There’s been an interesting development in the prosecution of the January 6 rioters. A three-judge appeals court has ruled 2-1 that the Justice Department can proceed with several hundred cases where defendants are charged with obstructing an official proceeding — for the time being.
This was only ever about Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.
It’s not as though he was the innocent victim, but when Donald Trump and his legal team say that Stormy Daniels extorted him, they are right.
From one perspective, this is another perversity of the case — Stormy Daniels engaged in a kind of extortion, and yet Trump is the one the authorities have tried their utmost to nail to the wall.
What’s a politician to do? Going into a presidential election year, the incumbent president looks to be facing a difficult reelection campaign. Persistently high inflation numbers remain a problem. Energy prices are still up. America’s southern border is being overrun with illegal border-crossers and fentanyl. Major bank failures have raised the specter of a banking crisis. There are multiple House of Representatives investigations covering Biden family finances, the weaponization of government agencies, China, and the origins of COVID. For the current administration and its supporters, the answer is as easy as it is familiar: change the subject to Donald Trump. It has been an oppositional go-to foil since Trump dared step onto the political stage in 2016.
Law enforcement agencies had at least 40 undercover informants engaging in surveillance work among defendants on Jan. 6, defendant Dominic Pezzola’s lawyer Roger Roots said Wednesday.
Taking up where disgraced Democratic attorney Michael Avenatti left off, New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg has indicted former President Donald Trump with — well, no one is exactly sure how to describe the crime.
If Bragg were trying to ding Trump with a misdemeanor, he would have to show that Trump was knowingly involved in the false bookkeeping entries that the Trump Organization used to describe various hush-money payments regarding affair allegations. But Bragg brought 34 felony charges against Trump on the premise that the false business records were part of a greater criminal scheme.
The former publisher of the National Enquirer, a convicted perjurer, and a 44-year-old porn star constitute the potential witnesses against Donald Trump. With the prosecution relying on that cast of characters, who needs a defense?
Not since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault has anticipation led to such letdown as that which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Tuesday gave to Democrats who regard Trump as Christians do Satan.
The US is “going to hell”, Donald Trump has said in a defiant address after pleading not guilty to falsifying business records to hide damaging information ahead of the 2016 election.
The former president was charged with 34 counts in a Manhattan court in New York on Tuesday.
These relate to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, who says they had an affair.
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on a slew of criminal charges, including 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, according to the unsealed court records released on Tuesday afternoon.
Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan announced the felony charges during Trump’s initial court appearance on Tuesday afternoon, marking the first time a former president has been criminally charged in U.S. history. Trump pleaded not guilty to all 34 counts.
Donald Trump arrest: Whom did Trump ‘defraud’ in 34 felony counts of hush money payments?
Former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records tied to the Stormy Daniels hush-money payment.
Trump, 76, was pictured with his shoulders slightly hunched as he took his seat at the defendant’s table in Manhattan Supreme Court ahead of his historic arraignment.
BREAKING: Donald Trump is now under arrest in New York City ahead of his arraignment in court https://t.co/0NxzuxZt8I pic.twitter.com/9sdFFunjcM
— CNN (@CNN) April 4, 2023
Former President Donald Trump will make his first appearance in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday afternoon on criminal charges tied to the Stormy Daniels hush-money payment — marking an unprecedent moment in US history.
Trump, 76, will face a historic booking and arraignment after he surrenders to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office downtown in the early afternoon.
Alvin Bragg’s Dangerous Stunt
Today in Manhattan the resistance will get what it’s been craving for years. Is it worth it?
For seven years, the progressive resistance has fantasized about Donald Trump’s indictment, conviction, and incarceration.
First, there was his alleged collusion with Russia, which dominated the better part of 2017 and 2018, and tapered off in early 2019.
Then, just as Russiagate was winding down, along came all the talk about his obstruction of the investigation into that alleged collusion, followed by his phone call with Ukraine’s president, during which Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. This became grist for his first impeachment in late 2019.
The indictment of former President Donald Trump is just the latest maneuver by many in the United States to distort elections.
The indictment will not be known until tomorrow, but according to the American media, the former president is accused of making fraudulent payments to a porn star with whom Trump denies having had sexual relations. According to the claims of his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who went to prison for “lying to the Internal Revue Services about the taxes he owed, lying to financial institutions and lying to Congress,” Trump is accused of making the payments with funds from his 2016 presidential campaign, which is prohibited. But Trump did not use campaign funds, which would actually have been a serious violation of campaign laws. Trump used his personal money — to pay Cohen.
With the indictment of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. has entered the “era of police-state politics,” as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland put it Friday morning. The prosecution and expected arrest of a former president — and likely presidential challenger — is a serious thing, made all the more outrageous by the nakedly political nature of New York D.A. Alvin Bragg’s mission. Bragg appears to be ginning up a criminal probe out of a possible campaign finance issue that federal prosecutors had already declined to pursue.
In March 2021, two months after the F.B.I. arrested Dominic Pezzola, a New York Proud Boy, on charges stemming from the Capitol attack, one of the lead agents on the case made an unusual confession. On Lync, the bureau’s internal chat system, she said she felt sorry for the man she had helped take into custody.
“Is it bad i almost kind of feel bad for Pezzola?” the agent, Nicole Miller, asked one of her colleagues.
When the colleague told her that Mr. Pezzola was in jail because of choices he had made, Agent Miller seemed to agree. But then, she snapped back into work mode.
The entire effort by Alvin Bragg to resurrect what the Washington Post editorial board rightly calls a “zombie” case has looked dodgy from the beginning. Even Bragg found it dodgy — after all, he shut down an investigation into the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal shortly after taking office. And unless Bragg has a much different case than the one his office has been pursuing for the last couple of years, the editorial board echoed Van Jones in their reaction last night.
