By Steven Rader | Guest Commentary
The day after the Trump verdict in Manhattan, a European news portal headlined its analysis “The Day the Democrats Putinized America.” The reference, of course, was to the false charges that Vladimir Putin brought against his top opponent Aleksi Navalny to put him in prison and get him out of Russian politics.
Over in the UK, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson penned a column for the country’s largest newspaper in which he called the Manhattan trial and verdict “a mob-style hit job on Trump.” The former prime minister observed, “It was nakedly political and will make his victory more likely than less.”
Heavy politics has always swirled around this and other attempts to use the criminal courts to try to stop Trump’s election this year. The District Attorney behind the Manhattan charges, Alvin Bragg, promised to use his office to get Trump while running for the position, and was heavily funded by far-left financial kingpin George Soros. Once in office, he set about carrying out that campaign promise.
The fingerprints of the Biden administration are all over this prosecution of Biden’s political opponent. The third highest ranking official in Biden’s Department of Justice, a political appointee, was dispatched to Manhattan to head up Bragg’s team assigned to prosecute Trump. If not for the political angle, that would normally be a very odd career move, giving up a very prestigious position in Washington, DC to take a much less prestigious job in Manhattan in a state prosecutor’s office.
The idea was to bring charges in a jurisdiction like Manhattan where the jury pool would be heavily anti-Trump from a political standpoint. Polling conducted before trial showed that a majority of American voters agreed that Trump could not get a fair trial in Manhattan. Added to that burden was a hyper-partisan judge. Not only is Juan Merchan himself a political contributor to Joe Biden, but his daughter has worked as a political consultant to the Biden-Harris campaign, and even used the Trump trial to raise money for her clients. In spite of such rampant conflicts of interest, Merchan refused to recuse himself from the case.
To fashion charges to use against Trump, Bragg’s office took a couple of bookkeeping entries from a computer drop down menu that would have been made by a lower level employee, and at most would have been misdemeanors, on which the statute of limitations had long run out. Claiming these were intended to cover up some other unspecified crime, Bragg charged them as 34 felonies and against Trump personally. No one else had ever previously been charged this way. This whole theory was purely a scheme to get Trump, as Bragg had promised voters in his political campaign.
It adds a whole new dimension to the old term “TRUMPED UP CHARGES.”
While most judges try to avoid the embarassment of committing errors that will be reversed on appeal, ultra-partisan Judge Merchan seemed laser-focused throughout the trial on making sure he got a conviction in the short term. Merchan piled reversible error on top of reversible error. Probably the most brazen was in his jury charge defying a long line of ‘black letter law’ (mandate) from the US Supreme Court to instruct the jury that they did not have to be unanimous on what the “underlying crime” was, even though the jury was indeed required to be unanimous. All of this has given a huge black eye not only to America’s democratic principles but also to integrity of our judicial system.
“Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” Elon Musk tweeted, “If a former president can be convicted over such a trivial matter — motivated by politics rather than justice –- then anyone is at risk of a similar fate.”
One of America’s most renowned legal experts, retired Harvard Law School Constitutional Law Professor Alan Dershowitz called the Trump trial the most “Sovietized” he had ever seen in America. Dershowitz is a liberal Democrat who voted for Biden.
And what has this perversion of our legal system accomplished? A poll of American voters by a major British newspaper immediately after the trial found the Trump’s approval rating had gone up six points after the verdict.
“The Democratic Party’s strategy is to beat President Trump in the courtroom rather than at the ballot box,” declared liberal Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, (a longtime Democrat.) “This will backfire in November. Even worse, it is profoundly undemocratic. America deserves a president who can win at the ballot box without compromising our government’s separation of powers and weaponizing the courts. You cannot save democracy by destroying it first.”
The threat to our democracy from the Biden camp has been clear since they first began their series of maneuvers to use the courts against Trump. Immediately after the first salvo (the raid on Mar-a-Lago), President Burkele of El Salvador, a popular and democratic president of a country once known as a banana republic, called out Biden’s action, saying “Imagine what would be said of me, if I did something like that to my leading political opponent.”
The Rule of Law seems to be on life support and fading fast in New York, and the challenge for voters on November 5 will be to ensure that the same thing does not happen nationally.
Editor’s note: Steven Rader served as General Counsel of the NC Department of Health and Human Services in the Jim Martin administration and as a North Carolina Commissioner to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. He is a former General Counsel of the NC Republican Party.
