Free Republic

It is certain they will face true justice. The Lord is not mocked.

For the sake of their own souls and for the good of any other wannabe thugs, I hope they also face earthly justice before they face the Lord. They need to repent.

Actually, did the FEC have a statement of why they didn’t prosecute Trump? If they communicated in any way that there were no FECA violations by Trump then those jerkwad prosecutors DID know that they were lying the whole time.

They belong in the slammer for a good long time.

Is there a way to prove that Bragg, Colangelo, or Steinglass knew they were lying when they told the jurors this broke FECA?

If so, somebody should slam them with perjury and prosecutorial misconduct - and put THEM in the slammer.

Authentic Campaigns was launched in 2018 by Loren Merchan and Mike Nellis and and received a bunch of awards for their work with Adam Schiff and Kamala Harris in 2020. See https://medium.com/@Authentic_HQ/authentic-campaigns-wins-eight-awards-at-the-2020-pollies-more-than-any-other-digital-firm-daaef745b442

Mike Nellis was involved in the BArack Obama campaign and relies on AI for results. See https://www.inspiredinsider.com/mike-nellis-interview/

Enjoy the barbecue.

I’ll see if the link allows me to contact her even though I’m in Nebraska.

Merchan’s political donations were on July 26, 2020.

July 10, 2020 was the day the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump did not have Presidential immunity from investigations and indictments by state prosecutors.

In 2023 34 judges received written warnings for forbidden political contributions. See https://cjc.ny.gov/Publications/AnnualReports/nyscjc.2024Annualreport.pdf . That included complaints from 2022-23. The report suggests that judges were confused about whether contributions to out-of-state candidates were forbidden and about the time window allowed for contributions by judges seeking election. In Merchan’s case, there is no allowance at all since he has never faced election.

These links are about civil cases regarding federal issues, where any jurisdiction has standing to hear the cases. Of course, all the cases are appealable within the federal court system.

It seems to me that if Chuck Schumer et al recognize the importance of not cherry-picking judges for their political views in such a situation, they should ALL THE MORE recognize the importance of random assignment of cases in CRIMINAL cases, and especially in STATE criminal cases, where the appeals options are much more limited.

The 14th Amendment requires each state to provide due process and equal protection under the law. For criminal trials at least, that concept should include the right to not have your criminal case deliberately given to somebody who has publicly stated (through financial contributions to activist groups) their desire to eliminate all your supporters. In just the general sense this would be sort of like a Black person being assured that his rape trial would not be deliberately assigned to the head of the KKK.

But assigning Trump’s cases to Merchan was even more egregious than that, because it’s not just a general animosity toward a generic group such as Blacks but it is a very specific, targeted animosity towards the actual defendant in question. And it’s not just an issue with Trump. We see the same kind of crap with Chutkan being given most of the J6 cases.

Giving jurisdiction only to courts where the alleged crimes occurred guarantees that places like DC and NYC can continue their corruption because there are no judges who protect the interests and rights of people who are not from the same banana republic as the judges. Why couldn’t a defendant from Texas, for instance, be able to ask for a randomly-assigned court anywhere in the country to be given jurisdiction and be assigned the case for alleged crimes occuring in DC? That change of venue would prevent the judicial hellholes we’ve all been watching in horror - while also preventing judge shopping.

In addition to the attorneys who signed the NYC Bar document, we have Chuck Schumer and his allies claiming the importance of random selection of judges. These people should ALL be pressured to speak up on the very court cases that should NOT involve political leanings at all: criminal trials.

Does anybody know how to get ahold of Elise Stefanik? If her staffers could do some outreach to these specific people, perhaps at the very least we could work on building consensus regarding this country’s need to prevent kangaroo courts like Merchan’s. We all care about the Trump case because we support Trump so we see what is being done to him. But this has been done to the “little people” for a long, long time, and those who have had to live within a judicial system that is rigged against them will easily see how their fate is tied to Trump’s. If we use the blatant corruption against Trump to attack the kangaroo court systems, a lot of Blacks and others will reap the benefits as well - which is also a great reason for all of us, of all political persuasions, to unite to address the injustices.

And in that one post you showed more consideration for the truth than Merchan allowed the jurors access to do.

The only reason the bookkeeping issues weren’t buried by statute of limitations is because there was supposedly an intent by Trump to commit or hide some other crime. But what that crime might be was only brought up by the prosecution in the summation AFTER the defense’s chance to give any “reasoned counter points” was already past. Merchan had already refused to let a subject expert testify about it.

That alone should tell you how bad this was. Counter points with time to digest them. A juror should be able to expect at least that much. Not in Merchan’s court though.

When were Merchan’s donations in relation to when he was assigned to the grand jury, the timing of when Cyrus Vance put together his “get Trump” team, when Trump said he would run for re-election, etc?

Something to check out. Also, had he made any other donations prior to those small donations?

Thanks. I really do need to sleep, if I can get my mind to shut off. I have problems with that sometimes.

Good night! =)

I really need to go to bed but I can’t shut my brain off.

I wonder how many of Loren Merchan’s clients are associated with NYC courts in some way. Normal justices have to be elected, though it sounds like it’s pretty much the democrat party that chooses who gets in.

It just seems too convenient that the justice randomly assigned to the Trump grand jury (and thus to all the cases dealing with Trump, his company, and his allies) just so happened to have illegally contributed to Joe Biden and an advocacy group to fight MAGA. It would be interesting to look at the names of the other 27 justices who could have gotten the appointment, and see if any of them have violated the ethics code by donating to political candidates and/or groups. Their names can be found at https://ww2.nycourts.gov/courts/1jd/criminal/judicial.shtml

Did they not take Merchan out of the running because there weren’t any justices to choose from who hadn’t already made their conflict of interest publicly-known? If he was the only justice who violated ethics in this way, it almost seems like his small donations were his way of alerting the “random” process that he would be a good justice to “get Trump”. Otherwise, why would he violate ethics rules to make such small donations?

Also, it seems like this Al Baker guy - the spokesman for those who assigned Merchan to all of the Trump cases - might be a good name for Jim Jordan’s committee to have. He’s publicly admitted to breaking the rules, and called it common practice. An admission that NYC is corrupt as heck.

Thanks for those links. My eyes are drooping so I’ll try to read them in the morning.

It would be interesting if an attorney contacted the signatories on that NYC Bar document and asked for their help in pursuing this flagrant violation of the rules.

I’m so bad at remembering names. Anybody know some attorneys they could ping to these last posts of mine?

So I’ve been looking at Wikipedia, trying to figure out New York’s judicial system. It seems that Mayor Bloomberg appointed Merchan to be a Family Court (a lower court) judge in 2006. NYC doesn’t have enough judges/justices for all their cases so they grab whatever judges they can and make them “acting justices” for their trial courts (which they call “supreme courts”). That’s what happened with Merchan in 2009. An administrative judge took him from his role in the lower-level family court and made him into an “acting justice” in the supreme court, criminal division. Normally supreme court justices (normal trial judges) are elected, but because Merchan is only an ACTING justice he has never had to be elected.

So that’s the difference between a justice and an acting justice.

I’m seeing a document from the NYC Bar Association in 2002 that is arguing that assignments of judges should be random. See https://www.nycbar.org/reports/the-assignment-of-judges-in-the-criminal-term-of-the-supreme-court-in-new-york-county/

The argument they made is that it is not fair to automatically assign a judge involved in a grand jury to also be assigned the judge for all the indictments that come out of that grand jury. (The “Challenged Policy”) They not only pointed out that such a policy is against the express rules and exceptions, but also stated why: the “Challenged Rule” gives any one judge too much power and it breeds distrust.

And their point is well-taken in the Trump case because there was only an indictment because Merchan didn’t require Alvin Bragg to give exculpatory evidence, and allowed him to lie about what evidence he had, if I’m understanding correctly. So the same corrupt judge that allowed the indictment to be gotten through prosecutorial fraud was also the corrupt judge who oversaw the criminal trial.

But apparently nothing came of the NYC Bar’s recommendations because this is the response to Stefanik’s complaint to the NY Unified Judicial System inspector general regarding the apparent non-randomness of the assignment:

““As we’ve said repeatedly, including in April 2023, Judge Merchan was assigned to supervise the special grand juries that investigated the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg as well as Donald Trump. He was, in turn, assigned the indictments that arose from those investigations, which is common practice since the judge supervising the grand jury investigation already has some familiarity with these often-complex cases and can manage them more efficiently,” OCA spokesperson Al Baker said in a statement. (see https://nypost.com/2024/05/28/us-news/elise-stefanik-files-misconduct-complaint-against-judge-juan-merchan-over-random-assignment-to-trumps-trial/ ).

So they are not even pretending that Merchan got these cases randomly, even though the NYC Bar Association notified them 22 years ago that the policy they just used to “get Trump” was against the rules.

From the NYC Bar document:

“Since the adoption of the Uniform Rules for Courts Exercising Criminal Jurisdiction more than a decade ago, the principle that judges in criminal cases should be selected randomly has been firmly embedded in the criminal justice system. Rule 200.11 of the Uniform Rules governs judicial assignments of criminal cases in superior courts. Rule 200.11(c) provides that subject to certain carefully defined exceptions described below, each criminal action “”shall be assigned to a judge by the clerk of the court in which it is pending pursuant to a method of random selection authorized by the Chief Administrator.”” 22 NYCRR § 200.11(c).” (and they went on to point out what the exceptions are, and they don’t include that a grand jury judge should hear all the indictments coming out of the grand jury).

So basically, in this document there are a whole bunch of names of NY lawyers who have already expressed the same outrage as Stefanik is expressing now. The NY court is not even pretending to obey the rules.

The question is whether the inspector general will do anything about it.

Unbelievable.

My son is a computer geek and plays around in his mind about how to have a truly randomly-generated number. I’m sure he would love to hear what method was used to get this “random” result.

If anybody in the office had a Smartphone at the time they were “randomly” deciding these assignments there’s probably a recording somewhere - that federal authorities don’t even need a warrant to get access to now... Any chance Elise Stefanik’s people could get their hands on it?

Somewhere I read that Merchan is an ACTING judge, though I don’t know the difference between that and any other kind of judge. I wonder if that would have any impact on whether he would normally get cases. I wonder what his case load was like before the Trump cases came up.

lol. My son would be much better in such a thread than I would be.

Either way, though, it’s a very slim likelihood. I’d like to know exactly what system of randomness was used and how it came to beat the odds in such a spectacular way - and especially to land so spectacularly right on the guy whose daughter is making millions off of his position.

I remember some years ago there was a ruckus in the CA region federal appeals court because cases were NOT being assigned randomly. My mind is fuzzy these days; do you know if I’m remembering that right, and if so what was done about it?

I also know Clinton’s “Magnificent Seven” (it became eight) also met privately every month to decide who would take the Clinton cases so he would be off the hook until the appeal overturned their crafty, criminal endeavor. I don’t think anything was ever done to punish those criminal judges either.

It would be nice if there was some evidence, somehow, that could be used to put Merchan in prison...

What do you think would be the military’s response to all that?

At what point would the military acknowledge that the USA has been taken over by a hostile foreign-bought domestic enemy?

Hmm. Seems like there’s a disagreement here.

I agree with what you’re saying, but I do think this time it is different. Now that the primaries are past we are stuck with whoever the primary winner is. Then the question becomes what we do about a member of the R party who is not a good choice. Do we vote for them anyway?

In this particular year I say yes, and the reason I say that is because what we most desperately need is to get rid of the Deep State that is using its “six ways from Sunday at getting back at you”, surveillance, etc to corrupt any good guys we put in anyway. The first step has to be to get rid of the Deep State. To do that we need President Trump, we need an AG who will be serious (somebody like Ken Paxton or Kash Patel - or if they couldn’t be approved, somebody like Matt Whitaker as an interim who will shake the place up and then move on), and we need a R majority so the current committee chairs who have been investigating can hand the AG criminal referrals from Day 1. We have to have all 3 things if anything is going to happen.

I am not impressed with Mike Flood, the R Congressman who represents my district. But I would walk over broken glass to vote for him because that is the only way I can put Jim Jordan, James Comer, Barry Loudermilk, and Clay Higgins in the positions they need to be come Jan 20, 2025. If we can’t achieve that, all the crimes they’ve uncovered will be for naught.

We have to play this game very strategically. Things need to be done in the right order. The first step is to get Trump, an effective and lawful AG, and R House committee chairs all in place at the same time. Whatever it takes to do that, we need to do.

It’s the only way we can get ourselves out of this terrible mess of lawlessness we’re in.