• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    In this case intent does matter. It’s a fraud trial. And it’s elevated to a felony because he had to be intending to cover up another crime.

    Let’s say someone genuinely thought an apple was a pear. That’s not fraud because there was no intent to deceive, it was just an honest mistake.

    To take the analogy a step further, and make it more accurate, maybe the my knew the apple wasn’t a pear, and maybe the prosecution is alleging the cashier ate the original pear, and they’re selling the apple as a pear to hide that.

    To elevate it to a felony, they’d have to show that there was the intent to conceal a crime. Which means they had to know that eating the pear was itself a crime.

    Make sense?

    • CatsGoMOW@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yes, but I was referring more generally to the part where you said he probably doesn’t understand esoteric campaign finance laws. Running afoul of a law you don’t know/understand doesn’t mean you still didn’t break the law, whether you knowingly intended to or not.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        He’s not being tried for the campaign finance law, this is separate and about him falsifying business records- it’s a felony because his intent was to cover up the campaign thing.

        So they could conceivably argue that Trump didn’t know the campaign thing was a problem and there couldn’t have possibly meant to conceal it. At this point taking the misdemeanor would be a win.