Free Republic

For a variety of reasons, the United States Supreme Court has a constitutional obligation to take up President Trump’s criminal case following his unlawful conviction in New York state court. First and foremost, federal issues permeate this case. While it was never a case that should have been brought in any court in the first place, this case especially should not have been brought in state court, where jurisdiction patently does not exist. The driving legal issue was purportedly a campaign finance law violation which fell within the gamut of the Federal Election Commission. Bragg flimsily paired that charge with...

The Department of Justice official who left the Biden administration to work for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump took a small pay cut to make the move, records suggest. Matthew Colangelo was the third-highest official at the DOJ, earning an annual salary of $183,100, according to public salary records. He left the job to relocate to New York and be a senior counsel for Bragg, where he now earns a reduced salary of $180,000 a year, the city’s salary database shows.His move from the prestigious post in Washington D.C. to a lower position in...

Democratic Manhattan District Alvin Bragg’s office defended on Wednesday keeping former President Donald Trump under his gag order, requesting that it stay in place at least through Trump’s sentencing hearing in late July and any post-trial motions. Trump attorney’s asked Judge Juan Merchan on Tuesday to lift the order, writing in a letter that the “concerns articulated by the government and the Court do not justify restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump” now that the trial has concluded. Prosecutors disagreed, responding that the order was intended to protect more than just the trial proceedings. “As the People...

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is backed by Soros, is now under fire for allegedly leaking sensitive sentencing information about former President Donald Trump to the far-left media. In the wake of a trial widely criticized as a sham, where Trump was convicted on all 34 felony charges in a ‘hush money’ scandal, sources suggest that DA Bragg’s office may recommend Trump serve a year at the notorious Rikers Island. Judge Merchan told jurors they did not have to agree on a crime—a practice unheard of in US history. The jury only had to agree that...

If former President Trump wins in November, top supporters will push him to investigate, prosecute — and even try to imprison — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who won Trump's conviction in the hush-money case. "Of course [Bragg] should be — and will be — jailed," Steve Bannon, one of the top voices of the MAGA movement, told us — saying for the record what many Trump supporters are privately plotting. Why it matters: This column has reported extensively about all the norms Trump plans to shatter if returned to the White House. Nowhere would that be truer than...

Demanding the immediate release of documents pertaining to “credible allegations” of “improper collusion by the Biden White House and Department of Justice (DOJ) in the sham political show trial of President Trump conducted by Alvin Bragg, the New York County District Attorney’s Office, and Judge Juan Merchan,” America First Legal is suing the Department of Justice. The principal target of the allegations of cooperation between the Biden Administration and Bragg’s office is Matthew Colangelo, a senior Biden DOJ official who joined Bragg’s team as a prosecutor after leaving the department. Before accepting a low-level position as a prosecutor in Bragg’s...

Monday on MSNBC ‘s “The Last Word,” host Lawrence O’Donnell featured a video of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg getting a standing ovation at Abyssinian Baptist Church after former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in the New York business document trial. O’Donnell said, “Donald Trump didn’t go to church on Sunday. He never goes to church, never. After becoming the first prosecutor in history to convict a former president of crimes, the Manhattan district attorney went to church on Sunday morning as he always does. It is the church his parents brought him to when he was growing up just...

Photo by Matt Cohen via Flickr.Among the amusements of New York Attorney General Letitia James, when she is not honoring her campaign promise to destroy Donald Trump, is harassing and financially bankrupting Peter and Lydia Brimelow and their VDARE Foundation, located in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Peter and Lydia made the disastrous mistake of registering their foundation in very blue New York state and have been suffering the consequences ever since. Letitia as the “defendant” in a costly legal case is demanding all kinds of confidential information from the Brimelows, charging them with running a white nationalist outfit that should...

When the main casualty is the rule of law itself.On May 30th, a Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four jerry-rigged felony charges brought against Mr. Trump by the progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The fix was in, and the main casualty was the rule of law itself.District Attorney Bragg abused his prosecutorial powers by targeting Mr. Trump personally, as he had promised to do when he ran for office, and then coming up with concocted felony offenses to charge him with. The Trump-hating district attorney magically alchemized a statute of limitations-barred misdemeanor of falsifying business...

House Speaker Mike Johnson joined Fox Sunday to discuss House Republicans’ plans to investigate Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Special Counsel Jack Smith for targeting political opponents. It sounds like just more words from Speaker Johnson. We want to see action! Shannon Bream: Now, I want to ask you about the verdict. Clearly, you think it’s a travesty, as many people do. And I think having watched the trial, there are many grounds, fertile territory for the Trump team to use on appeal, but that’s going to take time. In the meantime, there are a number of Republicans out there...

Last Thursday, in a courtroom in Manhattan that voted against him 88-12% in 2020, a jury, heavily persuaded by a judge, who contributed to Joe Biden in 2020, convicted President Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsification of business records. The case concerns payments that were made to former Trump attorney Michael Cohen in 2017. Cohen claimed the payments were reimbursement for a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with President Trump.

Yo-Yo Note: Longish read but very good from someone who is NOT a MAGA person.Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a presidential contender nine years ago, America’s most esteemed scholars and journalists have argued that he was violating democratic norms. Trump, they said, was ignoring the stabilizing, unwritten rules and values of American politics. This was evident in his vulgar language, vilification of immigrants, criticisms of the press, lack of cooperation with the intelligence community, and refusal to accept the 2020 election results.But the Democrats’ relentless effort to imprison Trump has undermined the rule of law, faith in the criminal...

As the dust starts to settle on Trump’s conviction newly-minted status as an Outlaw President, legal scholars are starting to weigh in on the severe problems with Alvin Bragg’s case. First up, Ed Whelan passes on this this piece by Mr. Elie Honig, explaining some of the problems with the conviction: Trump's superpower is the ability to bring out the worst in both his supporters and his opponents. Bragg's prosecution sure strikes me as blatant example of latter, for reasons CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig spells out in this powerful piece. https://t.co/y6CGA6Ald9 — Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) May 31, 2024...

The conviction of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan of 34 felonies produced citywide celebrations. ... The celebrants would be wise to think twice before mounting this trophy kill on the political wall. The Trump trial is a target-rich environment for an appeal, with multiple layers of reversible error, in my view. I am less convinced by suggestions that the case could be challenged on the inability of Trump receiving a fair trial in a district that voted roughly 90 percent against him. The problem was not the jury, but the prosecutors and the judge. Some of the most compelling...

Former Commissioner of the Federal Elections Commission, Brad Smith, a preeminent expert on campaign finance law has taken to social media to lash out against the Manhattan trial that led to the conviction of former President Donald Trump. Judge Juan Merchan had prevented Trump’s defense team from seating Smith as a witness or even submitting his testimony to the jury. Smith had planned on testifying that Donald Trump’s filing of a “hush money” payment as a “legal expense” was not a crime against federal elections law. Indeed, federal prosecutors had passed up on the case prior to Alvin Bragg, the...

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is backed by Soros, is now under fire for allegedly leaking sensitive sentencing information about former President Donald Trump to the far-left media. She described them as ‘street fighters,’ who indicated that Bragg might push for a tough one-year imprisonment, primarily to ensure Trump faces the daunting conditions of Rikers Island. “I spent this morning speaking to someone from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. They’re called street fighters. He believes that they will recommend a one-year term in prison. And that is because when you spend a year in prison in...

After years of trying — in the words of the judge — “to get the damned rascal in this court,” it was a conviction that many welcomed. But those words were not from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, and the conviction was not that of former President Donald Trump. Rather they were from US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, at the end of the 18th century, when America embraced political prosecutions to target critics and opponents. The man on trial then was James T. Callender, a muckraking writer critical of President John Adams. For accusing politicians of corruption, Callender...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Friday called on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and prosecutor Matthew Colangelo to testify for the “political prosecution” of former President Donald Trump. Mr. Jordan, Ohio Republican, teed up a hearing where both men will testify in front of the Weaponization of Federal Government Subcommittee on June 13. “This hearing will examine actions by state and local prosecutors to engage politically motivated prosecutions of federal officials,” Mr. Jordan wrote. “In particular the recent political prosecution of President Donald Trump by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.”

U.S. — Following the reading of the guilty verdict in the first criminal trial of a former president, Democrats across the country celebrated Donald Trump being convicted of whatever it was he did. Though none of the Democrats who commented publicly on the verdict were able to identify what crime Trump allegedly committed, they were unanimously overjoyed that there was a volition of some type for some thing that was done at some point. "It's time for Trump to answer for that one thing from that one time," said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "No one should ever do that...

Thinking further out loud The issue is how to get out of the New York system and bring the case to the Supreme Court, which may or may not take it up. That is why I look to Bush v Gore, where the S Ct decided to step in BECAUSE it was a presidential election. There was another court involved, the Florida Supreme Court. And it was that court that the Supreme Court believed was violating the Equal Protection Clause. That was the doctrine it settled on, given the unequal treatment of voters. In New York, you would file the...