The judge in New York City’s show trial of former President Donald Trump is “unethical” and a judicial “tyrant.”
That verdict comes not from the Trump presidential campaign, but instead from Biden voter and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz.
Dershowitz’s 809-word, sizzling indictment strongly suggests that Trump has a ready appeal should the jury return a guilty verdict.
“Outrageous” and “Petty”
Trump is on trial for “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and other women. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, helped into office with money from communist Hungarian billionaire George Soros, claims Trump falsely called the reimbursement of Trump’s disgraced former attorney, Michael Cohen, “legal expenses.”
As well, Trump supposedly violated federal election law in paying the women. Dershowitz and law professor Jonathan Turley, also a man of the Left, have explained at length why the case is a legal farce. The statute of limitations on the “crimes” has expired, and federal prosecutors have declined to charge Trump, they have explained.
Moreover, Judge Juan Merchan donated to President Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, the subject of an ethical complaint that was dismissed. His daughter is a Biden campaign veteran.
On display is an American version of Stalinist show trial.
That aside, Dershowitz wrote that he’s never seen anything like Merchan’s performance in his six-decade career.
“I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday,” he wrote on Substack:
The judge in Donald Trump’s trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn.
Many experienced lawyers raised their eyebrows when the judge excluded obviously relevant evidence when offered by the defense, while including irrelevant evidence offered by the prosecution.
But when the defense’s only substantive witness, the experienced attorney Robert Costello, raised his eyebrows at one of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s rulings, the court went berserk.
Losing his cool and showing his thin skin, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone including the media.
Amazingly, Dershowitz explained, that little twist of the eyebrows inspired Merchan to threaten striking Costello’s testimony. And that would have been “utterly improper and unlawful” because Costello’s testimony “undercut and contradicted the government’s star witness.”
“The judge’s threat was absolutely outrageous, unethical, unlawful and petty,” Dershowitz wrote.
Why No TV Coverage
Having witnessed the doings inside Merchan’s corrupt courtroom, Dershowitz also worries about the leftist mainstream media’s coverage of the case, along with its inability to know what happened when Merchan emptied the courtroom.
“The public was even denied the opportunity to hear from journalists who saw the judge in action because he cleared the courtroom,” Dershowitz wrote:
I am one of the few witnesses to his improper conduct who remained behind to observe his deep failings.
Even when journalists do report on courtroom proceedings, their accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. When you watch CNN or MSNBC, you generally see an account of a trial that never took place.
They spin the events so much that reality is totally distorted.
Dershowitz explained that the courtroom reporters turned a friendly conversation with a former student who works for CNN into a hostile encounter that simply didn’t occur.
The problem, though, isn’t that misreporting. Rather, the public can’t determine when the media is delivering biased and even false accounts of the trial because it’s not on television.
“There is absolutely no good reason why a trial of this importance, or any trial, should not be televised live and in real time,” Dershowitz wrote:
Allowing the public to see their courts in action is the best guarantee of fairness. As Justice Louis Brandeis wisely said a century ago, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” …
Today there is no check on partisan reporting of trials and exaggerations and personal opinions are rampant.
The American public is the loser.
Get Trump
Indeed. Nor can Americans see Merchan’s “outrageous, unethical, unlawful and petty” behavior, as the hate-Trump media won’t likely describe it. So, as Dershowitz wrote, the public can’t impartially and intelligently evaluate the trial’s conduct — or the jury’s verdict.
Dershowitz has been concerned about the trial for some time. For one thing, paying “hush money” isn’t illegal. “It’s done all the time,” he told Newsmax in 2019.
“The most likely felony that’s been committed in this case [is] if somebody on the grand jury … leaked the fact that there was a vote to indict, that is a one- to five-year, Class E felony,” he said on Fox News’ Mornings with Maria last year. “So Bragg now has a prima facie case that a crime has been committed right in his building.”
The prosecutor ran on a campaign pledge to “get Trump,” and said he would “figure out what crimes there might be” after the election, Dershowitz said. Bragg concocted a “fake misdemeanor” that he wants to “piggyback” with a federal felony.
But “get Trump” is Bragg’s and the Democrats’ goal, wrote Dershowitz in Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.
Lawyers crazed by Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) have tossed away the rule of law because “Trump is different” and must be destroyed, he wrote:
Perhaps the most extreme example of the dangerous phenomenon is the effort of Professor Laurence Tribe, my former colleague at Harvard Law School, to persuade Attorney General Merrick Garland to prosecute Trump for attempting to murder former Vice President Mike Pence despite the absence of any plausible legal basis for such a prosecution.
Such is the grip that TDS has on the leftist-dominated legal profession that something called the “65 Project” wants to ruin Trump’s attorneys who filed briefs challenging the 2020 election.
Their goals as described by their supporters are indecent to the core.
As one put it: “This is mostly important for the deterrent effect it can bring so you can kill the pool of legal talent going forward.” One of its leaders also said that its purpose was to “shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.” He acknowledged that “the little fish are probably more vulnerable to what we are doing … threatening their livelihood … [and] their reputations in their communities.”
With the criminal trial closing, Dershowitz worries that Merchan’s jury instructions will be biased against Trump.
Dershowitz will discuss the matter on his Dershow at 5:30 p.m. today, Eastern Standard Time.
H/T: Daily Caller
