Even anti-Trumpers expressed outrage over President-elect Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts at the end of a Soviet-style show trial in New York City last May.
The National Review’s Rich Lowry, certainly no fan of the former and future president, spoke for most of us at the time. He wrote: “The charges were rigged, the prosecution’s presentation of the case was rigged, the judge’s management of the case was rigged, the gag order was rigged, and the instructions to the jury were rigged. The whole thing was rigged from beginning to end, in the hopes of … rigging the presidential election.”
The verdict sent shockwaves throughout the Republican Party – and even beyond. It was a seminal moment for Americans who immediately grasped that the Democratic Party had corrupted the U.S. system of justice to influence a presidential election.
On Friday morning, New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan handed down his sentence in the case: Trump received an unconditional discharge. No prison, no probation, no conditions.
What else could Merchan have done? Although a biased jury had convicted Trump in one of the country’s most liberal jurisdictions months earlier, a much larger – and more diverse – jury delivered a far different verdict on November 5 in the form of an overwhelming victory.
[Still, as lenient as Merchan’s sentence was, until Trump is exonerated upon appeal, he will officially remain a “convicted felon.” And that, no doubt, pleases New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s liberal base.]
From the beginning, legal experts on both sides of the political aisle, including CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, saw this brazen and unprecedented corruption of our system of justice for what it was: the raw exercise of political power. And up until the age of Trump, it had only been practiced in third-world countries.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley weighed in on Fox News following the sentencing (both in person and in a later op-ed). He noted that Merchan’s choice of an unconditional discharge “reflects the lack of seriousness in the case” and revealed “the massive void within this case.”
Turley said the case was “based on a non-crime.” Expanding on this point in his op-ed, he wrote:
DA Bragg took a long-dead misdemeanor and zapped it back into life with a novel and unfounded theory. By using federal violations that were never charged, let alone tried, Bragg turned a misdemeanor into dozens of felonies and essentially tried Trump for federal offenses.Merchan not only allowed those charges to be brought to trial but then added layers of reversible errors in the effort to bag Trump at any cost. For that, he was lionized by the liberal media and many New Yorkers.
Calling the case against Trump “more inflated than the Goodyear blimp, pumped up by hot rage and rhetoric,” Turley told colleagues the case contains “a peddler’s wagonful of reversible errors.” He believes that Trump will ultimately be exonerated once the case is freed from the “vortex” of the New York court system. The bad news is that the process could take years.
Turley argued that this case is more an indictment of the New York legal system than it is of Trump: He wrote that, “Merchan has brought down the gavel on the New York legal system as a whole.”
“The verdict is in,” Turley concluded, adding, “The New York legal system has rendered it against itself.”
As I see it, Turley’s remarks about New York’s legal system can be expanded to include all of the Democrats’ lawfare against Trump. Moreover, it may have been a factor in Trump’s ultimate victory.
The daily images of a former and then-potentially future U.S. president defending himself in a courtroom on bogus charges ran contrary to most Americans’ sense of fairness.
You may recall the utter lack of enthusiasm that greeted Trump’s campaign launch in November 2022. His announcement came just one week after an election in which the much anticipated red wave had failed to materialize, and Trump-endorsed candidates in key Senate and House races had underperformed.
In fact, throughout the first quarter of 2023, Trump’s lead over his nearest competitor in the Republican primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), ranged between 14 and 18 points. But as word of Bragg’s April 4 indictment spread, Trump’s lead exploded to 30 points. And it climbed with each new indictment.
The Democrats hoped that Trump’s legal woes would stir up his base and hand him the GOP nomination but that a felony conviction would prevent his victory in the general election.
Unfortunately for them, they had miscalculated. The Democrats’ use of lawfare to defeat Trump backfired spectacularly. Instead, it united Americans who saw this as a political persecution. The election results showed that voters saw through the lawfare.
With Friday’s sentencing, Trump is now free to begin the appeals process. And upon his inauguration in just ten days, he will gain access to a treasure trove of communications between top Biden DOJ officials and Bragg’s office to help his lawyers determine how it all went down.
And just maybe, Bragg will turn his attention to his real job: protecting New Yorkers from real criminals.
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