Douglas Andrews – This is how sick our society has become: Letitia James ran for attorney general of New York in 2018 on a platform to perp-walk and prosecute Donald Trump, calling him “illegitimate” and “an embarrassment.” And she won.
Perhaps New Yorkers, though, upon reflection, would ultimately realize that the Get Trump industry is a crooked one and that decent people don’t elect an attorney general on a promise to go after a particular citizen but rather to duly uphold and enforce the law. But no. The citizens of the once-proud but now Trump-deranged Empire State reelected her in 2022 by nearly half a million votes. So much for calls of conscience.
In Manhattan yesterday, Trump appeared in court as the schedules of two legal cases against him collided — one criminal case that threatens his freedom, and the other a civil case brought by James that threatens his family’s business empire. His appearance regarded the start date of the former, a trumped-up case that includes 34 counts of falsifying business records related to his private hush-money payments to keep quiet an extramarital affair.
After federal prosecutors had passed on the prosecution of that victimless crime, the eight-year-old offense was dug up by Soros-funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in an attempt to incarcerate Trump and thereby take him off the presidential playing field.
It’s unlikely to work, even in the rigged town of Manhattan, which went 9-to-1 for Joe Biden in 2020. “There’s no way there should be a prison sentence in this case,” said former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy on Fox News yesterday. “This is a nonviolent business-records crime at best, in which there are no victims, and no one was hurt.”
Altogether, the charges against Trump could put him in prison for more than a century. No kidding. McCarthy, though, noted that courts usually see through an overzealous prosecutor’s stacking of charges in order to make them look more serious, adding, “It would be a travesty if [Trump] did an hour in prison.”
Indeed, Bragg’s case is a horrible one. It is, as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley calls it, “a Frankenstein’s monster of a case,” with Bragg having cobbled it together with different parts of the federal and state codes. The federal piece, in fact, which he has no jurisdiction to enforce, was rejected by federal prosecutors years ago as too flimsy.
“Now,” says Turley, “we’re going to have this spectacle of a disbarred lawyer, Michael Cohen, who just recently was denounced by a judge who said that he was a serial perjurer, that he was still gaming the system. And that’s gonna be your star witness. It’s going to be another blow, I think, to the New York legal system. We’ll see if a New York jury buys this. I think what Bragg is betting on is that the jury won’t get past the name on the caption of the criminal complaint.”
Bragg, sadly, would rather focus on the Republican Party’s chosen candidate for president than the Venezuelan illegal alien criminal gangs that are terrorizing his city. But, hey, every people gets the government they deserve. And New Yorkers deserve Alvin Bragg and Letitia James. And they deserve them good and hard.
As for AG James, she’s responsible for the other case against Trump, a non-jury civil trial in which hard-left judge Arthur Engoron assessed a ridiculous $454 million bond, which was due yesterday, and for which the Trump-deranged AG has threatened to begin confiscating his properties if he doesn’t come up with the money. As McCarthy notes, “It’s a lot easier to win a money judgment than to enforce it, especially when you have such complicated finances as Trump does.”
Trump, who has vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, was unusually terse as he walked into the courtroom at 10 yesterday morning, stopping only long enough to say: “Thank you very much, everybody. This is a witch hunt. It’s a hoax. Thank you.”
But just before noon, a New York appellate court slashed the $454 million bond to $175 million, payable within 10 days. That amount still seems ridiculously high, especially when we consider that the bond for infamous Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, who defrauded real people of an estimated $65 billion in savings, was a mere $10 million.
The Eighth Amendment is short and sweet and crystal clear: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Can anyone argue credibly that the Trump bond, whether $454 million or $175 million, isn’t excessive? Still, $175 million is much more manageable than $454 million — and, most importantly, it prevents the out-of-control James from snatching up Trump’s properties.
“It’s not that they necessarily like Trump,” says Turley, “but they don’t like what they’re seeing, particularly in New York. They’ve created this inescapable political vortex that used to be a legal system. And it’s damaging not just the courts; it’s damaging the city. Who wants to go to a city where they try to get you to sell off your property just to get an appeal to look at what a judge did? So the damage there has been below the water line, and it’s going to have to be repaired. But now the New York Court of Appeals could restore some integrity to their system and look at these numbers.”
Turley boils it down: “There’s two issues here: Whether he overvalued and undervalued [his properties]. That’s something that’s very common in the real estate area. But the other major issue is, does this violate the Constitution? Almost half a billion dollars in penalty when no one lost a single cent.”
Either we have a Constitution, or we don’t. Either we have an Eighth Amendment, or we don’t.
SF Source The Patriot Post Mar 2024