Donald Trump will go on trial in Washington, D.C. — a city that voted 92% for Joe Biden in 2020. Can any prosecutor honestly say he can find “12 good men and true” in our nation’s capital who aren’t tainted by partisan politics?
Donald Trump is the most polarizing figure in American politics since Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford was so concerned about putting Nixon on trial that he pardoned him — to howls of dismay from the Nixon-hating left. They wanted their pound of flesh, and Ford denied them their spectacle.
Now it appears that the left not only wants to put Donald Trump on trial, but they also crave a “show trial” where the state parades the defendant before the people so that some lesson is taught — or, in this case, to deliberately and systematically destroy the Republican Party.
They certainly have the judge for it. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is an Obama appointee who has “already dealt the ex-president one of the most significant legal blows of his lifetime,” according to Politico. A ruling in 2021 allowed the January 6 Committee access to “call logs, memos, internal strategy papers and more from the desks of Trump’s most trusted advisers.”
Related: The New Charges Against Trump ‘May’ Carry the Death Penalty
The left mocks the idea that there could possibly be any political bias against Trump in a D.C. jury pool. But note that the leftist legal experts that Salon quotes from don’t deal with the complaint’s substance, only with Lauro’s suggestion of an alternate venue.
Legal experts expressed skepticism at the argument.”Crime in DC, get charged in DC,” tweeted Georgia State Law professor Anthony Kreis. National security attorney Bradley Moss mocked Trump for seeking to “Transfer Venue to a State with Fewer Minorities.” Former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade said Trump’s move is “unlikely” to succeed. “Low approval rating is not the test. He must show that an impartial jury cannot be found in all of DC,” she wrote. Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann agreed that “Trump motion to change venue will be rejected as the crime was so nationally televised that all venues were exposed.”
If “all venues were exposed,” why hold the trial in the most partisan spot in the entire United States? Why not in some purple city like Charleston, W.V.? Kanawha County (Charleston) is 40% Democrat — more in the city proper. If the “crime was ‘so nationally televised,'” why not move it to a more evenly divided venue?
To achieve a change of venue, Mr. Trump will have to show a reasonable likelihood that he will not receive a fair trial in the nation’s capital. The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure mandate removal if the “court is satisfied that so great a prejudice against the defendant exists in the transferring district that the defendant cannot obtain a fair and impartial trial there.”
Only a defendant can move for a change of venue because, as the federal code explains, the “defendant has a constitutional right to a trial in the district where the offense was committed.” That right, though, must not infect the defendant’s rights under the Constitution’s Article III, the Sixth Amendment, and the right to Due Process encoded in the 14th.
Judge Chutkan is not likely to change the trial’s venue, although an appeals court may feel differently. Nevertheless, the left’s sanguinity about rabidly partisan D.C. residents being allowed to sit in judgment on Trump is smug and self-righteous.
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