The historical indictment of a former president who is also currently running for POTUS will be a show trial for the ages, just as George Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had hoped. It’s one of the single promises Bragg ran on to get the top position in the city and one he’s kept, even if it meant finding the smallest, most weak way to take Trump down.
Not only is this move a serious threat to America’s democracy, an absolute abuse of office, and proof of a weaponized justice system, the initial phase of this prosecutorial abomination is just the beginning. The saying stands true that a grand jury can “indict a ham sandwich,” however, it’s going to take a judge to convict Trump of what he’s been accused of, which doesn’t look to be in the former president’s favor.
Reports suggest that Donald Trump should already have some familiarity with Judge Juan Merchan, who has been assigned to his case. Trump is set to be arraigned in Merchan’s court room on Tuesday. The Secret Service is in the process of making preparations to transport him to New York City for his arraignment.
According to NBC NewYork, Merchan “recently presided over the case of the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, as well as the tax fraud trial in which the family’s company was found guilty on 17 counts including charges of conspiracy and falsifying business records.”
A plea was entered by Weisselberg on 15 counts and he was indicted on those counts after testifying against the company that he participated in a scheme to defraud the federal, state, and city authorities.
A five-month prison sentence was subsequently imposed on him. Weisselberg is currently is now currently serving that sentence at Rikers Island after he turned himself in on an agreed-upon date.
Merchan has 16 years of experience on the bench, having started his career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and came to the U.S. when he was 6 years old. He grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, according to The New York Times. In 2006, Merchan was appointed to the Bronx Family Court bench after working in the State Attorney General’s office, Conservative Brief reported.
Additionally, Merchan presided over other high-profile cases, including Anna Gristina’s “soccer mom madam” case in 2012.
“A grand jury in New York on Thursday indicted former President Trump on charges related to an illegal hush money payment in 2016 to adult film star Stormy Daniels who alleged they had an affair, according to multiple outlets,” Axios reported on Thursday upon this monumental move.
On Monday, just before Trump was indicted, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, appeared before the grand jury for the first time as one of the final witnesses to appear.
“Pecker was a key player in the $150,000 ‘catch-and-kill’ payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, in which the Enquirer bought the publishing rights to her claim that she — like Daniels — had an affair with Trump before he became president. The Enquirer never reported McDougal’s allegations but its parent company, American Media Inc., featured her in other publications. Trump has denied having sex with either woman and has denied any wrongdoing in connection with the payments to them,” according to the New York Post.
The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case is, however, deemed exceptionally weak by a number of legal experts.
“The question to ask yourself in a case like this [is], ‘Would a case like this be brought against anybody else, whether he or she be president, former president or a regular citizen?’ The answer is… no,” Former Whitewater deputy counsel Sol Wisenberg told the New York Post.
“You can debate all day long whether or not… Trump should be indicted related to the records at Mar-a-Lago, whether or not he should be indicted with respect to Jan. 6 incitement of lawless activity… Those are real crimes if they occurred, and he committed them,” he said. “This is preposterous.”
Not holding back in an interview with Fox News, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley simply call the absurd case “outrageous.”
“[Bragg] is attempting to bootstrap [a] federal crime into a state case. And if that is the basis for the indictment, I think it’s rather outrageous,” the professor said.
“I think it’s illegally pathetic,” he said. “There’s a good reason why the Department of Justice did not prosecute this case: Because it’s been down this road before. It tried a case against former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards arguing that hush money paid to another woman, who bore a child out of that relationship, was a campaign violation. That was a much stronger case, but they lost,” Turley said, referring to federal prosecutors not charging Trump following Cohen’s guilty plea.
“Bragg’s betting on a motivated judge and a motivated juror. You couldn’t pick a better jurisdiction…. [But] under Bragg’s theory, he can take any unproven federal crime and revive a long-dead misdemeanor and turn it into a felony. That’s going to raise concerns for a number of judges. But once it gets to the appellate level, he’s going to have a particularly difficult time,” he concluded.
