And just to be clear, I do believe that white collar crime is real crime, and that, although white collar crime poses no immediate threat to our physical safety, consistently letting it go unpunished will undermine society's morals.
On the other hand, white collar crime poses no immediate threat to our physical safety, so police departments and district attorneys generally ignore it to focus on street crime. When most district attorneys prosecute white collar crime, it is very simple, low level white collar crime, like writing bad checks. More complex cases are usually left to state attorney generals or federal prosecutors. And even they tend to take only the highest-level, most egregious cases. Intermediate cases are usually treated as civil or administrative matters.
Clearly any records falsification Trump may have done is not the sort of street-level white collar crime like writing bad checks that causes serious headaches to local merchants and draws the attention of local prosecutors. Nor is it the sort of really egregious case that draws the attention of federal and state prosecutors. If intermediate white collar crime has an actual victim, the offender usually has enough resources that the victim can sue. But there was no victim in this case. So if any enforcement actions were taken, I would expect them to be civil penalties by some administrative agency.
But Manhattan may be an exception. As one of the world's greatest financial centers, it is presumably also one of the great centers of white collar crime. So it may be that the local district attorney in Manhattan really does spend a great deal of time prosecuting white collar crime. Maybe he even prosecutes fairly low-level, victimless cases. Maybe a thorough perusal of the Manhattan white collar prosecution could convince me that there was nothing unusual here. But I doubt it.
No comments:
Post a Comment