Donald Trump reacted the only way he knows how to deal with a challenge May 30 when a New York jury returned guilty verdicts on all 34 felony counts against him after only two days of deliberation. Jurors found Trump falsified business records to cover up a potential sex scandal that could have wrecked his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump replied with lies and threats.
The Trump defense team may have been surprised by the quick verdict after a six-week trial. They may have thought they had a ringer among the jurors who would hold out against a guilty verdict and possibly force a mistrial, which would sideline the case at least until after the election. If so, they lost that bet, big time.
Trump refused to take any responsibility, of course. ”This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump told reporters after the verdict. He insisted he is “a very innocent man.”
“I was just convicted in a rigged political witch hunt trial: I did nothing wrong,” Trump wrote in a message to backers.
Trump and his flunkies, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, blamed President Joe Biden, whom they accused of “weaponizing” the Department of Justice and making the U.S. into a banana republic. But the U.S. would look more like a banana republic if it let a corrupt president get away with such crimes.
Banana Republicans ignored the fact that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg answers to the voters of Manhattan, not to Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Instead, Bragg’s team brought a case to the state court that literally included the receipts that corroborated statements of damning witnesses, such as David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, who told how he agreed with Trump to execute “catch and kill” deals with porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in service of helping Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — a plot that prosecutors labeled a conspiracy to illegally influence the election. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who made the payment to Daniels, filled in the details. When Trump was president, he let Cohen take the fall. Cohen served prison time for his role in the federal election violation.
Republicans have been trying to bluff their confidence that Democrats are playing into Trump’s hands ever the New York trial.
“I think it’s time we put a felon in the White House,” Republican Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco said in a video posted to his personal Instagram account.
A post-conviction poll conducted by YouGov between May 31 and June 2 found Republicans are more receptive to having a criminal candidate for president.
In April, just 17% of Republican voters said convicted criminals “should be allowed” to become president while 58% said they should not. But now 58% of Republicans say felons “should be allowed” to be president, while just 23% say they should not.
More Republicans now say felons should be allowed to become president. But other polls show majorities of all registered voters approve of the verdict, which puts the convict in a bit of a hole.
Trump now says that, because of his conviction on 34 felony counts, he has “every right” to go after political opponents should he be elected in November. He tells supporters that his return to the White House will feature “retribution” against his enemies, who are also their enemies. When the trial started in April, Trump claimed he passed on the chance to prosecute Hillary Clinton during his presidency It would’ve been “a terrible thing” if he’d taken such a step, he claimed.
“This remains a bizarre lie,” Steve Benen wrote at MaddowBlog.com. In Trump’s first year in the White House — after the 2016 election was over and Clinton largely withdrew from public view — the then-president publicly called on the Justice Department to go after Clinton. “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems,” Trump claimed at that time.
Republicans have joined Trump in claiming Democrats have weaponized the justice system and Trump has made it clear that he intends to purge the federal government of impartial career officials and replace them with Trump loyalists if he gets back in the White House. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” aims to destroy the DOJ’s impartiality and turn it into an attack dog for Trump.
But Republicans aren’t waiting. They’re moving forward with an aggressive plan to obstruct state and federal prosecutors who have brought another 54 felony counts against Trump that are still awaiting trial. They are targeting other Trump inquisitors ahead of the election.
Voters deserve to know the facts on Trump’s indictments brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith in Florida, where Trump is accused of keeping classified documents after leaving the White House and storing them at his Mar-a-Lago Club, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,” according to the indictment. He is also accused of a “scheme to conceal” those documents from federal officials seeking their return.
Trump is accused in D.C. federal court of participating in a scheme to interfere with the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden. The indictment accuses Trump and six unindicted, unnamed co-conspirators of knowingly spreading lies that there was widespread fraud in the election and that he had actually won, ultimately leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump denies wrongdoing and argues he is immune from prosecution.
Trump and 18 others are accused in state court in Atlanta under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) of coordinating an effort to thwart proper certification of the state’s 2020 presidential election, which Biden won. The investigation was launched after disclosure of a recorded phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump pressed him “to find 11,780 votes.” Trump denies the allegations.
That trial has been delayed until at least October as three Republican appointees on the Georgia Court of Appeals consider a bid by Trump and his allies to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, and her office from the case because of a personal relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who has since withdrawn from the case.
House Speaker Johnson outlined a “three-pronged approach” on how House Republicans can target the DOJ, New York and other jurisdictions that try to investigate Trump. Those plans call for launching investigations and cutting funds for Jack Smith and any state that tries to investigate Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
In a May 31 appearance on Fox News, Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who reportedly is on the shortlist to be Trump’s next attorney general, urged Republicans to pick up the pace in weaponizing the system against the judicial process.
“Is every House committee controlled by Republicans using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now?” Miller asked. “Is every Republican DA starting every investigation they need to right now?”
Stephen Miller will never try to talk the Convict in Chief down from a proposed retribution scheme. Neither of them belongs back in the White House. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2024
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