In a way, it must feel like the weight of the Donald Trump-hating world is squarely on the shoulders of Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
After all, the Democrat Party to which they both belong had gotten curb-stomped on November 5 by the aforementioned Orange Hitler — to the tune of 312 electoral votes, nearly 77 million popular votes, and a 2.5-million-vote margin of victory, in addition to the four-seat flipping of the formerly Democrat-controlled Senate and the retention of the agenda-setting House of Representatives.
For these reasons, then, we can understand why the lawfaring Democrats would want to hold onto the sentencing phase of Trump’s hush-money criminal case and hold it over the former and future president’s head, Sword of Damocles style, until he leaves office for the final time. In 2029.
In a filing before Judge Merchan on Tuesday, writes constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, “Bragg suggested that the court should stay the pending criminal case and defer any sentencing ‘until after the end of defendant’s upcoming presidential term. That would allow a city prosecutor to put a leash on a sitting president for four years.”
In effect, as Turley writes, Bragg would be putting Trump on department store layaway. For the next four years, at least in part, Trump’s future would belong to the DA of a bloodthirsty borough that he lost to Kamala Harris by more than 60 points.
How did we even get here? The hush-money case against Trump was always a legal abomination — a stink bomb of a case that the George Soros-backed Bragg himself had for years declined to prosecute until he learned just how much President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland and the rest of his fellow Democrats wanted him to prosecute it. Essentially, Trump had entered into a perfectly legal nondisclosure agreement with a money-grubbing porn star but ostensibly filed it incorrectly. And for that arguable bookkeeping error, these partisan Democrats have persecuted him viciously and relentlessly.
But even now, Merchan and Bragg could’ve done the right thing. No less a Democrat than SCOTUSblog publisher Thomas Goldstein took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times recently to urge his fellow Democrats to end the criminal cases against Trump. As Goldstein argues:
With the election now over, the courts have to decide quickly whether to move forward with the criminal cases against Donald Trump. Although this idea will pain my fellow Democrats, all of the cases should be abandoned.
Democracy’s ultimate verdict on these prosecutions was rendered by voters on Election Day. The charges were front and center in the campaign. The president-elect made a central feature of his candidacy that the cases were political and calculated to stop him from being elected again. Despite the prosecutions, [nearly 77] million people, a majority of the popular vote counted so far, decided to send him back to the White House.
Indeed, they did. As Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett writes: “The 2024 presidential election outcome gives both prosecutor and judge a convenient off-ramp to terminate this case before enduring the embarrassment of being overturned by higher courts. Their vindictive lawfare strategy failed at the ballot box. … Make no mistake, Bragg and Merchan will never acknowledge their misfeasance. But they have the opportunity to end this misbegotten case now. Will they do it? If the past is prologue, no.”
Turley doesn’t believe that a presidential election, however resounding, necessarily negates jury verdicts on 34 criminal counts, but he does believe that “ample reasons exist” to appeal these decisions and overturn these verdicts or to dismiss the case entirely.
Even if Merchan does what he’s expected to do, which is to refuse to dismiss the case even though the Supreme Court recently ruled that a president enjoys immunity related to actions taken in office and during the exercise of his presidency, the trial “was rife with reversible error,” Turley notes. “This was a raw exercise of lawfare and Merchan did little to ensure fairness toward the defendant. Yet none of those errors [and this is the key part] can be likely addressed until Merchan reaches final decisions on the motion to dismiss as well as the sentencing question.”
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy suggests what’s likely driving Bragg: politics, pure and simple. “Harris beat Trump by more than 60 percentage points in Manhattan,” he writes. “While campaigning for DA, a political office subject to popular election, Bragg signaled to Manhattanites that he would use the powers of his office against Trump. He has made good on that commitment, and voters have noticed. As the New York Post reported just two days ago, Bragg is heavily favored to win reelection next year. Trump made inroads in New York this year, but that was in the outer boroughs and upstate; in Manhattan, the president-elect is deeply unpopular, and the public does not see Bragg’s case as the farce it appears to be to much of the national electorate.”
McCarthy continues: “Ergo, Bragg is not letting the case go, and he doesn’t need Trump to be sentenced. As far as the DA and his political base are concerned, Bragg won the trial, and that’s what matters. He is not worried about the appeal. The point of bringing the prosecution was to damage Trump as a 2024 presidential candidate; even if the case is reversed on appeal, such a reversal won’t happen for years — by which point Bragg could be looking to run for higher office.”
McCarthy had me until the last part of that last sentence. Bragg is a turd, and even dullard Democrat New Yorkers know it.
So there you have it. Because of rank political power, the Democrats are going to hold this over Donald Trump’s head. And Trump is going to wonder — he’s only human, after all — whether certain decisions, perhaps on trade or tax policy, for example, might be to the benefit or detriment of the state of New York, whose governor would have the power to pardon him. Never mind that Trump might actually want this sentencing delayed so as not to have the specter of a sentence clouding his second term.
This is no way for a president to run a country, and the Democrats know it.
I’ll close with a reflection on the absurdity of it all, courtesy of libertarian Fox News host Kennedy, who quipped yesterday: “What I would like to see from Alvin Bragg is a little bit of consistency. I want him to be making sure that he’s meticulously going through all the financial filing records of anyone in New York who might ever think about running for president and make sure that they don’t have any fraudulent statements on their past financial filings. Because if they do, they should be tried … and convicted. Because we could have thousands of [such fraudsters] running around the city. And that’s much more dangerous than a madman with a knife going throughout the borough and murdering people.”
Kennedy wasn’t done, though: “And while I’m at it, I want to make sure [Bragg] targets people that use any sort of filtered photos on dating apps because they’re also making fraudulent filings. And people are making dating decisions — life-or-death dating decisions — based on wholly inaccurate information.”
This is the ridiculous legal state we find ourselves in at the moment, all thanks to the Democrats.
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