Welcome back to the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host

Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow. He is the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at

NYU and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. Richard, how are you?

Well I'm fine. I mean at least I'm not going to jail.

You're not going to jail. Well, that's, the question is, will former President Donald Trump go to jail?

Because we are recording this moments after Donald Trump was just found guilty on all 34 counts of

falsifying business records in New York State. It looks like sentencing will be on

July 11th and Richard the first thing I have to

ask of course is what happens next I mean he's out of he's out on bail right now

until July 11th we have a presidential debate coming up I think June 27th.

So legally what's going to happen next?

I think legally if he's released on his own recognizance nothing will happen.

What happens is the lawyers will be preparing furiously to make their various presentations about the severity of the sentences.

One of the things that I think will surely come up about this is why is it that they're 34 counts?

This was one program in order to try and influence the election according to the prosecution.

Is each separate check an offense worthy of us the sentence of four or five years.

Do you really think that for something like this, which for everybody else would amount to a $200 fine, you could throw a guy in sentence for a period that would long exceed his life.

And I think that there will be a lot of attention paid to that particular issue, saying in effect

when you think about the sentencing sentencing you cannot basically think about these

are separate charges.

I think another thing that they're going to start to worry about is that these are all

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