The indictment and trial on a thin charge, the gagging of a presidential candidate in the middle of a campaign, and the judge’s consistently biased rulings amount to deliberate judicial interference in the 2024 election.
The process was led by a Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who ran on the campaign platform of going after Donald Trump. Not going after a crime. Going after a person. That fundamentally contradicts the basic principles of Anglo-American law and justice.
No one else in New York City would have been indicted, as Donald Trump was, on what amounted to two expired misdemeanours, turned into a felony. One alleged felonious act became 34 counts. The prosecution said Trump was really guilty of election interference. The idea was that the catch-and-kill payments about the Stormy Daniels story, made to the National Enquirer and handled by Michael Cohen, changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
There are some glaring problems with that approach. The first is that campaign election violations are the responsibility of the federal government and normally handled exclusively by them for federal elections. Yet the federal government, the real experts in this process, chose not to prosecute. Alvin Bragg knew better. At least he knew what was better politically in New York.
What will a middle-class, independent voter in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit or Milwaukee think?
He knew he would draw a jury pool that, if it was like the rest of Manhattan, loathed Donald Trump and overwhelmingly rejected his candidacy. The judge was cut from the same cloth and effectively served as a member of the prosecution team. He let prosecution witnesses offer their (uninformed) opinions about these campaign-finance issues, but slammed the door shut on the defence’s effort to rebut them. Trump’s team wanted to call one of the country’s leading experts on campaign finance to refute those claims. Judge Merchan flatly refused.
His instructions to the jury were just as fair-minded. To take just one example, he omitted a crucial point for Trump’s side: a ‘missing witness’ instruction. The prosecution had complete control of one potential witness, Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Weisselberg, who is now in jail for lying under oath, worked with Michael Cohen to arrange the bookkeeping entry that is the heart of the prosecution case.
The prosecution refused to call Weisselberg, presumably because they figured his testimony would hurt their case. The judge should have told the jury that they could reasonably make that assumption. That’s not a trivial point. For the jury to make anything out of the bookkeeping entry, they had to believe Trump willingly created the false entry and did it to conceal a crime. The only person who actually said that was Michael Cohen.
We don’t know how voters will respond to the verdict. The last elections have been decided by razor-thin margins so even small changes could make a difference.
The public respects the courts, though its deference has dwindled considerably over the years. The Democrats have made undermining trust in the courts a major theme once they lost control of the Supreme Court. Even so, the public retains some residual respect for the judicial system, and that may affect independent voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That will depend on how they weigh the outcome of the New York trial against the process (and whether they see that process as unfair).
During the trial itself, Trump’s support actually grew among independent, swing-state voters. They thought, correctly, that the trial was part of an unfair ‘lawfare’ campaign, aimed at keeping Trump off the campaign trail, soaking up his campaign chest and smearing him with criminal charges.
But a conviction is different from an indictment and trial. We don’t know what the effect will be. We do know that it will be the second arrow in Biden’s quiver, and he and his surrogates will use it. (The other arrow is abortion.) We know the media will gloat. They will be led by the New York Times and Washington Post. We know, too, that Trump and his allies will cry foul. Repeatedly and with increasing ferocity.
What will a middle-class, independent voter in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit or Milwaukee think? The election may very well turn on that judgment.
Watch Freddy Gray and Lionel Shriver’s analysis on Spectator TV:
This article was originally published with The Spectator’s World edition.
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