I believe officially the vitamin company is owned by his parents and isn't included in the judgement against Alex Jones.

How is that not fraud?

It is. IIRC he started shuffling assets only after the legal consequences got real. But the legal system is moving slowly. And the victims may get tired of chasing his assets

>But the legal system is moving slowly.

FFS, it's actively working in his favor right now!

Since when has that mattered? He'll get a pardon in 1 month anyway.

Pardons are for crimes. This is a civil suit, not a criminal one.

Fraud is a crime.

There's no fraud conviction, there can't be a pardon. There's not even fraud charges, so what would the pardon be for... I find your rebuttal confusing.

You can pre-emptively pardon someone. Seemingly.

Only federal crimes can be pardoned by the president.

Everything here is state-level. The next president can't touch any of it.

They've already suspended his sentencing indefinitely due to the election win.

That's a non-sequitur.

Justice departments don't go after presidents or president-elects in order to prevent a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the remedy in that case.

This policy is entirely unrelated to presidential pardon power.

You're not going after a "President". You are going after a law breaker. He can be President all day long in jail.

The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system. There was no carve outs in the constitution at any point for anybody in government. This is a new, and probably fatal invention.

> The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system.

They can be investigated and held to account by Congress. That's what impeachment is. That's the whole point of having impeachment in the constitution.

If Congress fails to exercise its constitutional duty, then the problem lies with the specific representatives that place party above country.

It feels really gross that he was acquitted in the second impeachment partly because he argued that criminal court was the appropriate venue for the issue, and then turned around and argued in criminal court that he was immune for not having been convicted in the impeachment.

I apologize for not getting back to you earlier on this (if you see it at all!)

We've seen it fail over and over. They won't investigate their own seriously, and even when they find the grossest violations of law, they cover it up.

The idea that there will be justice by the voters is laughable.

> He can be President all day long in jail.

Playing devil's advocate, at least in part...

In practice, he cannot perform many of the duties of the office effectively - or perhaps at all - from jail.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it says he should be President (given the outcome of the process we had). The laws that say he should be in jail are subordinate to the Constitution and so rightly lose out in the minimum way practicable - a delay in sentencing.

...

I do have problems with some of what I've written here, but it seems like a sensible position that could be held unreservedly by someone who disagrees with me on a few questions of fact that do have a subjective component.

Who? Trump? What does that have to do with anything?

Well supposedly federal govt can't intervene in state cases but the conviction against trump is at the state level, so why isn't he being sentenced? Because power isn't about rules.

As others said above, the president has certain immunities to prevent constitutional crises. But that's only for the president, and it's not part of his pardoning powers (which wouldn't work here anyway).

So why isn't he going to jail for felony falsification of business records (forget the classified records case, he's not meant to be immune from that but here we are)

My point is that power is not about what the law says, it's about what people can get away with through their relations with other people.

Trump or Jones?

I agree but the cases are very different. There's not much worth comparing them. It's different kinds of corruption.

His conviction wasn't overturned, they are just delaying his sentencing because he's now going to be the president again. He's not doing it by any power of the federal gov't.

Exactly, there's no rule (certainly no federal rule) that says a guy can't go to jail just because he was elected president. So why isn't he? Because he has power that is not assigned to him by any law. He is a bully with a cult of personality that makes people fear him and/or act as his sycophants.

I wouldn't bet on this. Trump can use a punitive executive order to pressure the state until the governor pardons Alex Jones.

It's certainly mafia type of behavior. Now Jones has learned the lesson that as long as he doesn't directly own anything, he is effectively defamation proof. It's almost like an inverse RICO case, he does all the crime whole holding none of the money vs a mob boss rolling in dough while never directly committing the crimes.

Likely different legal entities. Johnson & Johnson tried to get out of the talc powder settlement by creating a different legal entity to contain responsibility and damages. A court ruled that invalid but this type of corporate entity manipulation happens all the time. With the vitamin company, it might be that Jones is not majority owner of it but the other owners are sympathetic to him. Giving Jones' ownership stake to the Infowars creditors wouldn't change anything if Jones is not the controlling owner. This is all supposition on my part and perhaps he is the controlling owner but the court for some reason decided not to include it in his bankruptcy assets. It's a weird world when we allow artificial people to exist in the form of corporations.