After a recent guilty verdict in a New York City courtroom on his felony charges of falsifying business records in connection to pre-2016 election hush money, MSNBC legal analyst Kristy Greenberg says prosecutors should seek prison time for Donald Trump.
“Prosecutors should seek a prison sentence for Donald Trump,” Greenberg wrote on social media. “Michael Cohen was sentenced to 3 years in prison for the same conduct (as well as other crimes) that prosecutors argued threatened the fairness of our elections and eroded faith in our electoral process. Cohen acted at the direction of Trump; Trump is clearly more culpable than Cohen for this same conduct. If this crime was serious enough to send Cohen to prison, it’s serious enough to send Trump to prison too.”
Cohen, a former ally to Trump, was prosecuted on campaign finance law violations after he provided those funds for Stormy Daniels, a woman who in years past allegedly had a sexual encounter with the now former president. The idea was that the arrangement stood to covertly boost Trump’s bid for president by way of keeping Daniels’ story of an encounter with Trump under wraps.
The underlying hush money connected to Trump’s and Cohen’s criminal cases in different ways, as Trump’s core charges centered on his successfully alleged falsification of business records of repayments that Cohen received for delivering the funds. Prosecutors did also somewhat incorporate election-related allegations into Trump’s case, though, as they raised the records allegations to the felony level by alleging that Trump also intended to conceal other illegal acts. And in the process of laying out what they meant by the latter claim, local prosecutors alleged a covert plot to impact the 2016 election in a pro-Trump fashion.
Trump’s case is now heading to appeals, with an expected sentencing also looming for Trump, though a Trump lawyer predictably claimed this weekend that they’d have success in appeals to the point Trump’s eventually subject to no sentence at all.
