House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) filed a complaint about whether the judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s hush money case was chosen randomly.
Elise penned a letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct this week requesting an investigation to determine if the appointment of Judge Juan Merchan violates the Uniform Rules for New York State Trial Courts.
According to the state’s rules, a judge must be assigned “Pursuant to a method of random selection authorized by the Chief Administrator.”
Stefanik is accusing Merchan of being chosen “intentionally” to “increase the chance” of convictions against Trump.
One cannot help but suspect that the ‘random selection’ at work in the assignment of Acting Justice Merchan, a Democrat Party donor, to these cases involving prominent Republicans, is in fact not random at all. If Acting Justice Merchan or any other Justices of the Court are found to have violated these rules, I would hope that the Commission would subject them to the required discipline. And if any non-judicial employees of the Court are involved in such a scheme, I would hope that the Inspector General subject them to the appropriate sanction. If justices were indeed being randomly assigned in the Criminal Term, the probability of two specific criminal cases being assigned to the same justice is quite low, and the probability of three specific criminal cases being assigned to the same justice is infinitesimally small. And yet, we see Acting Justice Merchan on all three cases.
However, New York State Office of Court Administration (OCA) spokesperson Al Baker said that it is not uncommon for a judge to be assigned to several cases that relate to another.
“As we’ve said repeatedly, including in April 2023, Judge Merchan was assigned to supervise the special grand juries that investigated the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg as well as Donald Trump,” Baker said. “He was, in turn, assigned the indictments that arose from those investigations, which is common practice since the judge supervising the grand jury investigation already has some familiarity with these often-complex cases and can manage them more efficiently.”
🚨🚨🚨 I just filed an official misconduct complaint with the New York State Unified Court System related to the “random” assignment of Acting Manhattan Justice Juan Merchan, a Biden donor whose daughter is fundraising millions off his unprecedented work, to criminal cases… pic.twitter.com/OsBjFc3qeI
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) May 28, 2024