Last week Jonathan Turley issued a thorough indictment of the trial in Manhattan, which he described as “a clear example of the weaponization of the criminal justice system.” The George Washington University law professor has been saying this from the beginning about Alvin Bragg’s partisan prosecution, and it should be self-evident: a criminal case relying on the slimier-than-slime, convicted perjurer and disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen as an essential witness should never be pursued, and it is a violation of prosecutorial ethics to do so.

I was surfing between various news networks’ analyses of the case, and only the usually silly “Fox and Friends” crew stated the most important conclusion that the others carefully avoided. It’s a political prosecution, and the purpose is to get a conviction by any means possible, even one tainted and sure to be overturned, so the Democrats can run against Trump as a “convicted felon.” Justice has nothing to do with it, as Turley’s careful assessment makes clear.

The other purpose is to interfere with the certain Republican candidate’s ability to campaign, because he otherwise has the energy and ability to campaign, while his Democratic opposition does not. Yes, the Democrats are interfering with the 2024 election and attempting to rig it even as in other prosecutions and in campaign attacks, they claim Trump is an existential danger to democracy and that his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” are “baseless.” The unethical conduct of the Democrats in prosecutions like the “hush money” trial is itself a rebuttal of that statement. If I had to define “hypocrisy,” I couldn’t come up with a better example than that.

The question this week was whether it is fair to try Donald Trump in New York City. That’s easy: no. All of the lawfare cases are calculated to go to trial in communities extremely hostile to Trump: New York, D.C., and Fulton County, Georgia, the solid Blue heart of a mostly conservative state. Given the stakes and the defendant, judges should move all of the cases, just as the trial of Derek Chuavin and the three other cops implicated in George Floyd’s death should have been moved out of the Twin Cities, if the objective had been a fair trial rather than to mollify Black Lives Matters.

Can Trump get a fair trial in the current case? Sure: if the jurors do their jobs with integrity and intelligence, which, as we were recently reminded with O.J. Simpson’s death, a lot of jurors are incapable or disinclined to do. The Times published the chart above showing where the selected jurors said they got their news from. (The Times loved the data because it shows its own biased news source way ahead of the pack.)

Observations on this:

• The chart isn’t as indicative of political orientation as people might think. Heck, the Times is probably the source I use most, but I don’t trust it, I am aware of its unethical biases, and there are so many other sources I use that I would have trouble ranking them all or remembering to mention them.
• Where’s the Daily News, the third major New York daily newspaper? Where’s Newsday? No network news at all? No “Today,” no “Meet the Press”? At least no one mentioned “Comedy Central.” I doubt that the chart is accurate, or even close.
• If I were the judge, I’d dismiss any juror who said he got any of his or her news from MSNBC. It is literally an anti-Trump propaganda factory all day, every day.

“RIGGED: Judge Merchan Let an Anti-Trumper Who Lied Onto the Jury”! This kind of exaggerated hysteria, from the conservative but usually reasonable PJ Media pundit Matt Margolis, is irresponsible because it makes the public dumber while inflaming the Right’s knee-jerk partisans. He claims the trial is rigged because the judge refused to dismiss a juror, Juror No. B133, who had stated that she had never attended a Trump rally, but posted a video on social media of her celebrating with others after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election. 

Susan Necheles, one of Trump’s attorneys, argued that this was “clearly an anti-Trump event.” Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass argued that the video depicted a celebration, not a rally. The juror had another anti-Trump post on social media as well. Judge Merchan let her stay in the jury box, explaining, “The juror came in, she was confronted with both of these [posts], and she provided what I believe were reasonable explanations of both.” That is a reasonable exercise of a judge’s discretion. That she didn’t want Trump to be reelected doesn’t prove that she would vote to convict someone who wasn’t proven guilty, or even suggest it.

Over at CNN, Jake Tapper was told by a legal analyst that a potential juror wearing a MAGA hat wouldn’t be dismissed by a judge for that head attire alone, if he convincingly explained that he could be fair and unbiased in evaluating evidence. I agree with that. In my book with Ed Larson, we examined Clarence Darrow’s voir dire in the Sweet Case, where he was forced to defend eleven blacks in a murder prosecution before an all white jury, in 1926, and the murder victim had been a white man. Examining one juror, Darrow heard the man say that he didn’t like or trust Negroes, wouldn’t have one in his house or hire one in his business. Yet when Darrow asked if he could fairly evaluate and weigh the evidence in the case and vote accordingly, the potential juror answered that he would never want to see any man, black or white, convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Darrow replied that he was a fair and honest man, and that he was welcome on the jury.