Tag Ben Protess

The center holds, for now

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The more things change – a U.S. president convicted of a felony offense for the first time ever – the more they stay the same – Donald “Trump calls trial a ‘scam,’ vows to appeal historic verdict.” 

The verdict in New York yesterday was historic: not only for being the first time an American president or former president was found guilty of having committed a felony, but for the American system of justice demonstrating that any American citizen can be held to account before a jury of his or her peers.  In spite of that citizen’s rank in society, or his attempts to undermine the system itself by waging “an all-out war against the judicial system before the verdict came in, hoping to blunt the political damage and position him[self] as a martyr.”

But amid the relentless offensive by Trump and his allies on the legal infrastructure holding him accountable, the trial came with a substantial cost, according to those who study democracy, with the ultimate impact likely to be measured in November.

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“The judicial system has taken a body blow from Trump’s assaults,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government. Forcing him to sit through the trial, follow orders and listen to evidence against himself meant that “his rage at being controlled by others is going to be directed at trying to bring the whole judicial system down with him.”

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But there was something different about Trump’s repeated complaints about this first criminal jury trial that made them even more potent, experts say. Whenever a politician is brought up on charges, “every single time that leader will scream up and down that this is a politicized process and his political enemies are out to get him,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “What’s notable here,” said Levitsky, co-author of the book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” “is that the entire Republican Party is marching in lockstep, along with right-wing media, claiming that the legal process has been weaponized, and therefore eroding public trust in a really vital institution.”

(snip)

“The problem is that not even the best institutions in the world can function well in the context of extreme polarization, particularly when one party has turned against democratic institutions. And so extreme polarization and extreme radicalization will undermine and destroy even the best of institutions. And that’s what we’re seeing in the United States.” But even if Trump damaged the judicial system’s reputation through his complaints about the trial, to not prosecute “when there’s a strong sense that wrongdoing happened,” Levitsky said, would be more damaging. “That would hold the judicial system and the political system hostage to say that to prosecute will bring more blowback than benefit. If you give in to that, you have no rule of law.”

Did this trial and all the sideshows related to it diminish the American judicial process?  We can each answer that for ourselves.  I think not, and I don’t think it has for the many many millions of Americans who don’t take every childish taunt out of Trump’s mouth as gospel truth.  He was obviously trying to pre-rouse his supporters to doubt and reject any verdict against him, in the same way he tries to get them to believe that any election he loses had to have been rigged; the unfortunate thing is that it appears to work for many many millions of other Americans.  He promised a “news conference” this morning, and it was filled with more of the same lies as came before.  And, he took no questions…which to my mind makes this a campaign speech rather than a news conference.  Trump is not famous for engaging in a vigorous exchange of viewpoints.

(What he is famous for, among some, is being a TV star, and this morning I discovered an article in the Washington Post with some terrific background about that show.  It cites a recent essay in Slate by one of the producers on that show – who has just been released from a non-disclosure agreement and is free to talk about what he witnessed – and Bill “Pruitt describes choices about scripts and editing and challenges as efforts to present a particular, inaccurate image: the show’s star, Donald Trump, as an omniscient business leader. Looking back across the decades since the first season of the show was filmed, Pruitt clearly regrets having helped foster that perception.”  It’s worth your time to read.)

Trump says he will appeal the verdicts and that is certainly his right, but don’t expect that to bring a conclusion to the legal fight any time soon.  Trump is famously litigious when it comes to civil matters that are at bottom just about money; potential appeals in this case – to the trial judge, two levels of state appeals courts and (yes, possibly) the Supreme Court of the United States could take years to conclude.  Not that it matters, though: Trump, the convicted felon, is still allowed by law to run for president and to serve if he is elected.  And the first reaction to the conviction from among MAGA Nation was to shower him with tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions!

Does this conviction change the course of the presidential election?  No one knows yet, including the talking heads who are acting like they do know.  It seems plain that those who are brainwashed in the MAGA cult either don’t believe he did anything wrong or don’t care what he did, or think this whole thing is more evidence of the anti-Trump Deep State at work.  Those who were never going to vote for Trump before didn’t need this conviction to sway them.  For the rest, this might be what it finally takes for some Trump supporters to change their minds and some undecideds to choose a side.  It sure seems like it should matter, to everyone.  It wasn’t so long ago, I think, that it would have.

“demonstrably false and misleading”

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

A New York appellate court suspended Rudolph W. Giuliani’s law license on Thursday after a disciplinary panel found that he made “demonstrably false and misleading” statements about the 2020 election as Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer.

Thus does the New York Times kick off today’s top story, for those of us who have been patiently waiting for the true believers to open their eyes and see what has been right there all along.

“We conclude that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at re-election in 2020,” the decision read.

Not just a simple assertion—backed by evidence—that what Giuliani was saying was untrue.  “Demonstrably false and misleading” is the plain and simple description of what has been coming out of the pieholes of Donald Trump and every last henchman-and-woman of his since…well, since ever.  They lie.  About anything, even things that don’t matter.  About everything, even things that aren’t in dispute, things that the evidence of our own eyes and ears and common sense tell us are so.

Don’t believe me?  Believe these judges when they tell you that the once-trusted and respected mayor of New York has become a scoundrel who will say the most ridiculous things on behalf of Individual-1.  And while you’re at it, take note, as Jeremy Stahl has in Slate, that “the meticulous 33-page chronicling and refutation of just a handful of Giuliani’s most blatant and nefarious election lies is actually kind of hilarious. The filing reads as though the five-judge committee went out of its way to show how ludicrous Giuliani’s—and by extension Trump’s—claims of election fraud are.”

In cataloguing Giuliani’s transgressions, the filing reads as a bemused and indignant greatest hits of Trump 2020 election lies, along with point-by-point refutations and comically timed footnotes. With every other sentence, the judges are almost shouting at the reader “get a load of the nerve on this guy.”

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The judges also dismantled the absurd logic Giuliani’s defense in this proceeding put forth that because dead voters are sporadically removed from the rolls—and were in 2021—that means dead people voted in 2020:

“Respondent claims his statements were justified because the state of Pennsylvania subsequently agreed to purge 21,000 dead voters from its rolls in 2021. This fact, even if true, is beside the point. This statistic concerns the whole state. Purging voter rolls does not prove that the purged voters actually voted in 2020 and per force it does not prove they voted in Philadelphia. It does not even prove that they were dead in November 2020. Moreover, the number of statewide purged voters (21,000) bears no correlation to the numbers of dead voters respondent factually asserted voted in Philadelphia alone (either 8,000 or 30,000). Clearly any statewide purging of voters from the voting rolls in 2021 could not have provided a basis for statements made by respondent in 2020, because the information did not exist.”

(snip)

At various points, Giuliani said 10,000, 32,000, or 250,000 undocumented immigrants voted in Arizona in the 2020 election. From the ruling:

“On their face, these numerical claims are so wildly divergent and irreconcilable, that they all cannot be true at the same time. Some of the wild divergences were even stated by respondent in the very same sentence.”

(snip)

Giuliani’s lone defense is that he did not “knowingly” make all of these false statements, as knowledge that he was lying is a required element to prove misconduct. The judges were largely able to brush this aside by pointing out all of the evidence that contradicted Giuliani’s statements that was available at the time he made them and his own lack of proof. More pointedly, though, they repeatedly noted that Giuliani kept lying even after he had been charged with lying.

Why?  Why, in the wide wide world of sports, would Giuliani and his “friend” insist on telling these lies—to America, and to judges they do not and did not control, who in every court challenge to the 2020 vote told them to pound sand?  Because they are so contemptuous of the rest of us, and blindingly out of touch with the reality of Trump, and so greedy and corrupt.  Because they expected the weak-minded not to question them, to just fall in line.  They proved that nearly every damn day, for anyone willing to honestly listen to what they were saying.

Now, we have a court ruling willing to point out that the emperor’s lawyer has no clothes, and by extension that neither does the emperor himself.  A little crack in the dam maybe, the one that could lead to the final catastrophic failure of the myth of MAGA Nation?  Hope so…