MOSHE HILL OPINION COLUMNS JUNE 05 2024
The conviction of Donald Trump in a New York City courthouse is nothing less than a complete demolition of 248 years of a judicial system that this country has been building. This was a clear and obvious political prosecution, with no legal precedent or cause, and the former President of the United States and leading candidate for future President of the United States may go to jail over it.
The injustice of this verdict hits on several levels. First, the charges themselves were obscene. Second, the judge in the case was corrupt and pushed the scales of justice in the prosecution’s favor. Third, the political attack from the Biden administration itself was something out of the Soviet playbook. Last, the gaslighting from the media in reaction to this is enough to drive anyone insane.
Alvin Bragg campaigned on the promise of using legal means to target Trump, which helped him get elected. Similarly, Letitia James was elected on her vow to use state power against Trump. Letitia James got her pound of flesh from Trump with the insane civil suit where she claimed that Trump defrauded lenders, even though no victims could be found. The judge in that case allowed insane valuations into evidence, like claiming that Mar-A-Lago was worth $18 million when it’s clearly worth over ten times that amount.
Not to be outdone, Bragg indicted Trump under a vague New York business-records statute because he lacked a serious crime that would warrant charging a former president. Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor with a two-year shelf life, meaning that even if Bragg charged Trump with that, he had to have done so by 2019. So, he claimed that it was a felony because the false business records were in pursuit of another crime.
This approach, typical of selective prosecution, essentially manufactured a crime. Despite the strong anti-Trump sentiment in New York, Bragg had to be stealthy. He framed Trump’s NDAs and bookkeeping as a campaign-finance violation, though he lacked jurisdiction as a state prosecutor to enforce federal law, which governs federal elections. Both the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission had investigated Trump and chose not to act, because the NDAs were not campaign expenditures.
Bragg’s case relied on an ambiguous crime and irregularities in the legal process, with Judge Juan Merchan supporting these efforts. Bragg used New York election law, which also didn’t fit, to circumvent the statute of limitations and turn misdemeanors into felonies. This kind of manipulation is unethical, especially when targeting a political opponent.
Bragg’s prosecution aimed to suggest Trump’s guilt by emphasizing Cohen’s guilty pleas and Pecker’s non-prosecution deal, which weren’t directly related to Trump. The judge allowed this misleading evidence, undermining Trump’s defense. Bragg’s case lacked proof of Trump’s intent to commit a federal election law violation, yet the jury was not properly instructed on this crucial point.
The jury was given a confusing set of instructions, leading to a conviction without a clear consensus on the crime Trump supposedly committed. Merchan even told the jury that if they agreed that Trump committed a felony, it didn’t matter what the felony was! This was heretofore unheard of in legal circles prior to this case.
After the verdict, when Bragg came out to gloat, a man was standing next to him. That man is Matthew Colangelo. In 2022, Colangelo was the third in line at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC – an incredibly powerful position. In November of that year, Trump announced that he was running for re-election. In December, Colangelo left the DOJ and went to work for Alvin Bragg. A few months later, the indictments dropped on Trump’s lap.
America First Legal (AFL), a conservative watchdog group, is currently suing for evidence related to how Colangelo left the DOJ and started working for Bragg. “No one leaves being the Number Three at the Department of Justice to go work in a district attorney’s office – no matter which one it is. There is no plausible explanation other than engagement in a coordinated campaign to target one man – President Trump. The American people deserve to see these records,” Gene Hamilton, AFL’s executive director, said in a statement. It is highly plausible that Joe Biden, or one of his handlers, directed Colangelo to help a wavering Bragg along.
After the verdict, the media did everything they could to ensure that the words “Trump” and “convicted felon” were on air as often as possible. The very same pundits who were analyzing the trial, saying that Michael Cohen’s testimony was full of lies and that the prosecution didn’t make its case, praised the brilliance of the justice system when the verdict came in. Adam Schiff, one of the more despicable members of the House of Representatives, and the likely next Senator from California, said, “If you don’t want to be tried in front of a New York jury, then maybe don’t commit so many crimes in New York City. It’s pretty simple.”
So, to sum up in an analogy, Trump was essentially going five mph over the speed limit. Five years later, an Attorney General won election on the vow to “get Trump.” When discovering this speeding ticket, he, with help from a high up official in the Biden administration, used that simple incident and declared that the speeding was in furtherance of another unnamed federal offense (which all federal agencies already investigated and declined to prosecute). The judge in the case told the jury that as long as they found him guilty of something, they didn’t need to agree to what. The media declared that “no one is above the law” and justice is served.
Sounds ridiculous, right? How could a simple speeding ticket turn into dozens of felonies years later? That’s the two-tiered justice system in America these days. If this was happening in any other country, the State Department would issue a travel advisory, and the United Nations would monitor their elections. That’s what’s happening.
It is now a moral imperative to vote for Donal Trump and all Republicans this November. This behavior cannot be rewarded with more power. Democrats must suffer for their abuse of power. There should be prosecutions of any and all Democrats who set foot into deep-Red areas. There should be landslide victories in every purple district in the country for the Republican. Every voter in this country should be saying with a unified voice that this injustice will not be tolerated, no matter who it’s against.
This may backfire on the Democrats in a major way. Or if Trump is in jail and loses the election when the polls say he will win, this may be a match on the pile of dynamite they’ve been stacking for years. Either way, Democrats are playing with fire.
