The jury for former President Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial will receive instructions from a Democrat judge whose daughter uses this trial to make money fundraising for left-wing clients about the trial.
Fixed much?
But just in case any of the jurors don’t get the message, the Biden-Harris campaign held an event outside the courthouse to emphasize how important a guilty verdict is even though even CNN analysts have been dismayed that no case was actually made.
The star of the campaign rally was that bastion of rationality - Robert DeNiro.
In a glimpse of the Biden campaign theme, DeNiro, speaking for the campaign made the following claims that Trump “wants to sow total chaos” and “destroy not only the city” and “eventually he could destroy the whole world.”
The Biden campaign spokesman continued, “I don’t mean to scare you. No, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you. If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted. And elections. Forget about it. That’s over. That’s done. If he gets in. I can tell you right now. He will never leave. He will never leave. You know that. He will never leave.”
Of course the Biden campaign claimed that they were not interested in the trial but came to the New York City courthouse because that’s where the media is.
That DeNiro appearance showed the world that the Biden campaign is desperate for a guilty verdict so they can campaign off of it, regardless of the facts.
And in case anyone is catching up, this case is not about whether or not Donald Trump had an affair with porn ‘actress’ Stormy Daniels in spite of the salacious testimony the judge allowed to be offered. The case is about whether a payment made to Daniels’ attorney should have been treated as a campaign expenditure. That’s it.
The judge didn’t allow the former head of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to testify about the nature of the case or even the consequences of misidentifying an expenditure – it is a misdemeanor with the typical remedy being a requirement to amend the campaign report and pay a minimal fine.
In 2016, the FEC fined the Hillary Clinton campaign $8,000. CNN reported the fine as follows, “The FEC concluded that the Clinton campaign and DNC misreported the money that funded the [Steele] dossier, masking it as “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting” instead of opposition research.”
The Democratic National Committee was also fined $105,000 for the same offense.
Might have been instructive for the jury to know both what the typical treatment is for misreporting a federal campaign expenditure and the fact the FEC never fined Donald Trump or his campaign for the expenditure the Manhattan District Attorney is prosecuting.
But, the compromised judge denied the jury the ability to actually know anything about the federal misdemeanor that Donald Trump is being accused of committing, and that not only did the FEC not charge the former president, but the local U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York federal office chose to not prosecute.
Now, back to the facts of the case. Here is what we learned through four weeks of trial. Trump’s lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen (an admitted perjurer), submitted expenses to the Trump organization. The Trump Organization classified those expenses as ‘Legal Expenses’ because as a prosecution witness who is the Controller of the Trump Organization testified, ‘it was submitted by the attorney.”
The same witness testified that he was never contacted by former President Trump about this expense classification, which is the basis of the prosecutions case.
Michael Cohen’s former attorney later got on the witness stand and testified that Cohen repeatedly told him that he didn’t have anything on Trump even though it would have helped him avoid jailtime in another federal case. Cohen contended to his attorney that he came up with the idea to both make the payment in response to Daniel’s attorneys extortion demand and how to classify it in order to protect Melania Trump from embarrassment.
And in case you missed it, Cohen pinpointed a specific 90 second call that he claimed the he and Mr. Trump laid out the scheme to hide the payment, only for it to be revealed in court that Cohen actually spoke with a security official in the Trump organization about a problem he was having with a fourteen year old girl who was harassing him online during that phone call, not Donald Trump.
What’s more it was revealed that Cohen stole $30,000 from the Trump Organization when he requested and received a $50,000 reimbursement for a separate extortion payoff expense when he only disbursed $20,000 to the extortionist.
So Trump is on trial because his former attorney now claims that Trump ordered the whole payment misclassification to avoid the issue coming up prior to the 2016 election – a charge that federal prosecutors decline to make.
The prosecution provided no evidence that Trump even had knowledge of the payment, let alone how it was recorded on the corporate ledger. And the key witness both lied on the stand about the phone call which was the lynchpin of his testimony and stole $30,000 from Trump’s company in the process.
But it is New York City and it is doubtful that a single juror even considered voting for the former President in 2016 or 2020. And now, the Biden-Harris campaign is seeking to intimidate that jury into a guilty verdict if the facts get in the way. Election interference anyone?
The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
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