by Joseph Klein
When the main casualty is the rule of law itself.
[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
On May 30th, a Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four jerry-rigged felony charges brought against Mr. Trump by the progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The fix was in, and the main casualty was the rule of law itself.
District Attorney Bragg abused his prosecutorial powers by targeting Mr. Trump personally, as he had promised to do when he ran for office, and then coming up with concocted felony offenses to charge him with. The Trump-hating district attorney magically alchemized a statute of limitations-barred misdemeanor of falsifying business records into a felony violation of a state law that prohibits conspiring to win an election by “unlawful means.”
DA Bragg accused the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee of allegedly conspiring to falsify business records to hide a hush money payment aimed at keeping news of a potentially embarrassing sex scandal from the voters. The jury bought this flimflam of a case against Mr. Trump with the help of a biased judge whose daughter’s firm was reportedly leveraging this same case to assist Democrats in their fundraising.
DA Bragg fabricated a byzantine legal theory especially for the purpose of ensnaring Mr. Trump. The progressive prosecutor chose to revive a time-barred misdemeanor by upgrading it to a felony involving alleged interference with a federal election, even though the public was in no way endangered by the alleged falsification of business records.
Contrast Mr. Bragg’s targeting of Mr. Trump with how he has dealt with the wave of violent crimes surging in Manhattan. Mr. Bragg has often taken the side of the accused criminals. His office has chosen to downgrade many of the most serious offenses occurring on its watch from felonies to misdemeanors.
In short, District Attorney Alvin Bragg is living proof of what the late Attorney General (and a subsequent Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson warned was “[t]he most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
An impartial judge would have thrown out Bragg’s indictment against Mr. Trump or, at the very least, ensured that Mr. Trump received a fair trial. However, the hopelessly biased Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Mr. Trump’s hush money trial, did neither. This judge, who should have been recused on conflict-of-interest grounds, abused his judicial authority by tilting the playing field sharply in the prosecution’s favor. Indeed, Judge Merchan’s rulings prevented Mr. Trump from receiving a fair trial and violated Mr. Trump’s fundamental constitutional right to due process.
For example, Judge Merchan allowed the prosecutor’s witness, former porn star Stormy Daniels, to rattle on with details about her alleged salacious affair with Mr. Trump. The judge overruled repeated objections by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that her prolonged testimony was highly prejudicial and legally irrelevant to the case, even though the judge himself admitted that the testimony may have gone too far.
Judge Merchan also allowed the introduction of other prejudicial evidence to help the prosecution’s case that had nothing to do with the charge that Mr. Trump caused the falsification of business records for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 election. This extraneous, prejudicial evidence included testimony about the infamous “Hollywood Access” tape. It also included testimony about Mr. Trump’s alleged affair involving former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Judge Merchan did the prosecution another favor when he barred the introduction of evidence crucial to the defense. He did not allow the jury to hear testimony from a federal election law expert that would have supported the defense’s contention that Mr. Trump did not violate federal election law.
Judge Merchan also issued jury instructions that were highly stacked against the defense. The instructions allowed the jury to reach a guilty verdict even if they could not agree unanimously in identifying the specific crime that Mr. Trump allegedly committed as the unlawful means to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The judge offered the jury a buffet of three possible key crimes that each jury member could choose from. They did not have to all agree on the same key crime but yet could still render a unanimous guilty verdict. Mr. Trump’s defense team did not learn of the specific crimes that the jury members could select from until the end of the trial. By then it was too late to present evidence to refute each of these crimes and their alleged connection to the charge of conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees to the accused criminal defendant “due process of law.” The Sixth Amendment guarantees that in a criminal prosecution the defendant has the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.” Mr. Trump was denied these fundamental rights in Judge Merchan’s courtroom.
Following the announcement of the jury’s guilty verdict, the Soros-funded progressive Manhattan DA bragged that “I did my job.” He is right in one sense. Mr. Bragg did a hatchet job on Donald Trump, enabling his comrades in the Democratic Party and the Biden re-election campaign to brand Mr. Trump as a convicted felon and distract voters from President Biden’s disastrous policy failures.
However, as mentioned earlier, Alvin Bragg has utterly failed to do his real job. He has shied away from vigorously prosecuting violent criminal suspects accused of putting innocent people’s lives and well-being in danger.
President Biden took Donald Trump to task for the former president’s harsh criticism of his trial and guilty verdict. Mr. Biden said that “it’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”
“The justice system should be respected, and we should never allow anyone to tear it down,” President Biden declared. “It’s as simple as that.”
Evidently, respect for the outcome of court decisions was not so simple for Mr. Biden himself when he angrily denounced, on foreign soil no less, the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade. “The one thing that has been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States,” he declared while in Spain for a NATO summit meeting in 2022 after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
After the leak of a draft of the Dobbs majority opinion, the Biden administration failed to enforce against pro-abortion protesters parading near conservative justices’ residences a law prohibiting such behavior aimed at influencing the outcome of a judicial proceeding.
A year later, President Biden angrily responded to the Supreme Court’s decision that struck down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard. “This is not a normal court,” the president exclaimed about a co-equal branch of the federal government.
“Destabilizing,” “outrageous behavior,” and “not a normal court.” These were the words that President Biden chose to describe the Supreme Court for decisions it rendered with outcomes that he did not like. Once again, we see an example of ‘rules for thee but not for me.’
The guilty verdict against Donald Trump in the New York hush money case should be overturned on appeal on various grounds that include violations of Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights, Judge Merchan’s jury instructions, and reversible errors in the judge’s evidentiary rulings. However, the appellate process takes a long time and will not be concluded before Election Day. Mr. Trump cannot count on the Supreme Court’s intervention in time to redress this miscarriage of justice and ensure a fair election that is determined at the ballot box, not in a courtroom.
The Biden campaign is already using the “convicted felon” slogan against Donald Trump to amplify its smear that Mr. Trump and his millions of supporters constitute a grave danger to democracy. But this is part of the progressive Left’s Big Lie meant to deceive the voters. The truth is that democracy and the rule of law in America are under assault by the Biden White House, the Biden Justice Department, and progressive state prosecutors and judges who abuse their powers to target their political enemies.
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the author of Global Deception: The
UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack
Hussein Obama, The United Nations & Radical Islam.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-gross-miscarriage-of-justice-in-a-manhattan-courtroom/
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