare yourself to be a legitimate State Elector.
 
Random said:
Actually, it gets pretty interesting. Tax Fraud requires Mens Rea (intention or knowledge of wrongdoing)
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Err, not exactly, and not entirely.

Tax fraud is evident if the taxpayer is found to have:

• Purposely failed to file his income tax return (mens rea)

• Intentionally failed to pay his tax debt (mens rea)

• Deliberately failed to report all income received (mens rea)

• Prepared and filed a false return (actus reus)

• Misrepresented the actual state of his affairs so as to falsely claim tax deductions or tax credits (actus reus)

The last two require only actus reus, the "the act or omission that comprise the physical elements of a crime as required by statute.", and the last one is the one that the Trump Mobsters will be in trouble for - it only requires the act to have been carried out - it does not require any of the them to know that they were doing something illegal.
 
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Remember when Trump said only mobsters invoked the Fifth? His son Eric invoked the Fifth over 500 times when deposed in the New York State fraud case against the Trump organization.

And it's not like they overstated or understated the value of one property, they did it on property after property after property. Not only did Trump tell Insurance Companies and Bankers that his apartment was three times larger than it is, they said it was worth over 320 million, almost double the most expensive apartment in the country. It's actual value is likely to be well under 100 million.
They said a golf course was worth 80 million dollars to bankers He told local tax authorities it was worth 3 million. They said a mansion was worth 295 million. A professional appraiser set the value to be about 35 million.

This is just a few examples. There are countless more. These were the most egregious.
 
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AC, his apartment may well be worth that! I'm sure all that gold furniture, etc is real! ;)

It looks like Versailles threw up.
 
TragicMonkey said:
One of the many legal insights of Rumpole is that a witness who is eager to testify is pure poison to their own side of the case.
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True. As a witness for the prosecution, the legal eagles always coached witnesses to answer in monosyllables if possible or otherwise short sentences and never, ever engage in a to and fro when on the stand.
 
Also just to add my earlier post #1431, Tax Fraud from the intentional undervaluing of assets is only half of the story. The other half is the overvaluing of assets to get bigger loans that they otherwise would have got... thats bank fraud, and AFAICS, there is no real mens rea required for that.

18 USC§ 1344 - Bank fraud
Whoever knowingly executes, or attempts to execute, a scheme or artifice—
(1) to defraud a financial institution; or
(2) to obtain any of the moneys, funds, credits, assets, securities, or other property owned by, or under the custody or control of, a financial institution, by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises;
shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.

LOUGHRIN v. UNITED STATES
A part of the federal bank fraud statute, 18 U. S. C. §1344(2), makes it a crime to “knowingly execute a scheme . . . to obtain” property owned by, or under the custody of, a bank “by means of false or fraudulent pretenses.” Petitioner Kevin Loughrin was charged with bank fraud after he was caught forging stolen checks, using them to buy goods at a Target store, and then returning the goods for cash. The District Court declined to give Loughrin’s proposed jury instruction that a conviction under §1344(2) required proof of “intent to defraud a financial institution.” The jury convicted Loughrin, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed.

Held: Section 1344(2) does not require the Government to prove that a defendant intended to defraud a financial institution. .  (a) Section 1344(2) requires only that the defendant intend to obtain bank property and that this end is accomplished “by means of” a false statement. No additional requirement of intent to defraud a bank appears in the statute’s text. And imposing that requirement would prevent §1344(2) from applying to cases falling within the statute’s clear terms, such as frauds directed against a third-party custodian of bank-owned property. Loughrin’s construction would also make §1344(2) a mere subset of §1344(1), which prohibits any scheme “to defraud a financial institution.” That view is untenable because those clauses are separated by the disjunctive “or,” signaling that each is intended to have separate meaning. And to read clause (1) as fully encompassing clause (2) contravenes two related interpretive canons: that different language signals different meaning, and that no part of a statute should be superfluous.

Effectively the Government would only have to show that

1. The Trump Mobsters intended to get the loans, and
2. They got the loans fraudulently.
 
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