(DCNF)—CNN’s Michael Smerconish said Friday that relentless media coverage and the criminal cases against President-elect Donald Trump likely played a significant role in his victory.
The media has faced allegations of bias against Trump and he also got indicted four times during his 2024 presidential campaign. Smerconish, on “Press Club,” argued that these factors ended up helping Trump rather than hurting his appeal with voters.
“I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but at the top of my list, I’ll say it that way … It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel,” Smerconish told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin. “Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know.”
“But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing that god-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it,” he added. “I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do.”
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe performed at Trump’s Oct. 27 Madison Square Garden rally, calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and receiving significant media backlash. However, Trump ended up winning a majority of Hispanic male votes nationwide in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republican voters in Georgia told MSNBC during a May segment that Trump’s legal issues have made them more passionate about supporting him.
“It’s actually caused me to support him more,” a voter named Antonio Jones said. “I just don’t believe that it’s a coincidence we have a trial happening in Atlanta, we have one happening in New York, so the question people are beginning to ask themselves like I did, is like, why now?”
Trump leads Harris in the popular vote by 2% with over 76 million votes as of Friday morning, according to The Associated Press.
After Trump’s election victory, his two federal cases will be dropped and his state cases probably will too, though there’s a possibility that ambitious local prosecutors could extend the battle, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. For instance, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis signaled during a Wednesday interview with Atlanta News First that she intends to proceed with her case against Trump, which accuses him of attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
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]]>The longtime Democratic Party lawyer has already filed more than 60 preelection lawsuits to stop Trump from becoming president again by combatting what he calls Republican “voter suppression” efforts such as requiring voters to provide identification at the polls. Echoing a standard Democratic talking point, Elias maintains that such requirements are “racist” strategies designed to make it harder for minorities to vote.
At the same time, Elias has been sending letters to election officials in Georgia and other key swing states threatening legal action if they uphold challenges to voter rolls to remove noncitizens and other ineligible registrants. Some Georgia officials complain that his intimidation tactics are interfering with county registrars’ ability to check the qualifications of voters.
If Trump is declared the winner, the hard-charging attorney threatens to overturn his election by deploying an army of more than 75 lawyers to sue for ballot recounts in several swing states. Trump, in turn, has threatened to lock Elias up for election interference, as ABC News moderator David Muir pointed out in last month’s presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris.
Elias symbolizes the growing impact of lawfare on U.S. elections as both parties are turning increasingly to the courts to gain an edge. According to a newly disclosed Republican National Committee memo, the Trump campaign has filed or joined 123 election lawsuits in 26 states, 82 of which are in battleground states, to combat what it describes as voter fraud. It has also hired thousands of lawyers to fend off what a Trump lawyer expects will be “an onslaught of litigation” from the Harris campaign contesting the results of the election. Of course, that army of lawyers will also be used to push recounts should Trump lose.
Election experts say that these GOP efforts – fueled, in part, by Trump’s claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election – are playing catch-up. Democrats have long been at the forefront of strategies to use the court to impact elections, and no one has been more important to that cause than Elias, who keeps a sign behind his desk that warns: “BEWARE OF ATTACK DEMOCRAT.”
To many Democrats, he is a hero. The headline of a 2022 profile of Elias in the New Yorker called Elias, “The First Defense Against Trump’s Assault on Democracy.”
Conservatives tend to see Elias in a much different light. “Mr. Elias is part of a massive and well-funded partisan leftist operation notorious for using lawfare to undermine election integrity,” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “Making it easier to steal elections is the antithesis of ‘democracy.’”
Nevertheless, in the expanding world of lawfare, Elias, a 55-year-old graduate of Duke University’s law school, continues to stand apart. While scoring many victories in the courthouse, he has also worked closely with campaigns on partisan efforts that have little to do with jurisprudence.
More Than a Courtroom Partisan
As general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, he helped lead the effort to manufacture and leak spurious “opposition research” claiming to reveal illicit ties between Trump and Russia.
Elias later testified that he was worried – then as now – that Trump was a threat to democracy: “I received information that was troubling as someone who cares about democracy.” That “information” turned out to be a fictitious “dossier” linking Trump to the Kremlin crafted by former British spook and FBI informant Christopher Steele, who huddled with Elias in his Washington office.
“Some of the information that was in it I think has actually proved true. It was accurate and important,” Elias testified in a closed-door hearing on Capitol Hill in December 2017, according to a declassified transcript. Actually, Steele’s allegations proved to be a collection of improbable rumors and fabricated allegations invented by Steele’s top researcher and a Clinton campaign adviser.
Nonetheless, the disinformation was fed to the FBI and media, igniting criminal investigations (including illegal electronic surveillance), congressional probes, and a media frenzy that crippled Trump’s presidency with bad press for years.
In a parallel operation against Trump, Elias worked with his then-law partner Michael Sussmann and Clinton campaign officials – including Jake Sullivan, who is now President Biden’s national security adviser – to develop misleading evidence of a “secret hotline” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that allegedly used a “back channel” connection between email servers at Trump Tower and Russian-owned Alfa Bank. These false allegations were posted on social media and brought to the attention of the FBI, triggering a separate criminal investigation targeting Trump and his campaign. Like other Russiagate probes, it was eventually discredited.
But the damage was done. By spreading fake Russian dirt on Trump, Elias was able to create scandals that dogged Trump for years, tarnishing his electability. The Democratic lawyer’s machinations, however, drew scrutiny from other investigators and hurt his own reputation – albeit temporarily.
During his probe of Russiagate, Special Counsel John Durham found Elias intentionally sought to conceal Clinton’s role in the dossier. According to court records, Elias acted as a cutout for more than $1 million in campaign payments for the dossier. By laundering its payments through a law firm, the Clinton campaign and Elias were able to claim attorney-client confidentiality when Durham sought their internal emails (the assertion of that privilege also blocked investigators from accessing communications between Elias and Steele’s immediate employer, the Washington-based opposition research firm, FusionGPS). But their shell game got the Clinton campaign in trouble with the Federal Election Commission, which later fined it and the Democratic National Committee $113,000 for misreporting the purpose of the payments as “legal expenses,” rather than opposition research, in violation of FEC laws.
The Durham probe, which Elias insists was “politically motivated,” nonetheless raised ethical issues with the D.C. Bar and Elias’ former law firm, Perkins Coie, reportedly leading to their breakup in August 2021, when Elias suddenly left the powerhouse after almost 30 years. The firm, which Elias had joined fresh out of law school in 1993, grew “increasingly uncomfortable” with the unwanted scrutiny the Durham probe invited on it, according to published reports. The veteran prosecutor exposed questionable billing practices by the firm. Durham also revealed the Democratic firm had set up an FBI workspace within its Washington offices, further calling into question the FBI’s impartiality in investigating Trump.
In late 2021, Elias opened his own firm, the Elias Law Group, but soon lost major clients who reportedly grew weary of his aggressive tactics and go-it-alone style. Last year, the DNC severed its 15-year relationship with Elias; then more recently, the Biden campaign parted company with him. In 2020, Elias had quarterbacked Biden’s legal team that fought Trump’s claims in court that the election had been stolen. He also beat back GOP measures to ensure election integrity after Democrats took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to dramatically loosen rules for voting – including allowing ballot harvesting, drop boxes, and ballots arriving up to four days after Election Day to still be counted.
Top Democratic Party officials were said to sour on Elias after he filed election-related lawsuits without consulting with them, some of which backfired with unfavorable – and lasting – rulings. Biden’s team reportedly also became frustrated with his fees. Elias billed the DNC and Biden campaign more than $20 million during the 2020 election cycle.
But Elias has since taken on other clients – including Kamala Harris – who have more than made up for the loss in revenue. So far in this election cycle, the latest FEC filings show the Elias Law Group has received a total of more than $22 million in disbursements from a host of major Democratic and anti-Trump clients. In addition to the Harris For President campaign, where he’s in charge of recounts and post-election litigation (it’s not known if he also has a hand in opposition research, as he did in 2016), Elias has signed retainer agreements with the:
- Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
- Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
- [Democratic] Senate Majority PAC
- Stop Trump PAC
- The Lincoln Project
Elias has also been retained by Mind The Gap, a political action committee set up to help Democrats take back the House. Mind The Gap was founded by Barbara Fried, the mother of convicted crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried. In a lawsuit filed last year, Fried, a Stanford law professor, is accused of orchestrating a potentially illegal scheme to funnel political contributions from her son to her PAC.
Among Elias’ other clients are Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a leader of House efforts to impeach Trump who, records show, is shelling out a six-figure retainer for Elias as he runs for an open U.S. Senate seat in California, and Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, who previously served as Schiff’s chief counsel during the first Trump impeachment.
Elias also represents Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who polls show is narrowly leading GOP challenger Bernie Moreno in his race for reelection, according to the RealClearPolitics Average. That race could determine control of the Senate.
The business of political lawfare – or “protecting democracy,” as Elias calls his job – has made the super lawyer super-rich. The most recent property records show Elias lives in a $2.6 million mansion in Great Falls, Va., and FEC records show he has the wherewithal to donate generous sums to his party, including a combined total of at least $65,000 in gifts to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
“Aggressive Bully”
Elias first earned his reputation as a fierce and effective advocate in 2009, when he won an eight-month recount battle to get his client, Al Franken, elected to the Senate. He also scored a series of victories against the Trump campaign in 2020.
“My team and I beat [Trump] in court 60-plus times,” Elias boasted on X last month, in his trademark brashness. “Here is my message to the GOP: If you try to subvert the election in 2024, you will be sued and you will lose.”
Representing Biden electors in Arizona, for example, Elias in late 2020 defeated a post-election Trump lawsuit alleging voter fraud in Maricopa County by arguing at trial the plaintiff showed the court only “garden variety errors” but provided “no evidence about misconduct, no evidence about fraud, no evidence about illegal votes.”
But Elias’ aggressive posture has also backfired.
In 2016, he sued Arizona to strike down two laws that, he argued, made it harder for blacks and Hispanics to vote. One banned the practice of partisans going door-to-door and collecting mail-in ballots and bringing them to a polling place, and the other canceled ballots that were cast at the wrong precinct. Elias argued the measures violated a key part of the Voting Rights Act – Section 2 – prohibiting states from passing voting laws that discriminate based on race. After a lower court in Arizona refused to block the measures prior to the election, Elias appealed and won a favorable ruling from the liberal U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But in the case, Brnovich v. DNC, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Arizona, ruling that the state’s ballot-integrity measures lacked discriminatory intent.
UCLA law professor Rick Hasen speculates that the conservative Supreme Court used the Brnovich case as “an opportunity to weaken” Section 2, which Democratic voting-rights lawyers have relied on as a tool for civil rights enforcement. Regardless of the justices’ motives, the Brnovich decision does establish a precedent whereby voting rules resulting in only small disparities for voters of color can no longer be challenged. Some Democrats complain that Elias’ loss in Arizona opened the door for all red states to impose “restrictions” on voting.
“Marc didn’t listen to such criticism and he brought an extremely weak Voting Rights Act case in Arizona to disastrous results,” Hasen wrote in a recent blog. “It is fine to be zealous in one’s advocacy,” he added, “but one need not be an aggressive bully.”
Elias has also aggravated judges. He’s been disciplined for filing frivolous lawsuits and motions. In 2021, for instance, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sanctioned Elias for refiling a motion that was previously rejected by a lower court “without disclosing the previous denial.” The appellate court ordered him to pay attorneys’ fees and court costs incurred by opponents in the Texas election case over his “duplicative” motion.
“Using lawfare as Elias does is legal – unless the litigation is frivolous,” said Paul Kamenar, general counsel for the National Legal and Policy Center in Washington.
Elias and an attorney representing him did not reply to requests for comment. But in a previous interview, he dismissed the criticism that he is unnecessarily belligerent, arguing that the “existential threat Trump poses to democracy” demands tough action. He acknowledged that he can be brusque but explained he discarded lawyerly circumspection and restraint after Trump’s 2016 election “radicalized” him.
“And so I became a much more polarized person and a more polarizing lawyer,” Elias told The New Yorker.
In a recent column for his Democracy Docket website, Elias attacked Trump as another “Hitler” who is “plotting to overthrow American democracy.” He even warned that a reelected Trump “is almost certain to convert the military into his personal domestic police force” and “seize voting machines [and] control ballot counting,” even though state laws govern elections.
Still, he denies filing groundless grievances over voting rules. He insists many of the tighter rules imposed by Republicans serve no legitimate purpose. And he doesn’t buy their argument that they’re needed to stop fraudulent voting because, as he claims, voter fraud is rare (or, more precisely, rarely prosecuted).
Anti-Trump War Room
“Republicans are working every day to make it harder to vote,” Elias recently posted on X. “They are also planning to subvert the elections when they lose.”
Noting the GOP’s flurry of preelection lawsuits, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina, Elias recently told MSNBC that Republicans will do anything to push Trump over the top because he cannot win on his own. “He is set to lose to Kamala Harris,” Elias claimed, “and Republicans know that their only way of winning this election is by intimidating voters, making it hard for voters to participate in the process, and by setting up a structure after the election for them to be able to engage in the kind of frivolous and harassing litigation and ultimately the kind of tactics we saw in 2020 – but on a much wider scale.”
To combat this, “My law firm is litigating 66 voting and election lawsuits in 23 states,” he said on X, with most of them concentrated in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. “And we are winning!” By comparison, Elias filed 20 voting-related lawsuits in 14 states at this point in the 2020 election cycle, making him more than three times as litigious this time.
His anti-Trump legal war room includes a for-profit operation he founded in 2020 called Democracy Docket LLC, which employs 16 and is housed in the same office as his law firm, records show. The digital platform tracks several hundred voting-related cases and publishes a weekly organ distributed to more than 225,000 paid subscribers (at $120 a year), who include lawyers, politicians, and journalists.
A sister operation, Democracy Docket Legal Fund, supports election litigation to protect the voting rights of primarily minority voters. Another spinoff, the Democracy Docket Action Fund, raises money for voting rights lawsuits. According to the Capital Research Center, the two organizations are bankrolled by millions of dollars in so-called dark money, including from leftwing billionaire George Soros – whom Elias has called “a hero.” Through these vehicles, Elias has virtually “unlimited funding” to challenge any voting law in any state if he thinks it will help his party and his Democratic clients win elections, according to Americans for Public Trust, a government watchdog group based in Alexandria, Va.
While Elias publicly claims he’s “defending free and fair elections,” it’s clear from his actions behind the scenes that his motives are purely partisan, critics say. Last month, he sent a letter to Virginia state election officials threatening to sue them if they don’t remove Cornel West, the presidential nominee of the leftwing Justice for All Party, from the state ballot. Elias is also trying to keep West, a progressive black college professor, off the ballot in 15 other states, including key battlegrounds. These efforts clearly have nothing to do with voting rights. Elias is simply worried West will bleed off enough votes from his Democratic client Kamala Harris to cost her victories in states where she is leading by razor-thin margins against Trump.
In a column he wrote last year for Democracy Docket, Elias admitted: “A vote for No Labels, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West or any other third-party candidate is effectively a vote for Trump.”
In addition, Elias is quietly working with immigrant advocacy groups that want to make it possible for noncitizens to vote. In August, for example, Elias stepped in to represent El Pueblo in its quest to stop North Carolina’s State Board of Elections from removing noncitizens from voter registration rolls as required by a 2023 law. An estimated 325,000 “unauthorized” immigrants reside in the state.
As more than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats now allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections, the push to redefine who is eligible for the franchise promises to become an ever more potent and divisive issue in American politics. Much of this debate will almost certainly be hashed out in the courtroom battles and behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that are Marc Elias’ special practice.
After this article was published, Marc Elias’s representative said a donation Elias had made to the nonprofit Just Neighbors was not in support of illegal immigrants. He said it was to help victims of a snowstorm in Vermont.
]]>The fact that Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, are using the imprimatur of the criminal justice system as a smokescreen to railroad and possibly imprison the leader of the opposition party is bad enough. By treating President Trump’s speech as the “proximate cause” of other alleged crimes (consisting mostly of questionable trespass violations reimagined and inflated into felonies) committed by strangers, the Biden-Garland-Smith Triumvirat
Should this bother all those rabid leftists who desperately want to see President Trump behind bars? I would say so. President Trump has now survived two assassination attempts, and although the FBI has done its best to muddy the waters concerning the motivations of the first gunman (trying to kill the Republican nominee for president seems like a pretty good clue, does it not?), the social media history of the second gunman (as well as the Biden-Harris bumper sticker on his truck) clearly exposes him as a Ukraine War–obsessed, anti-MAGA, Kamala Harris–supporting zealot who believes that President Trump is a civilizational threat.
Where would he get that crazy idea? Oh, I don’t know — maybe from the constant stream of contributors on networks such as MSNBC who call Trump a “dictator,” another “Hitler,” and a “Nazi.” Maybe the would-be assassin took Democrat politicians seriously whenever they showed up on news shows these last eight years to claim with utmost sincerity that Trump is a “threat to democracy.”
Maybe the man who turned an AK-47 on the president read one of the numerous opinion columns featured in the nation’s factually shoddy but stubbornly prominent publicati
Have we not also reached our “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” political moment? If President Trump must spend millions of dollars defending himself against mercenary prosecutors intent on locking him up for the remainder of his life because of the “dangerous” words that come out of his mouth, then surely those people who use their speech to beg for someone — anyone — to rid the country of the once and future president should be held similarly liable. How many times can a Democrat politician or credentialed propagandist falsely compare Donald Trump to mass murderers and dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini before those inflammatory slanders rise to the same level of “proximate cause” that prompted the Department of (in)Justice to put Trump in its crosshairs over January 6?
Jack Smith is prosecuting President Trump for somehow threatening the peaceful transfer of power from a legitimately elected president to an illegitimately installed stooge. Even though Trump correctly believed (and still does believe) that the 2020 election was rigged in Biden’s favor (mail-in ballots stuffed into unsecured drop boxes in the dead of night, the use of Zuckerbucks to increase ballot collection in Democrat neighborhoods, and the Intelligence Community’s efforts to defraud the American people with regard to Hunter Biden’s “laptop from Hell” all amply support this conclusion), he left office as legally required on January 20.
Trump never called for violence against Joe Biden or the U.S. government. He never urged Americans to revolt against their country. Even on January 6 — the half-day of protest that leftist pundits and politicians say was worse than 9/11 and the Civil War combined — President Trump calmly urged his supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” In other words, he defended his First Amendment right to speak his mind and the First Amendment right of all Americans to speak theirs — but he never, ever called for violence against his political enemies.
For the crime of speaking truthfully about the tremendous deficiencies and suspicious vote-counting activities surrounding the 2020 election, Jack Smith and the rest of the Triumvirate of Tyranny have thrown President Trump in the dock to defend his life. And as atrocious as the Triumvirate’s political persecution of an American president has been, it pales in comparison to the way it has harassed, hunted, imprisoned, and even tortured thousands of ordinary Americans for showing up at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to protest for free and fair elections.
The vast majority of Americans who arrived in D.C. on that fateful day committed no crimes. Most had no criminal records. They included an inordinate number of veterans, law enforcement officers, grandparents, and retirees. In D.C. courtrooms, however, prosecutors and partisan judges have described them as “terrorists,” “seditionists,” “insurrectionists,” and “domestic enemies.”
How did they earn such ignoble monikers? They are accused of spreading the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. It does not seem to matter to any of these courts that roughly 60% of the American people also believe that cheating likely affected that election. For expressing an opinion unpopular in D.C., J6 political prisoners have been held in solitary confinement and forced to review “re-education materials” regarding Trump’s “lies,” “crimes,” and “attacks on democracy.” These are actual lesson plans for conservative political prisoners in the United States.
If telling a “Big Lie” means that a person’s speech merits criminal punishment, though, surely Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deserve similar treatment. Biden has repeatedly claimed that Trump-supporters murdered police officers on January 6. That is a complete lie. The only people to die that day were J6 protesters, including a female Air Force veteran shot in cold blood and another female beaten to death. Crimes of murder and excessive force may very well have taken place on January 6, but Trump voters did not commit them. That truth, however, is inconvenient for Biden, fellow Democrats, and their faithful media propagandists, who all desperately cling to the “Big Lie” that Trump engineered a “violent insurrection.”
Biden has also clung to the “Big Lie” that President Trump called neo-Nazis at a Charlottesville political rally “very fine people.” Trump did no such thing. He was discussing the issue of whether statues and monuments commemorating Confederate soldiers should be removed simply because they offend modern sensibilities. In a moment when he sought to build unity among all Americans, he expressed his belief that there are good people on both sides of that contentious debate. Trump warned, however, that once we start tearing down historic statues, the impulse to destroy our past will never end. Eventually, he predicted, statues dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and other remarkable Americans would be targeted, too. He was right. Those who wish to transform America by first rewriting America’s history have spent the last four years toppling priceless monuments built by some of America’s finest artists. But that truth does not permit Joe Biden to falsely portray President Trump as a “racist.”
Where have we heard the Charlottesville and J6 lies recently? Kamala Harris repeated both during the presidential debate. Surely, if President Trump is responsible for “inciting” a fake “insurrection,” Biden and Harris are responsible for inciting two very real assassination attempts.
]]>Even while he was president they made wild claims that he orchestrated an “insurrection” against the nation even though the events were just a protest that got out of hand, and even though those charges weren’t filed. Nor did they succeed in their two failed attempts to impeach him and remove him from office, even once after he had left office.
But they made claims about business records misdemeanors that were now felonies for Trump, there were paper custody violations that generated a host of felonies against Trump even though almost identical violations by Joe Biden and Mike Pence were dismissed as not worthy of prosecution. They’ve even alleged he ran a corrupt criminal organization to overturn the 2020 election.
They’ve run into headwinds with valid arguments that their special prosecutor was appointed illegally, and the Supreme Court ruling presidents are immune to many claims based on their actions in office.
But now a commentator at Fox News is warning they’re about to ramp up their war against Trump to the nuclear level, ordering him to jail.
It is commentator Andrew McCarthy who is warning that the judge in the business records case, characterized by Trump critics throughout as a “hush money” complaint, already has signaled his intent to impose a jail sentence.
The case involved Trump’s payments to a woman to keep quiet about an “affair” the two were alleged to have had – even though both have denied it.
Those payments were characterized as legal expenses, since the payments were made through a lawyer. Much like Hillary Clinton characterized as legal expenses her payments during the 2016 race to a legal team which in turn hired someone to make up salacious allegations against Trump in what has become known as the Steele dossier, a series of debunked claims.
The judge, Juan Merchan, has refused to step away from the case even though there’s an obvious appearance of a conflict of interests as his daughter, a Democrat campaign activist, has been making money off the decisions her father makes in the courtroom against Trump.
“To the surprise of no one, Judge Juan Merchan has yet again denied former President Donald Trump’s motion that the judge recuse himself. I am speaking, of course, about the case in which Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district Attorney, Alvin Bragg, is prosecuting Trump. In early June, a jury found the former president and current GOP presidential nominee guilty on 34 counts of business-records falsification ” the commentary started.
“It is not just that Judge Merchan had previously denied the recusal motion. The judge has signaled that, come hell or high water, he intends to sentence Trump on September 18. If you’re keeping score, that would be two days after early voting in the 2024 election begins in Pennsylvania,” he said.
Trump’s lawyers have ammunition for their requests but McCarthy said this is no ordinary case.
“On July 1, the U.S. Supreme Court held that presidents (including former presidents) are (a) presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for any official acts taken as president, and (b) absolutely immune if the official acts are core constitutional duties of the chief executive. The Court instructed that this immunity extends not only to charges but to evidence. That means prosecutors are not just barred from alleging official presidential acts as crimes; they are further prohibited from even using such acts as proof offered to establish other crimes,” he explained.
He explained there is no doubt Bragg’s case used “Trump’s official acts” to support their claims.
“Unsurprisingly then, Trump’s lawyers moved post-trial to have the guilty verdicts thrown out based on the high court’s immunity ruling,” he noted.
Merchan has said he’ll issue his ruling soon.
“Most importantly, though, Merchan admonished the parties to prepare for the court to move ahead with the imposition of sentence on September 18. He instructed the lawyers to submit promptly any arguments they intend to make on that subject,” McCarthy said.
The logical conclusion is that Merchan already has decided to reject Trump’s immunity arguments, and there is “a high likelihood that he will impose a prison sentence against Trump right after that.”
McCarthy explained, “I suspect that Merchan will rationalize that Trump (a) was not charged based on official presidential acts, and (b) would have been convicted even if Bragg’s prosecutors had not introduced arguably immunized evidence. Such a ruling might be wrong, especially on the latter point (at trial, prosecutors described some of the testimony from Trump staffers as ‘devastating’); but Merchan made so many outrageous rulings in the case that it would be foolish to expect him to change course now.”
Additionally, he said there’s another defense Trump’s lawyers can use on appeal: that Merchan refused Trump the right to a unanimous jury decision on the evidence.
McCarthy noted the Supreme Court has affirmed “in criminal cases, important proof elements affecting the potential sentence must be found unanimously by the jury,” a right that Merchan refused to allow Trump.
That’s critical because “a unanimous verdict on the supposed crime (conspiracy to influence the election by illegal conduct)” was what “Bragg alleged Trump was trying to conceal by falsifying his business records. That crime is what turned a misdemeanor into a felony, and what allowed Bragg to get around the two-year misdemeanor statute of limitations.”
He said the main point is that Bragg’s prosecution was politics.
“That’s why we call it ‘lawfare.’ The prosecutors and judge are not concerned about whether convictions ultimately get thrown out on appeal. And it’s not like Merchan is actually going to put Trump in prison; it is virtually certain that Trump will get bail pending appeal, so Merchan can appear to impose a stiff incarceration sentence without any real incarceration – at least for now, and probably ever.”
He said what the Democrats want out of their potpourri of wild claims is “to enable Vice President Harris and the media-Democratic complex to label Trump ‘a convicted felon sentenced to prison’ just weeks before Election Day.”
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(DCNF)—Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Tuesday that an expanded gag order against former President Donald Trump was an indication that “things are rigged” against the former president.
New York judge Juan Merchan imposed the expanded gag order Monday after the former president criticized the judge’s daughter in multiple posts on Truth Social, including one linking to a New York Post report on Loren Merchan’s firm helping Democratic causes and candidates raise at least $93 million off Trump’s indictment. McCarthy said the daughter’s fundraising looked like “a conflict of interest.”
“What they claim to be worried about is the administration of justice and what they are saying is that when Trump makes statements about particular people, even though he doesn’t threaten them or direct anyone to do anything, that his followers end up intimidating those people and therefore it makes it difficult to administer justice in the case,” McCarthy told Fox News host Bill Hemmer. “The reason this is an issue is because they’ve scheduled these trials to commence prior to the election and they’ve intentionally put them in the heat of an election campaign. Trump didn’t ask for that. It is what the court did in conjunction with the district attorney.”
“Trump is running for president,” McCarthy continued. “He’s got a First Amendment right to campaign and he’s got a right to make his defense and he may be right or wrong, but it is perfectly appropriate to make a defense this is a political prosecution against him and the judge is biased. He didn’t pick any member of the judge’s family out of the sky. He chose the one who is a Democratic political operative, which is undeniable even if the judge doesn’t want to talk about it.”
Merchan’s daughter’s firm, Authentic Campaigns, helped Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a prominent and outspoken Trump critic, raise over $20 million, the Post reported.
“Trump has a right to run for president, he’s got right to make his defense,” McCarthy told Hemmer. “He shouldn’t be inhibited in what he can say.”
“I think it’s obvious that things are rigged against him,” McCarthy added. “Nobody who is honest would say this case that Bragg has brought would have been brought against anybody except Donald Trump, where he has taken a misdemeanor business records transaction in which there was no victim. No one was harmed, and turned it into 34 felony counts which statutorily amount to over a century of potential imprisonment.”
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]]>For the most part, the enemies of President Donald Trump have won on the second level by putting cases in front of judges that generally hate Trump. But there one major exception is in Florida with Judge Aileen Cannon. She has been a thorn in the side of Special Counsel Jack Smith and on Monday night she may have delivered the death blow to his classified documents case.
Here’s the news generated from corporate media reports…
The MAGA-friendly federal judge, appointed by President Trump himself, is taking a strong stance in the Mar-a-Lago classified records case. She’s forcing prosecutors to make a tough choice: either let jurors see a huge trove of national secrets or let Trump go. This judge, Aileen M. Cannon, has consistently sided with Trump, and she’s using this opportunity to swing the case in his favor once again.
Special Counsel Jack Smith now faces a dilemma. He must decide whether to allow jurors to examine the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago or give them instructions that would likely lead to Trump’s acquittal. Smith could appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, but that would delay the trial even further.
Trump, along with two of his associates, has been indicted on 39 felony counts for hoarding classified documents without authorization and attempting to cover it up. Trump argues that these documents were his “personal” files and therefore he had the right to keep them. He also claims that the country’s national security laws are “too vague” to be used against him.
While some saw Cannon’s decision last Thursday to not dismiss the case as a victory for Smith, it was more of a strategic move to set up her ultimatum on Monday. Now, prosecutors must decide whether to show jurors the classified records or inform them that a president has the sole authority to categorize records as personal or presidential during their term.
The first option would require Smith to allow any potential jurors in this rural Florida area to suddenly have access to these sensitive national secrets. The second option would essentially force jurors to acquit Trump, as they would be told he had the power to claim personal ownership over any government document within his reach.
In her two-page ruling, Cannon proposed a new version of the law without a lengthy judicial order to back it up. This proposed jury instruction would state: “A president has sole authority under the [Presidential Records Act] to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision.”
Cannon argues that the Presidential Records Act is unclear about how to allow a president to make this kind of determination, even though the law was passed in 1978 to ensure that White House records are considered government property and overseen by responsible historians and librarians at the National Archives.
In essence, the judge’s reading of the law would give extensive authority to any president, but most importantly, it would give Trump exactly what he wants: the ability to give himself the final word.
]]>Remember, Trump has more cases hanging over his head.
Review the following issues that, like most things, are unique to Trump in American jurisprudence:
- The concept and application of lawfare
- Multi-jurisdiction coordination
- Bolsterism
- The convoluted idea of Democratic voter suppression.
The term lawfare is not new. Lawfare is a well-understood term in the field of international relations. Recently, however, lawfare has taken on a different meaning: The strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder an opponent.
What is currently known or will be shortly is that there has been ongoing coordination between state and federal prosecutors and the Biden administration to destroy Trump. This kind of coordination is unprecedented in scale and scope. With multiple civil and criminal actions focused on a single individual, perhaps no one in history has experienced the pressure that Donald Trump is under. It is highly suspicious that so many of these actions were launched so close to the election. One might suspect a high degree of coordination was involved, given that so many disparate actions simultaneously came together. This is bolstered by the statements of various prosecutors, attorneys general and political surrogates up to and including the president’s press secretary, who not so adroitly drop bombs regularly.
Donald Trump’s civil rights are being violated on a scale heretofore never experienced by any other American. Are there any legal remedies to make him whole? Additionally, Trump’s ability to win a second term as president has been disrupted by what amounts to an organized process that, to my mind, is a conspiracy, not unlike what he has been accused of engaging in Georgia, the consequences of which have knock-on effects:
- The failed attempt to deny Trump the ability to be on the ballot this November.
- After Trump successfully beat his opponents on the ballot issue, Rep. Jamie Raskin, almost contemporaneously with the Supreme Court 9-0 smackdown decision, said he didn’t want to “pronounce” anything about what could happen next: “My initial reading suggests that they say that Congress must act … to pass a statute.” The Democrats aren’t giving up; nothing will stop them. Democracy is a word they throw around as it suits them, but in the end, democracy only exists when Democrats say it does.
- Another strategy waged against Trump is to suck up his time and resources, preventing him from running the best campaign he can. We certainly see how Trump must juggle his schedule and pay tens of millions to the largest group of lawyers working for a single client ever, all by design. If that were not bad enough, look at the recent decision in New York where Trump must come up with at least $450 million in a matter of days for a victimless crime that no one’s ever faced previously – a special crime for a special person. A quick review of Judge Arthur Engoron’s decisions and demeanor should inform anyone that there’s fundamental unfairness on display by an activist judge who hates Trump. Between the state’s AG, who sat in court each day and campaigned on bringing Trump down, law scholars will look at this case for years as an example of how an American kangaroo court functioned to subvert an individual’s rights for political purposes – lawfare on display.
- There is a precept in law called Bolstering. Bolstering means to build up or support. Bolstering testimony is improper when it relates to the witness’s truthfulness on a specific occasion and when the foundational requirements of evidentiary rules are not met. We see frequent examples in the courtroom and the press that contradict the rule of law. Attacks on Trump have become self-referencing between different court proceedings. Trump is frequently quoted, and his words are twisted to construe the worst possible meaning. “I will be a dictator on day one” is a good example that is widely reported. Except Trump is misquoted by not allowing for the full quote: “No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”
- It is striking that those who protest the loudest on the imminent loss of democracy are themselves trying to subvert it the most. Trump was never tried or convicted as an insurrectionist. Yet, Democrats spout with aplomb that he is one and should not be allowed on the ballot. The concept of due process appears to be foreign to progressive political leaders. Unbelievable!
Democrats are fairly chomping at the bit to get Trump before a Washington, D.C., jury. Progressives know he has virtually zero chance of getting a fair trial there. Read activist Democrat lawyer Marc Elias veritably promise Trump a swift and speedy hanging! A jury of your peers in D.C.! Only 1,274 votes were cast in the Republican primary held in a city of 700,000. Washington Dems can’t keep a straight face as they preen before reporters reminding them of their 99% conviction rate; that’s not a typo! Does that even seem possible to you?
Fundamental fairness dictates that former President Trump be reimbursed for all his costs of defending himself. And those who contrived to deprive him of his life, reputation and wealth should meet the same fate they wished on him.
Legal scholars I have spoken with see that the collusion between government officials in Congress, the Justice Department and state law enforcement conspired to defraud Americans of their constitutionally guaranteed right to choose their next president. This is true whether Trump is acquitted or convicted of pending indictments or civil actions. Effectively, any action his enemies have launched, successful or not, is the fruit of the poisonous tree and should nullify all actions against him. Fani Willis’ charge of RICO violations should be visited like some biblical plague against all who conspired against the American people.
God bless America.
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]]>Fox News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump’s name will remain on the Colorado 2024 presidential primary ballot, a judge ruled Friday.
‘The court orders the Secretary of State to place Donald J. Trump on the presidential primary ballot when it certifies the ballot on January 5, 2024,’ U.S. District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace wrote in her ruling.”
This was our toughest case in our ongoing legal battle to stop states from “disqualifying” President Trump from the states’ primary ballots. Yet we managed to ensure the Constitution was upheld.
The judge rightly ruled the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to the President of the United States, but still went on in a superfluous finding to state that she believed the President was guilty of insurrection. I don’t like that the judge had to write a 102-page screed that showed her bias against the former President – explaining why she thinks Trump is bad but still belongs on the Colorado primary ballot.
Keep in mind that the President has never been formally convicted – let alone even charged – with insurrection. And why? Because there’s zero evidence that President Trump tried to start an insurrection. So in the end, the judge reached the right legal conclusion, but she went the wrong way to arrive there.
Today’s broadcast celebrated the ACLJ’s victory in Colorado and reviewed how we’re defending Israel and the hostages both at home and abroad. Senior Counsel for International and Government Affairs Jeff Ballabon also discussed ongoing antisemitism on college campuses and the ACLJ’s efforts to defend Israel via our office in Jerusalem.
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