The judge in the New York state trial of President Trump in the business records case over hush money payments to a porn star has threatened President Trump with jailtime for his claims that President Trump violated his gag order.
According to Reuters:
NEW YORK, May 6 (Reuters) - The judge in Donald Trump's criminal trial fined him $1,000 and held him in contempt of court for a 10th time on Monday for violating a gag order and warned that further violations could land the former president in jail.Justice Juan Merchan said the nine $1,000 fines he had imposed so far did not seem to be deterring the wealthy business mogul from violating the order, which bars him from speaking publicly about jurors and witnesses in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president.“I do not want to impose a jail sanction and have done everything I can to avoid doing so. But I will if necessary,” Merchan said before the jury entered.Imprisonment would be an unprecedented step in the historic trial, which stems from a hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 election.
Of course he wants to jail him. He's got his hot little finger on the 'jail him' button and can't wait to push it. Everything about his past tells us that's what he wants to do.
One, take a look at what he claims is a violation of his 'gag order':
Merchan imposed the 10th $1,000 fine on Monday for an April 22 broadcast interview in which the former president said: "That jury was picked so fast - 95% Democrats. The area's mostly all Democrat."
Is the statement false? Absolutely not. So why should Trump talking about it be subject to a gag order ... unless of course, the aim is to cover up for the public that the trial looks just a little skeevy and banana-republic-like.
Jury of Trump's peers? Nope, not for a national figure like Trump, where approximately half the jury should represent the nation as Republicans, instead of solely Democrats who already hate him and are not neutral. What kind of a fair trial is that? Getting tried by a jury of one's political enemies, most of whom will be of the most rabidly Trump-hating sort? Would he like to see a trial of Obama being conducted by a Wyoming or Oklahoma jury of 100% Republicans? The judge himself has donated to Democrats and progressives, too, which makes the kangaroo court feeling even stronger, like a Castro judge trying a dissident in Cuba, or some kind of clown-show court as is seen now in Nicaragua or Venezuela. Suuuuure, they'll all be fair.
Only a fool would believe it. And of course, he's doing this to Trump because he wants them to believe it.
The irony of this is that the whole setup of charges against Trump -- that he paid off a porn star to keep some kind of involvement with her private -- with an underlying crime of influencing the election (in spite of the payment going out after he was elected president), is that we see the judge doing the exact same thing -- trying to influence the public that this trial is somehow fair and not political, so that Trump's factual statement about the Democrat-slanted jury needs to be kept hidden from the public. It's not O.K. when Trump does it, but it's always O.K. when he does it. How do you like that double standard?
It gets worse when one considers the judge's history. According to Wikipedia:
In late 2022, Merchan oversaw the five-week criminal trial of the Trump Organization; the organization was convicted of 17 counts of tax fraud.
He also presided over the criminal case of Donald Trump's former financial chief Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to his role in a 15-year-long tax-fraud scheme.[16][17] Weisselberg admitted to evading taxes by accepting $1.7 million in off-the-books compensation and entered a plea agreement, in which he testified against The Trump Organization and helped to secure the company's conviction.[18] Merchan sentenced Weisselberg to five months at Rikers Island and said he would have imposed a substantially longer sentence but for the plea agreement.[17]
O.K., so he's very reluctant to jail Trump or anyone, he tells the press, and his record shows that he really does let the real bad guys in his criminal cases off with lightweight sentences. But now we get to the case of Weisselberg and he's whining from the bench that he can't jail him even more, even though five months in Riker's Island is pretty substantial. He wanted to jail Trump's corporate lieutenant longer than he was allowed to, it made him unhappy, and for him to claim that he doesn't want to jail Trump sounds pretty disingenous. Of course he wants to jail Trump, why else would he keep trying to find petty violations on him?
The only thing that may be restraining him, thus far, and I don't know if it always will, is that his gag order itself is deeply unconstitutional, as legal experts have noted, given that gag orders are handed out to protect defendants. Trump is the defendant here, so gag orders should be handed out to his accusers, not to him. Or is the judge saying he's the one on trial here? That's a good question.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley points out the factors he sees in why this gag order is problematic:
Turley, who says he believes gag orders often "run afoul" of free speech, took aim at Merchan's order, specifically, because he says it allows [former Trump fixer Michael] Cohen to publicly speak out against the former president while hindering Trump's ability to criticize his former fixer and attorney.
"It creates this perversity. You have people like Michael Cohen, who's going on the news every night attacking Trump, arguing against his election, but Trump can't criticize Michael Cohen or Stormy Daniels or the lead prosecutor," Turley said Sunday. "This election is going to turn, in significant part, on the weaponization of the legal system. And Trump is winning on that narrative. These judges are essentially gagging a presidential candidate on one of the chief issues of the presidential election."
So they can attack Trump all they like, and Trump is powerless to say anything in his own defense in public. No even-steven here, Trump is already guilty before the verdict is launched, so he's not allowed to complain.
Are the kangaroos starting to go 'boingggg'?
Turley points out that the Supreme Court is likely to look "harshly" on this order, given that the whole thing is political and Trump is the presidential frontrunner, with a lot of Democrats who openly want to shut him down:
"I think SCOTUS would look harshly at this order as it's currently written. If you want to try the leading presidential candidate right before the presidential election, you have to have some recognition that there's a political speech element here, which is paramount. And I don't think the judge recognized that with this order," Turley, an attorney and professor at the George Washington University Law School, responded.
The case itself reeks of politics, given that New York is awash in lawlessness, a veritable sump of crime and non-punishment, yet according to them, this is the case that is the most criminal thing that ever happened in New York, the one they're spending millions on to prosecute, a bookkeeping dispute in a case whose statute of limitations has run out, yet somehow hasn't when the target is Trump.
If that judge lets his desire to jail Trump get the best of him, the U.S. will become a laughingstock globally as the first nation that willingly chose to give up its superpower status and become a banana republic. Its credibility will be zero, and don't imagine anyone will do anything but laugh when the ruling Democrats speak of 'democracy.' The judge is threatening to jail the former president if he doesn't stop commenting on problems with his courtroom, which he wants everyone to think are on the up-and-up despite the ugly facts that he doesn't want to get out to the public. Such a sensitive soul he is. That's a banana republic right there. Anyone can be jailed for anything in such places and they often are. After that, the Navalny "solution" can happen and somehow, the security cameras weren't working.
It's disturbing as heck what these people will do to him if they get away with it -- and why voters must vote against this kind of political score-settling no matter what this partisan judge does to Trump. The kinds of charges being leveled at Trump are genuinely out of control and badly in need of some checks and balances. The last check and balance left is from the voters.
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