Mike Huckabee: Dismiss the Case Against President Trump NOW
Enough of this farce. Stop wasting everybody’s time. Judge Juan Merchan should dismiss the case against President Donald Trump NOW.
Unless he himself is too Trump-deranged to preside fairly over this case, he has to know that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case is nothing more than a disgraceful political hit job against a former president and current leading candidate for a major party’s nomination.
He knows this is unprecedented election interference. He knows it’s abuse of the legal system, lawfare at its worst. And we all know that he knows.
Bragg ran for office on a promise to “get Trump.” That alone should be enough to discredit what he has done here. For those who might not agree that it is, the laughably insufficient indictment itself definitely is.
This is still America — we can’t have this in our country. It is not acceptable.
We’d ask the same question posed by Dan Bongino: “What kind of a clown joker wrote this thing?”
Judicial Watch released a statement calling this indictment and arrest “a blow to the rule of law and our republican form of government.”
“This is an indictment about nothing,” it said, “based on non-crimes and politics. It is a rigged prosecution to rig an election. The courts must end this malicious prosecution before the nation is irreparably damaged.”
Judicial Watch called for Congress to immediately investigate Bragg’s election interference and his attack on Trump’s civil rights. Thanks to them for using the Freedom of Information Act to get the ball rolling until Congress holds hearings. But the way FOIA requests are slow-walked, it could take a year to get the information they seek. This case needs to be dropped NOW.
Legal analyst Margot Cleveland has a new column on Bragg’s indictment of Trump, which she says is “even more partisan and pathetic than we could have imagined,” to the extent that other Democrats will distance themselves from it to “avoid the fallout from the political targeting of Trump.” Bragg’s reputation as a prosecutor is cooked, on both sides.
Trump, the indictment says, “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records.” Thirty-four times.
We’d assumed that the 34 counts reflected 34 payments made to Michael Cohen, but Bragg broke them down even further than that. Each payment typically required several records: invoice from Cohen, general ledger, issuance of a check. Each one of those records is a separate count.
Bragg stacked this indictment as much as he possibly could. “The repetitiveness of the counts reeks of a desperate piling on by the Democrat prosecutor,” Cleveland says.
Bragg included a 13-page “statement of the facts” that offers no facts that would bolster the charges. He described a “catch-and-kill scheme” to try to keep unflattering stories out of the media. Bragg called this “unlawful,” but in reality, it’s quite common in the celebrity world and is certainly not a crime.
And as everyone knows by now, Bragg never did identify the “other crime” that these falsified records were in service to. The whole case stands or falls on this, and he left it out.
Bragg’s job was to convince the American public that “the evidence overwhelmingly supported his decision to criminally charge the former President of the United States.” He utterly failed.
Even with these glaring deficiencies, Bragg might “successfully sidestep initial efforts to have the case tossed,” Cleveland says. If he does, it’s hard even to imagine how damaging that will be.
“Evidently Bragg and I went to very different law schools,” said Trump civil attorney Alina Habba to Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Wednesday night. (Editorial note: Alvin Bragg went to Harvard Law, which doesn’t say much for Harvard Law. Ironic factoid: He was an editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.) Habba had been waiting, she said, for “a little something” from the indictment, just as a challenge.
“He’s going to go down as a disgraced DA,” she said. “And this judge, same thing,” although she gave him credit for at least trying to appear measured and unbiased in court. Still, this is a judge who has “heard many Trump cases, and ‘somehow’ got another Trump case,” she added with a wide smile and no further comment.
She noted that Stormy Daniels had already come out with her story before the 2016 election; people knew about it. A court had already levied a $500,000 judgment against her for frivolously suing Trump for defamation, and another $190,000 was added to that the very day of Trump’s arraignment. Payments to Cohen were not recorded until 2017.
Note: As some legal experts have wondered, how can payments and records of payments made in 2017 be considered an FEC violation for the 2016 election?
For those who detest Trump, it doesn’t matter that there’s nothing to this indictment; he just needs to be prosecuted, for something.
As you know, James O’Keefe has a start-up business doing essentially what he did before — namely, catching people unawares on camera so they tell us what they really think and are up to.
On Tuesday, he decided to go wandering around among the many journalists who were outside the courthouse to cover the arraignment. It was easy to strike up conversations with them and get them to reveal their leftist views and hateful attitudes toward Trump.
“Whatever reason [Trump] is in prison is good for me,” said a news producer at Eurovision Americas.
“Hopefully he doesn’t get the [nomination]. He just goes away,” an ABC News cameraman said.
“Whatever it takes, right?” said an unidentified journalist.
“Georgia seems like it would be better at taking him down than this,” said another. “I’ll take this!” said another.
O’Keefe spoke with a DA who works there in the courthouse, Sylvia Wertheimer, and she said, mystified, “I still don’t understand that people think [Trump] won the election.” She was also ready to “change a lot in the Constitution.”
Even Politico had to admit the support for Bragg among Democrats is weak. You know the case against Trump is a disaster when as big a political enemy as Mitt Romney says, “The prosecutor’s overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.”
Still, this piece ends on the Democrats’ new talking point that it’s time to look ahead to the “acute legal threats” posed to Trump from other cases.
Among friends of Trump, attorney Joe DiGenova spoke out Tuesday, saying, “I think this indictment is an embarrassment to the historic Manhattan district attorney’s office. It’s an embarrassment to the Bar of the City of New York and the court system of New York.
“This case should be dismissed for a number of reasons: statute of limitations, prosecutorial misconduct, failure to state a crime. … There’s nothing of value the former president defrauded anybody of.”
DiGenova believes there’s a “silent majority” in the New York Bar that thinks this case is awful (“and so is Alvin Bragg”) and that Merchan should dismiss the case.
Even FBI agent-turned-CNN commentator Andrew McCabe, of all people, found the flimsy case a “disappointment.”
He said, “Everyone was hoping we would see more.” Whatever it might take to tie 34 misdemeanor charges to another crime to turn them into felonies “simply isn’t there.” (McCabe didn’t mention the problem with the statute of limitations on every one of those misdemeanors.) “It’s hard to imagine convincing a jury.”
This should never get to a jury. It’s maniacal to do this to a former president and current presidential candidate over a case that likely can’t even be made at all. It’s a colossal waste of time, resources and millions of dollars at a time when our country faces serious problems on virtually every front. (Thanks, Joe Biden!)
Trump, his family and the millions of non-deranged onlookers in this country will, of course, never receive the apology due to us for being subjected to such a malicious and abusive stunt, but the case should be dropped, NOW.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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