At this point, why are the Democrats keeping up the lawfare against the president-elect?
The Democrats’ grand project to portray Donald Trump as an insurrectionist who attempted to overthrow the government and install himself as a dictator has come to naught. He wasn’t barred from running for president again, and most Americans today don’t believe the left’s ridiculous Jan. 6 insurrection narrative. Efforts to frame Trump as a serial criminal with brazen contempt for the law have also come to nothing.
The election interference case in Georgia has foundered over DA Fani Willis’ corruption. Letitia James’ fraud case against Trump is under appeal and faces a tough road ahead since Trump didn’t do anything that isn’t common business practice in New York. The case thus opens the door to numerous others being prosecuted for practices they correctly thought up until now were perfectly within the bounds of the law.
Jack Smith’s classified documents case, meanwhile, sunk under the weight of the fact that the president has the right to declassify documents. Smith also dropped his bogus “insurrection” charges a few weeks after the election; it had failed to serve its purpose, and was no longer needed. Fantasist E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse case rolls on but is self-evidently absurd.
That leaves the case of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, which led to Trump being convicted last May of a whopping total of 34 felonies for falsifying business records. This case is almost as absurd as Carroll’s: the charges against Trump are ordinarily classified as misdemeanors, but Bragg elevated them to felonies on the dubious grounds that they constituted “election interference.” New York extended the statute of limitations on these particular crimes just so that Trump could be prosecuted. And what Trump did, here again, is common business practice: large corporations routinely pay settlements without acknowledging guilt, just to make a nagging problem go away.
But Bragg and the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, are determined to get Trump, and so New York State Supreme Court Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer has just denied the president-elect’s request to postpone his sentencing, which is scheduled for Jan. 10. Trump spokesman and incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung said:
Today, President Trump’s legal team moved to stop the unlawful sentencing in the Manhattan D.A.’s Witch Hunt. The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the state constitution of New York, and other established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately dismissed. The American People elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate that demands an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and all of the remaining Witch Hunts. We look forward to uniting our country in the new administration as President Trump makes America great again.
What game are the Democrats playing by insisting on getting Trump sentenced just ten days before he takes office? Merchan has already stated that he is not inclined to sentence the incoming president to prison. However, the sentencing before he takes office will ensure that he will be the first convicted felon to take the oath of office as president of the United States, and the Democrats apparently think that this will give their sagging cause a new impetus. It will also allow Trump to get on with his appeal of this appalling conviction; he can’t begin the appeal process until after he is sentenced.
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The rush to get Trump sentenced thus appears to be in service of giving the left another talking point, and a jumping-off point for what are certain to be energetic efforts to delegitimize and destroy his second presidency. They dogged his first with the Russian collusion hoax, the Ukraine phone call canard, the “insurrection” nonsense, and much more, and aren’t likely to sit by idly during his second term and watch as he makes the nation they hate so passionately become great again. What they’ll throw at him this time remains unclear at this point, but as the sentencing will seal the “convicted felon” business, it’s a first step. Many more, alas, will come along soon enough.
One would think, seeing how the whole lawfare enterprise has failed to stop Trump and has only made more Americans sour on them, that leftists would give it up and drop all the charges. But that would be tantamount to admitting that the whole thing was a scam and a sham in the first place. They started this ball rolling, and have to save face by seeing it through to its conclusion now.
