A month into Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City, we’ve heard adult film star Stormy Daniels testify that Trump pressured her to have sex with him, with a vague offer to put her on his reality TV show, while Trump’s third wife was home with their infant son, Barron. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified that Trump ordered him to pay Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the tryst before the 2016 election. Then Trump used his business funds to reimburse Cohen for making the payments, under the cover that they were “legal expenses.”
We believe the Manhattan District Attorney’s deputies have made their case that Trump directed the hush money payment to Daniels before the election to avoid a sex scandal he feared would derail his presidential campaign — and then authorized an illegal reimbursement scheme to conceal the coverup. And prosecutors brought the receipts from the payoff, as well as notes and recordings to corroborate testimony of witnesses.
Trump denies 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal another crime. He still insists he never had sex with Daniels, but he dares not take the witness stand to say that under oath, because he is a liar, and was bound to be caught up in perjury, and his lawyers know it, and everybody else in the courtroom knows it.
Trump’s defense attorneys tried to discredit Cohen, who is now a convicted felon and lately has made a living criticizing his former boss. But Cohen was even-tempered as he testified about his 10 years as Trump’s lawyer, which started with admiration for his employer and ended with him going to federal prison in 2018 for campaign finance violations relating to the payouts to Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, tax evasion and lying to Congress on Trump’s behalf about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Trump was OK with Cohen going to prison for him, but now that Cohen has turned state’s evidence, the former president’s best hope is that his lawyers can get at least one juror to insist on Trump’s innocence, which might create a hung jury and a mistrial. Trump has brought in congressional Republicans to debase themselves as Trump flunkies, echoing his contemptuous claims that Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan are partisans working for Joe Biden.
House Speaker Mike Johnson made the trip to Manhattan to make the reckless claim that “the judge’s own daughter is making millions of dollars” off of the trial, and a prosecutor in the case had “recently received over $10,000 in payments from the Democratic National Committee.” The House Speaker claimed that, in Trump’s classified documents case in federal court in Florida, prosecutors “manipulated documents” and “might have tampered with the evidence.”
“It was demeaning to the office of the speaker, and to Congress, for Johnson to be trashing the criminal justice system as ‘corrupt,’ and nakedly campaigning for Trump at the former president’s trial,” Dana Milbank wrote for the Washington Post. But Johnson was only one of a parade of MAGA legislators making the pilgrimage to the courthouse in mid-May. On May 13 came Sens. Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.). May 14 produced Johnson and a quartet of Republicans all dressed as Trump mini-mes in blue-gray suits, white shirts and red ties: Reps. Cory Mills (Fla.) and Byron Donalds (Fla.), North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. On May 16 so many House MAGA Republicans showed up that the House Oversight Committee had to postpone a vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
Fifty years ago, between July 27 and July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee, approved articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon for his role in covering up the burglary of Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. Nixon refused to turn over tapes of conversations with his aides. The Supreme Court took only six days after hearing arguments to order the release of White House tapes to Watergate investigators.
Nixon still hoped to keep support of enough Republican senators to block his removal. But after the text of the “smoking gun” tape on Aug. 5 proved Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up, a delegation of Republicans, including Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona went to the White House on Aug. 8, 1974, to tell Nixon his game was up, and he needed to resign the presidency or face impeachment by the House and conviction and removal by the Senate. He resigned the next day.
There are not enough principled Republicans remaining in Congress with the authority to tell Trump it’s time to step aside. A few Republican leaders expressed their outrage over Trump’s failure to take action to stop the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when the president refused to call on his supporters to leave the Capitol for several hours.
“Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Feb. 13, 2021. “… There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
But McConnell made that statement less than an hour after voting to acquit Trump for his role in the storming of the Capitol. And less than two weeks later, on Feb. 26, 2021, McConnell said he would support Trump again, if he was the Republican nominee for president.
One week after the attack, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Trump bore “responsibility” for it. But by the time McCarthy spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 27, 2021, McCarthy had pivoted to praising Trump for helping Republicans win races across the country.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has scrapped any principle he had since May 3, 2016, when he said, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it.” Nowadays Graham has become one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, despite Trump being the first president since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression to lose the House, the Senate and the White House in a single term.
If a Trump partisan on the jury stands in the way of a unanimous verdict, that does not mean Trump is acquitted. If the jury is deadlocked, the DA can ask the judge to put the case before a new jury.
In any event, assuming the Republican-majority Supreme Court does not allow Trump’s federal criminal trials to proceed before the November election, Trump will still emerge with the Republican nomination as a notorious liar, as well as a serial adulterer, who has already been found liable in civil trials for fraud and sexual assault.
The Republican Party is no longer the Grand Old Party of yore. As a subsidiary of the Trump Organization, it is now the Big Lie Party, because that’s all that ties the cult together nowadays. Trump’s enablers and defenders are just party clowns. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2024
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