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Paralegal Testimony: Alvin Bragg’s Office Tampered with Evidence

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MAY 13, 2024

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s paralegal testified on Friday that his office deleted from their evidence three pages of phone records between convicted liar Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson without notifying former President Donald Trump’s legal team, according to reports.

Trump attorney Emil Bove questioned paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider on Friday about three pages of 2018 phone records between Davidson and Cohen that Bragg’s office had deleted, according to CNN. Additional phone records between Daniels manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard regarding Daniels’ claim about her alleged affair were also deleted, according to The Epoch Times.

The altered call records were submitted into evidence, but Bragg’s office did not tell Trump’s team that three pages were missing, The Epoch Times reported. Tampering with evidence is a class E felony in the Empire State under New York Consolidation Laws, Penal Law § 215.40, which states in part:

A person is guilty of tampering with physical evidence when: Believing that certain physical evidence is about to be produced or used in an official proceeding or a prospective official proceeding, and intending to prevent such production or use, he suppresses it by any act of concealment, alteration or destruction, or by employing force, intimidation or deception against any person.

Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to X on Friday calling the developments “insanity.”

“How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it,” Trump Jr. posted to X.

Insanity! How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it.

I’d love if we had actual journalists that would report on this ongoing travesty.

Sadly, proper journalism is dead. They’re just scribes for the regime. https://t.co/vQkLDk3t1T
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 10, 2024

Bragg — who campaigned for office on targeting Trump — indicted the former president in April 2023 on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records. Bragg alleges Trump’s lawyer at the time, Cohen, paid Daniels before the 2016 election to stay quiet about an alleged affair that the former president denies. Bragg alleges Trump made this payment to help win the 2016 election so the expenditure should have been classified as a campaign expense rather than a legal expense.

Trump’s defense also made a motion for a mistrial, which Judge Juan Merchan denied. Merchan also kneecapped Trump’s team from defending the former president by limiting what former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith could say when testifying about campaign finance-related issues, noted Steve Roberts and Oliver Roberts in The Federalist Friday.

Smith was expected to testify, as Roberts and Roberts note, that “almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to ‘influence an election’” though “not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.”

Merchan ruled Smith can now only testify to the “general background as to what the Federal [Election] Commission is, background as to who makes up the FEC, what the FEC’s function is, what laws, if any, the FEC is responsible for enforcing, and general definitions and terms that relate directly to his case, such as for example ‘campaign contribution.’”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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Trump’s Jury Trial Will Be As ‘Fair’ As The Russia Hoax And 2020 Election

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 19, 2024

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Jury selection for 12 jurors wrapped up Thursday in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s lawfare against former President Donald Trump, with the next phase of the trial expected to begin as early as Monday. But with two selected jurors booted for potential bias and perjury and at least one juror who made clear she doesn’t like Trump’s “persona,” can he really get a fair trial?

Who Are the Jurors?

After two of the initial seven selected jurors were struck from the panel, another seven were chosen Thursday. The jurors will hear Bragg’s claim that Trump broke the law by allegedly classifying payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement as “legal fees” instead of campaign expenditures. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to charge Trump in 2018.

The final selection of jurors is as follows:

A salesman originally from Ireland who follows MSNBC, The New York Times, the Daily Mail, and Fox News. This juror is reportedly set to serve as the case’s foreman, according to ABC News.
A corporate lawyer from Oregon who reads the NYT, Google News, and the Wall Street Journal. The juror “suggested that he could infer the former president’s intent without ‘reading his mind,’” according to ABC News.
A man who works in finance and follows Michael Cohen — a convicted liar and the prosecution’s star witness — on social media. The juror also said he believes Trump did some good for the nation, The New York Times reported.
A lawyer who told the court he has “political views as to the Trump presidency” in that he agrees with some policies but disagrees with others, according to The Times.
A product development manager who said she did not like Trump’s “persona,” according to ABC News.
A female health care worker who enjoys faith-based podcasts.
A woman who “works in an educational setting” and acknowledged that because Trump “was our president, everyone knows who he is,” according to The Times.
A businessman who likes to listen to podcasts on behavioral psychology.
A retired wealth manager who claims he has no opinions that would hinder his ability to be impartial.
An engineer who said, “No, not really,” when asked if he has strong feelings about Trump, according to the NYT.
An English teacher from Harlem who appreciated Trump speaking “his mind,” according to ABC News.
A female who works in technology and relies on the NYT, Google, Facebook and TikTok for news. According to the NYT, “she said she probably has different beliefs than Mr. Trump, but that ‘this is a free country.’”

Two jurors were struck Thursday, one who admitted her inability to be impartial and another who had a possible history of vandalizing conservative political posters. One female juror told the court “outside influences” could impact her decision-making and expressed concerns about her identity becoming public, according to the Associated Press (AP).

“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” the woman reportedly said. “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”

A second juror was dismissed after the prosecution argued he may have been dishonest about his past when he claimed he had never been arrested. “Prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County,” the AP reported.

Will These Jurors Deliver a ‘Common Sense Judgment’?

The Supreme Court held in the 1975 case Taylor v. Louisiana that “The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power — to make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor … or biased response of a judge.”

The Sixth Amendment is designed to protect the accused from any arbitrary and capricious trials perpetrated by a weaponized government. A jury of the accused’s peers is meant to check the power of the government, a right created in response to the British courts’ habit of permitting judges to compel juries to change their verdict if the outcome was not favored by the judge.

But from what we know of the Manhattan jury pool, it’s not clear these New Yorkers will be willing to check the government on a case that experts on both sides of the aisle have called “dubious.” New York County, which encompasses Manhattan, voted for Joe Biden over Trump 87 percent to 12 percent in 2020.

Trump’s lawyer objected to one potential juror who posted a video of a crowd of people celebrating Biden’s 2020 victory. Judge Juan Merchan decided to chastise Trump instead and refused to strike the potential juror for cause.

Another potential juror who was excused because of a job conflict told reporters outside of the courthouse that while she believes it is important for Trump to get a fair trial, she did not “approve of what he did as president.“

Meanwhile of the dozen jurors selected, a number said they get their news from corporate media like The New York Times — one of the outlets that spent years disparaging Trump and spreading false information about him.

Three NYT reporters won Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the Russia-collusion hoax, which they based on anonymous sources. But FBI official Peter Strzok, who ran the investigation into the alleged collusion, privately acknowledged the report was filled with “misleading and inaccurate” information, as pointed out by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.

Other jurors cited Google as a news source. Google “interfered” in elections at least 41 times over the past 16 years to harm candidates “who threatened [Google’s] left-wing candidate of choice,” a study from the Media Research Center found. In 2020, corporate media and Big Tech suppressed a bombshell report about the Biden family’s corrupt foreign business dealings mere weeks before the presidential election, adding to a pattern of burying negative press about Trump’s opponent while spreading lies about Trump.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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Pam Bondi to Newsmax: Need One Juror to Follow Law

By Sam Barron | Monday, 15 April 2024 12:45 PM EDT

The outcome of President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, where he’s charged with falsifying business records to cover making hush-money payments to a porn star, could come down to one juror.

Pam Bondi, the former attorney general for Florida, told Newsmax on Monday it was very important for Trump’s defense team to get jury selection right. Jury selection in the Trump trial began Monday in a Manhattan court.

“Everyone in the world knows who President Trump is and everyone in the world has formed an opinion about him one way or the other, so it’s whether you can be a fair or impartial juror in this trial,” Bondi said on “Newsline.”

Bondi said she hopes Trump’s defense team is combing the social media posts of prospective jurors to see if they posted negatively about the former president.

“You don’t want people on the jury who are going to lie to get on the jury,” Bondi said.

If one juror follows the law and votes to acquit Trump, that could lead to a hung jury, Bondi said.

“Hopefully you will find 12 jurors who say he didn’t do anything wrong because he did not,” Bondi said.

The defense and prosecution each are allowed to strike 10 prospective jurors for any reason but have unlimited challenges to strike a juror for cause, Bondi said.

“The judge is going to have to let President Trump’s defense attorneys really delve into detailed questions with all these potential jurors,” Bondi said.

The former Florida attorney general noted both the Southern District of New York and the Justice Department declined to take the Trump case.

“[Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg took this case and created 34 felony charges,” Bondi said. “It was never even a felony to begin with. It’s really ludicrous.”

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Judge Bars Trump From Commenting on Witnesses, Others in Upcoming Case

Tuesday, 26 March 2024 03:16 PM EDT

A New York judge Tuesday issued a gag order barring Donald Trump from making public statements about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming criminal trial.

Judge Juan M. Merchan cited Trump’s previous comments about him, and others involved in the case, as well as a looming April 15 trial date in granting the prosecution’s request for a gag order.

“It is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” Merchan wrote.

Prosecutors had asked for the gag order citing what they called his “long history of making public and inflammatory remarks” about people involved in his legal cases.

The order also bars Trump from making or directing others to make public statements about people involved in the trial, but it does not apply to the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg because he is an elected official. The gag order adds to restrictions put in place after Trump’s arraignment last April that prohibit him from using evidence in the case to attack witnesses.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the order. A message seeking comment was sent to the prosecutors’ office.

The trial, involving allegations related to hush money paid during Trump’s 2016 campaign to cover up marital infidelity claims, had been in limbo after his lawyers complained about a recent deluge of nearly 200,000 pages of evidence from a previous federal investigation into the matter. Trump’s lawyers accused Bragg’s office of intentionally failing to pursue evidence from the 2018 federal investigation, which sent Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen to prison. They contended prosecutors working under Bragg, a Democrat, did so to gain an unfair advantage in the case and harm Trump’s election chances. Cohen, now a vocal Trump critic, is poised to be a key prosecution witness against his ex-boss.

Merchan bristled at the defense’s claims at a hearing Monday, saying the DA’s office had no duty to collect evidence from the federal investigation, nor was the U.S. attorney’s office required to volunteer the documents. What transpired was a “far cry” from Manhattan prosecutors “injecting themselves in the process and vehemently and aggressively trying to obstruct your ability to get documentation,” the judge said.

The DA’s office denied wrongdoing and blamed Trump’s lawyers for bringing the time crunch upon themselves by waiting until Jan. 18 to subpoena the records from the U.S. attorney’s office — a mere nine weeks before the trial was originally supposed to start. Merchan, who earlier this month postponed the trial until at least mid-April to deal with the evidence issue, told defense lawyers that they should have acted sooner if they believed they didn’t have all the records they wanted.

Though the hush money case is seen as less consequential than his other prosecutions — which charge him with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally retaining classified documents — it has taken on added importance given that it’s the only one that appears likely for trial in the coming months.

The trial will begin with jury selection, a potentially arduous task given the publicity surrounding the case and Trump’s struggle for popularity in heavily Democratic Manhattan.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges that he falsified business records, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee a conviction would result in jail time. Manhattan prosecutors say Trump did it as part of an effort to protect his 2016 campaign by burying what he says were false stories of extramarital sex. Trump on Monday repeated to reporters his claims that the case is a “witch hunt” and “hoax.”