Below is my column in the New York Post on the statement by Acting Justice Juan Merchan in the sentencing of President-elect Donald Trump. Merchan’s effort to justify the handing of the case sounded like the second defense argument made in the hearing. It likely changed few minds in the court of public opinion.
Here is the column:
This week, the sentencing of President-Elect Donald Trump saw one of the most impassioned defense arguments given at such a hearing in years . . . from the judge himself. Acting Justice Juan Merchan admitted that the case was “unique and remarkable” but insisted that “once the courtroom doors were closed, the trial itself was no more special, unique, and extraordinary than the other 32 cases in this courthouse.”
If so, that is a chilling indictment of the entire New York court system. Merchan allowed a dead misdemeanor to be resuscitated by allowing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively prosecute declined federal offenses. He allowed a jury to convict Trump without any agreement, let alone unanimity, on what actually occurred in the case. Merchan ruled that the jury did not have to agree on why Trump committed an alleged offense in describing settlement costs as legal costs. Neither the defendant nor the public will ever know what the jury ultimately found in its verdict.
I once described this case as a legal Frankenstein: “It is the ultimate gravedigger charge, where Bragg unearthed a case from 2016 and, through a series of novel steps, is seeking to bring it back to life…Bragg is combining parts from both state and federal codes.”
Even liberal legal experts have denounced the case and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) recently called it total “b—s–t.”
Now, Merchan seemed to assure this Frankenstein case that he was just like any other creature of the court. It did not matter that he was stitched together from dead cases and zapped into life through lawfare.
Merchan knows that there is a fair chance this monstrosity will finally die on appeal, and he was making the case for his own conduct. The verdict, however, is likely to last far longer than the Trump verdict. It is a judgment against not just Merchan but the New York legal system, which allowed itself to be weaponized against political opponents.
In the Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein says “I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.”
Trump can now appeal the case as a whole. Prior appeals in the New York court system were unsuccessful, and hopes are low that the system will redeem itself. However, Trump can eventually escape the vortex of the New York court system in search of jurists willing to see beyond the rage and bring reason to this case.
Notably, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass cited Chief Justice John Roberts in his argument before Merchan, noting that Roberts recently chastised those who attack the courts. (Roberts just the night before joined liberal justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in refusing to stay the sentencing). Steinglass portrayed Trump as an existential threat to the rule of law.
Roberts, however, is everything that Merchan is not. You can disagree with him, but he has repeatedly ruled against his own preferred outcomes in cases, including rulings against President Trump and his campaign and Administration. For his part, Trump declined to criticize the court and declared that “This is a long way from finished and I respect the court’s opinion.”
Indeed it is. Merchan’s monster will now go on the road and work its way back to the Supreme Court. Outside of New York this freak attraction will likely be viewed as less thrilling than chilling.
The election had the feel of the townspeople coming to the castle in the movie. In this case, however, the townspeople were right about what they saw in the making of a creature that threatened their very existence. Lawfare is that monster. It threatens us all, even those who hate Trump and his supporters. Once released, it spreads panic among the public which can no longer rely on the guarantees of blind and fair justice. That includes businesses who view this case and the equally absurd civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James as creating a dangerous and even lawless environment. Many are saying “but for the grace of God go I” in a system that allows for selective prosecution.
In the sentencing proceeding, Merchan was downplaying his hand in creating this Frankenstein. However, the case is the fallen angel of the legal system. While heralded in court by Bragg’s office as the triumph of legal process, it is in fact the rawest and most grotesque form of lawfare. Many will be blamed as the creators of this monster but few will escape that blame, including Merchan himself.
Below is my column at Fox.com on the sentencing of President-Elect Donald Trump. The conviction should be overturned on appeal. However, the most lasting judgment will be against the New York court system itself in allowing this travesty of justice to occur.
Here is the column:
With the sentencing of Donald Trump Friday, the final verdict on the New York criminal trial of the president-elect is in. The verdict is not the one that led to no jail or probation for the incoming president. Acting Justice Juan Merchan has brought down the gavel on the New York legal system as a whole.
Once considered the premier legal system in the country, figures like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Justices Arthur F. Engoron and Juan Merchan have caused the system to be weaponized for political purposes. Trump will walk away from this trial and into the White House in less than two weeks, but the New York system will walk into infamy after this day.
The case has long been denounced by objective legal observers, including intense Trump critics, as a legal absurdity. Even CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig denounced the case as legally flawed and unprecedented while Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., simply called it total “b—s–t.”
It is a case based on a non-crime. Bragg took a long-dead misdemeanor and zapped it back into life with a novel and unfounded theory. By using federal violations that were never charged, let alone tried, Bragg turned a misdemeanor into dozens of felonies and essentially tried Trump for federal offenses.
Merchan not only allowed those charges to be brought to trial but then added layers of reversible errors in the effort to bag Trump at any cost. For that, he was lionized by the liberal media and many New Yorkers. However, Trump still managed to pull in 3.6 million New York votes, or 42.7%, in the 2024 election. After all of the lawfare and every advantage (including a heavily biased media and a larger war chest), Vice President Kamala Harris lost hundreds of thousands of votes in 2024 in comparison to Joe Biden just four years earlier.
Many polls showed that the public saw the Manhattan criminal case for what it was: raw lawfare targeting a leading political opponent. The election itself felt like the largest verdict in history as citizens rejected the political, legal, and media establishments in one of our nation’s most historic elections.
The New York court system will now have a chance to redeem itself, but few are holding their breath. The appellate court has still not ruled on an appeal of Attorney General Lettia James’s equally absurd civil lawsuit against Trump. Despite judges expressing skepticism over Engoron’s use of a law to impose a grotesque $455 million in fines and interest, we are still waiting for a decision.
Most are waiting for this criminal case to escape the vortex of the New York court system. With this appeal, this peddler’s wagon of reversible errors will finally pull up in front of the Supreme Court itself.
With its ruling on Thursday night, the setting for a decision could not be better for Trump. The Supreme Court has again demonstrated that it has shown restraint and independence in these cases. In response to the ruling, Trump struck the perfect note Thursday night and declined to criticize the Court, stating that “This is a long way from finished and I respect the court’s opinion.”
The ultimate penalty on Friday morning from Judge Merchan reflects the lack of seriousness in the case. It was more inflated than the Goodyear blimp, pumped up by hot rage and rhetoric. The sentence was the pinprick that showed the massive void within this case.
The verdict is in. The New York legal system has rendered it against itself.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
Below is my column in the New York Post on the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams. The most serious charges may be the foreign campaign contributions. However, the indictment is not nearly as overwhelming as suggested by the government. That may be why they are openly threatening Adams associates to cooperate or face ruin.
Here is the column:
The federal five-count indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams is on its face a damning document of alleged public corruption. The government is alleging that Turkish officials saw Adams as a rising star in the Democratic Party and started to groom him for influence.
However, once beyond the details of the opulent rooms and flight upgrades, there may be less here than meets the eye in some of these charges. The campaign-contribution violations raise serious problems for Adams in the alleged solicitation of unlawful foreign contributions. Yet the counts must be read with caution. We have not seen the specific defenses to the allegations of using “straw men” to funnel unlawful contributions and the alleged favors bestowed on contributors. Indictments are one-sided and highly slanted interpretations of the facts by prosecutors to secure a conviction.
For example, many of the gifts from Turkish sources were realized in the form of upgrades on flights to business class or expensive hotel suites. It is not clear what Adams knew of the logistics for such travel or their inclusion in annual reports. Despite their public personas, many populist politicians tend to be a pampered class who expect to be feted in the best quarters as they speak as the “voice of the people.”
That was captured most vividly by NYC Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sashaying at the Met Gala in a designer dress reading “tax the rich.” It was a scene with a crushing irony. The dress itself was worth more than some people make in a year, and it was just “loaned” to AOC despite being made specifically for her. She also did not pay for her ticket, which would cost $35,000.
It triggered an ethics investigation and allegations of ethical violations. In one night, Ocasio-Cortez flaunted roughly half of the value of the alleged Adams gifts as she paraded as a social warrior among the social elite. The truly hilarious aspect was that it was the elite who were thrilled by the demonstration and subsidized it.
The Adams allegations would constitute a fairly crude form of corruption by today’s standards. For the Biden family, it looks like small potatoes. Adams lacked a Hunter and the type of labyrinth of accounts maintained by the Bidens to funnel millions from foreign sources.
One of the most discussed allegations concerns a high-rise building built by Turkish friends in Manhattan to serve as their new consulate. The Turks wanted the building opened before the arrival of the Turkish president in 2021, strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The problem is that, according to prosecutors, New York Fire Department officials found an array of dangerous defects in the building and believed that it was a fire risk. They refused to allow the building to open until it met those standards. The government alleges that Turkish officials immediately dialed up their well-groomed ally, Adams, and told him that it was “his turn” to support Turkey. Adams intervened and prosecutors say that FDNY officials were afraid for their jobs.
Once again, however, Adams has defenses. He can argue that New York is the home of the United Nations and a large population of diplomats and international organizations. This was a foreign country seeking to open a consulate and he intervened to avoid an embarrassing diplomatic tiff.
Suggesting that a push to cut short fire inspections may be difficult to maintain under a bribery theory. That was the type of expansive case that government attorney Jack Smith used against former Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell and it failed spectacularly before the Supreme Court. There are other reasons besides flight upgrades why Adams might have facilitated a speed up of building approvals.
In the end, this is a Bob Menendez-lite indictment. Failing to publicly list how you moved from economy to business class on flights is hardly the stuff of “All the King’s Men.” It is more like “All the King’s Upgrades.” The biggest problem for Adams is that the US Attorney’s Office went public with a threat for all of those who do not cooperate and pledged that more will be “held accountable.” In other words, the indictment amplified the tune in a game of musical chairs. Anyone close to Adams may want to sit down before the music stops. That means that Adams can expect close associates to be testifying against him with the enthusiasm of those threatened with ruin by federal prosecutors.
If Eric Adams is convicted, it will be at the hands of his associates. The jury will not be particularly sympathetic with a politician snaring the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis Istanbul. Prosecutors love to play on such opulence like their use of Paul Manafort’s $15,000 Ostrich coat.
Combined with former friends and associates, it may be enough for the ultimate upgrade for Adams from business class to a federal cellblock.
Judges on a New York appeals court were open-minded and receptive to the possibility of reversing or reducing the $454 million civil fraud judgment in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit against former President Trump. Trump appealed the civil fraud ruling that demanded he pay more than $450 million. The former president’s attorneys called New York Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling “draconian, unlawful, and unconstitutional.”
Engoron ruled that Trump and other defendants were liable for persistent and repeated fraud, falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements, conspiracy to falsify false financial statements, insurance fraud and conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. A five-judge panel on a New York appeals court in Manhattan Thursday heard oral arguments on the appeal. The former president did not attend oral arguments Thursday but was instead represented by his legal team.
Trump attorney D. John Sauer argued that James’ lawsuit stretched New York consumer protection laws and said there were “no victims” and “no complaints” of Trump’s business from lenders and insurers.
New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference National Town Hall on September 21, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Congressional Black Caucus Foundation)
Sauer said the cause “involves a clear-cut violation of the statute of limitations,” pointing to transactions used in the non-jury civil fraud trial that dated back more than a decade.
Sauer said that if the verdict is not overturned, “people can’t do business in real estate” without fear.
The Appellate Division typically rules about a month after arguments are complete, meaning a final decision could come before Election Day on Nov. 5.
Judge Peter H. Moulton questioned if James’ lawsuit turned into “something it was not meant to do.” Moulton said the “immense penalty in this case is troubling.” But the state argued that there is evidence to support the verdict.
In September 2023, before the non-jury trial began, Engoron ruled that Trump and the Trump Organization had committed fraud while building his real estate empire by deceiving banks, insurers and others by overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing. Trump was hit with an initial penalty of $355 million. That sum is quickly increasing via interest accruals of approximately $112,000 a day until paid in full, now sitting around $470 million.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 13: Justice Arthur Engoron presides over the civil fraud trial of former President Donald Trump and his children at New York State Supreme Court on November 13, 2023, in New York City. ((Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images))
Trump, the 2024 presumptive GOP presidential nominee, and his legal team had appealed and requested a stay on his $454 million civil fraud judgment. Trump’s legal team said the initial requested bond was “unprecedented for a private company,” and said to post it in the judgment’s full amount was a “practical impossibility.”
An appeals court slashed former President Trump’s bond payment in March, and the former president paid $175 million. Trump has vowed to fight the case “all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.”
Trump and his family denied any wrongdoing, with the former president saying his assets had been undervalued. Trump’s legal team insisted that his financial statements had disclaimers and made it clear to banks that they should conduct their own assessments.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he arrives for the start of his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on October 02, 2023, in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Throughout the trial, Trump attorneys brought witnesses, including former Deutsche Bank top executives, who testified the banks sought additional business from Trump, whom they viewed as a “whale of a client.” Trump’s defense also brought in expert witnesses, including New York University accounting professor Eli Bartov, who reviewed the Trump financial statements at issue in the case and said he found no evidence of accounting fraud. Bartov testified last month that Trump’s financial statements did not violate accounting principles, and he suggested that anything problematic – like a huge year-to-year leap in the estimated value of his Trump Tower penthouse – was simply an error.
“My main finding is that there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud,” Bartov testified. Trump’s financial statements, he said, “were not materially misstated.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Brooke Singman is a political correspondent and reporter for Fox News Digital, Fox News Channel and FOX Business.
New York Mayor Eric Adams speaks at a press conference Thursday before appearing in court after his indictment. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
Did New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, accept foreign bribes and foreign campaign contributions? That’s the key issue in the federal indictment of New York’s mayor just handed down by a federal grand jury led by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The indictment charges Adams with five felonies under federal law that could result in his spending a long time in prison, including wire fraud, solicitation and receipt of campaign contributions from a foreign national, and outright bribery.
The indictment claims that when Adams became Brooklyn borough president in 2014, he “sought and accepted … valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel” from “wealthy foreign businesspeople including at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him.”
In 2018, when Adams made public his plan to run for mayor, the indictment alleges that he “not only accepted but sought illegal campaign contributions to his 2021 mayoral campaign, as well as other things of value, from foreign nationals.” As Adams’ “prominence and power grew” and it became clear that he was going to become mayor of the Big Apple, those “foreign-national benefactors sought to cash in on the corrupt relationship,” the indictment alleges. It claims that Adams agreed, “providing favorable treatment” and “granting requests” from them.
The indictment describes an elaborate scheme to hide illegal foreign campaign contributions as well as corporate donations and individual donations exceeding the legal limits.
“Overseas contributors” used “straw donors,” U.S. nationals who falsely claimed they were making the donations that actually were from foreign nationals. Businesses evaded a ban on corporate contributions by using their employees to make those contributions, reimbursing the employees through corporate accounts. And “wealthy individuals” also used straw donors to evade laws “restricting the amount any one person can donate to a candidate,” the indictment says.
Adams also is accused of defrauding the City of New York through its public funding program for political campaigns. The city has a program that “matches small-dollar contributions from individual city residents with up to eight times their amount in public funds.”
The indictment claims that Adams applied for matching funds for the straw donor contributions he received; despite knowing they were fraudulent donations. The result? Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign received $10 million in public funds that he shouldn’t have gotten.
The indictment says that the same Turkish government official who funneled illegal campaign contributions to Adams, referred to in the indictment as a “senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment,” also arranged “free or discounted travel on Turkey’s national airline.”
The official also arranged “free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment” for Adams “and his companions” in Turkey, the indictment says.
Adams’ passport must have quite a number of U.S. Customs stamps in it, since the “free or discounted” travel apparently included trips to “France, China, Sri Lanka, India, Hungary, and Turkey itself.”
To illustrate the “opulent hotels,” the indictment contains photos of some of the hotels Adams stayed in, including two photos of the Bentley Suite bedroom and bathroom at the St. Regis Hotel in Istanbul. Adams paid less than $600 for a suite that normally costs $7,000 for two nights, the indictment alleges.
An essential part of the government’s prosecution is the claim that Adams not only knew about all of this, but that he “and others working at his direction, repeatedly took steps to shield his solicitation and acceptance of these benefits from public scrutiny.” Those efforts, the indictment alleges, included not disclosing the travel benefits he received on the city’s required annual financial disclosure form as well as creating “fake paper trails, falsely suggesting he had paid” for the travel benefits his generous overseas benefactor financed.
The mayor also was apparently diligent in deleting “messages with others involved in his misconduct” to destroy evidence, although the indictment is replete with email and text messages captured by government investigators.
Part of the quid pro quo for all of these benefits, according to the indictment, was the Turkish official telling Adams that he had to override the New York Fire Department in order “to facilitate the opening of a new Turkish consular building” without a fire inspection “in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey’s president.”
“Adams did as instruct,” the indictment says, and the responsible fire official “was told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce.” The building was allowed to open. If the scheme had not worked, the indictment alleges, the “building would have failed an FDNY inspection.”
The indictment also alleges that Adams successfully intervened on behalf of others who illegally funneled money to him, such as a businessman who wanted help with the city’s “Department of Buildings.”
The five criminal counts against Adams allege violations of 18 U.S.C. §1342 and §1343; 52 U.S.C. §30121 and §30109; and 18 U.S.C. §2 and §666. These federal statutes cover conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, federal program bribery, soliciting and receiving campaign donations from foreign nationals, and plain, old-fashioned bribery.
If you’re wondering how a federal prosecutor has jurisdiction over campaign contributions being made to a local mayoral campaign, it is because 52 U.S.C. §30121 bans all political contributions by foreigners in federal, state, and local elections.
Congress has the constitutional authority for this because of its power over foreign aliens and immigration, which includes the ability to keep them out of all of our elections, not just federal elections.
In the final paragraph of the indictment, the government asks for forfeiture by Adams of “all property, real and personal, that constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to the commission” of his misdeeds. That means that in addition to long jail time, Adams—if convicted—could be on the hook for millions of dollars in criminal forfeiture and civil penalties.
No one should doubt that these are very serious, very substantial charges, although Adams is presumed to be innocent until he is found guilty or decides to plead guilty. But all of the information in the indictment seems to indicate that federal prosecutors and agents conducted an in-depth, thorough investigation.
If Adams decides to fight the charges instead of trying to negotiate a plea deal with the government, we may be looking at a very long, very expensive process before the case is resolved.
Ofir Akunis was solidly entrenched in the Knesset, serving in his 15th year as a lawmaker. The popular Likud figure — formerly a party spokesman and adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu— had held a number of ministerial roles over the last nine years and was minister of science and technology in the current government.
So, why exactly would the 50-year-old (now 51), not exactly known for an active role in the Diaspora, accept Netanyahu’s offer to become the consul general to New York in a post-Oct. 7 world?
“It’s a very good question. I think that we are living in challenging times. I think that it’s not less important to be here these days and represent the State of Israel and the Jewish people from New York,” Akunis told JNS in his office on Manhattan’s Second Ave.
“I think that a political leader should do more things in his career. And I think that this is the right place to be these days. Especially these days,” he said.
While Akunis generally hews close to Netanyahu in principle, he has carved out his own path, and while he rarely contradicts Netanyahu, he has avoided being sycophantic.
Netanyahu has been known to shuffle off political rivals and annoyances to diplomatic posts, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with Akunis. The position of consul general had been open since Asaf Zamir, appointed by the previous government, resigned in March 2023 to protest the advancement of judicial reform by Netanyahu.
Netanyahu floated firebrand Social Equality Minister May Golan for the post in April 2023, but backlash from the more left-wing American Jewish community quickly put that idea to bed. The consulate had been served by a series of acting consuls general until Akunis’s arrival.
While Akunis may lack diplomatic bona fides, his appointment was largely viewed as one of a professional, technocratic hand coming on to steady a ship that’s been rocking since Hamas’ massacre.
“I think that the very main issue here is the attacks on the Israeli and Jewish students in the universities and among the campuses. This is unacceptable,” Akunis said of his top priority since taking over in May.
His very first meeting, he told JNS, concerned the attacks on Jews and Israelis at Columbia and NYU.
“This is urgent, because we are a few weeks before the new year on the campuses, and I’m calling from here to the American people and to the American leaders to do whatever they can to stop” the violent antisemitic protests that took place in the spring.
“If someone wants to protest against the State of Israel or against the Jewish communities, he can do it,” Akunis said, but not by waving Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS flags, as was seen at a number of campus protests.
“To scream and shout, ‘Oct. 7 was only the beginning,’ this is unacceptable,” he said. “This is not freedom of speech. It’s freedom of hate.”
Akunis went so far as to say last week that New York City was in danger of falling under “radical Muslim occupation,” similar to European cities that have succumbed to violent Islamist riots and so-called no-go zones that are essentially off-limits to non-Muslims.
“I think that radical Islam, influenced by Tehran and the Axis of Evil, is a huge problem, not only to the State of Israel, not only to the Jewish communities. It’s the Axis of Evil versus the Western world,” Akunis told JNS.
“How do I know it? I can hear from here, from this office — the screaming of ‘Death to America, to Israel, glory to Palestine.’ So it’s not about us anymore,” said Akunis, describing protests that have taken place outside the consulate.
He warned again of “a lot of neighborhoods” around Europe under “radical Muslim occupation,” citing London, Paris, Brussels, and Malmö as examples.
“I didn’t know that such a thing would happen here in the United States,” Akunis said. “We can see it in the streets. It’s not my imagination.”
It is critical that Americans understand that the issue has gone far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, morphing into a broader anti-American bent, he said.
“I think that I need to send this match message to my American friends. I think that this is the right message,” asking people to open their eyes to the support for terrorism taking place on New York’s streets.
And it’s happening during a broader time of political uncertainty and upheaval in the United States. Akunis arrived in the midst of a critical election season. Asked who on the political battlefield he has found to partner with and who he is still trying to bring on board, Akunis said, “I’m trying to bring everybody to support Israel. I think that the American administration, American people, American leaders, must stand with Israel.”
He was quick to note, though, that “the Israelis are not part of the election campaign. The American people will choose the president and their administration. And we, of course, respect any result we’ll see here on Nov. 5. This is the main idea of democracy — the will of the people.
Perhaps getting in a delicate shot at those who have opined on Israel’s domestic political affairs, including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who called for Netanyahu to stand down as premier, Akunis said he was “sure that you, the Americans, will respect the will of the people in Israel.”
Regarding his early dealings with American Jews, Akunis stressed the unity he’s seen in the community members that he’s been dealing with on the street level. “This unity reflects strength, and not the opposite. We will not be victims anymore,” he said, adding that “in the darkest days, you can see the light.”
In turn, the Jewish community looked for unity from its supposed partners and allies in other American minority and religious communities in the aftermath of Oct. 7, but largely encountered “radio silence”.
While American Jewish leaders have been quick to note their deep disappointment, worry and anger on that front, Akunis inferred to JNS that those concerns are overblown by the media, which he said tends to amplify the negative.
“I’m talking with them all the time,” he said of those erstwhile partners. “Beyond the big headlines, I think that most Americans, including the communities that you just mentioned, support Israel. There’s a lot of voices for Israel.”
While Akunis said he has not received a straight answer on why those communities went silent during Israel’s darkest hour, he is “asking them to reflect on their solidarity with Israel,” and he expects attitudes will change soon.
During a virtual town hall event last week, Paula Collins, who is challenging Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., suggested that supporters of former President Trump be sent to “re-education camps,” according to audio obtained by the Post Millenial.
Collins, a marijuana tax attorney, argued that even if a majority of Democrats are elected to Congress in November, there will still be a need for re-education camps to “put[] it all back together again” after “this MAGA nightmare.”
The uncontested Democrat nominee for NY-21 said, “Even if we were to have a resounding blue wave come through, as many of us would like, putting it all back together again after we’ve gone through this MAGA nightmare and re-educating, basically — that sounds like a, rather, a re-education camp.” She told voters on the call they will need to find “another way to phrase” the concept of “re-education camps” with the general public.
New York Democrat Paula Collins suggests Trump supporters need a “reeducation camp” after the election.
Collins is running for Congress and made the comments in a town hall meeting. pic.twitter.com/6VGNmtlcY7
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 6, 2024
Her remarks have drawn comparisons to a 2016 CNN interview of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, during which she said Trump supporters need “deprogramming.” Clinton said, “At some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.” On her campaign homepage, Collins notes the comparison to Clinton, saying she is honored.
Stefanik called for Democrat leadership to condemn the comments. Stefanik said in a press release, “Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer must immediately condemn this statement.”
My statement calling on Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer to immediately condemn NY Democrat congressional candidate's call to force Trump voters into re-education camps: pic.twitter.com/WPYEsg0Jrx
Instead of retracting and apologizing, Collins blamed the media for airing her controversial remarks. Collins claimed Stefanik is attacking her because she is “panicked.”
The left-wing candidate is using the controversy to fundraise, asking for $250 campaign donations. Asking for campaign donations, Collins writes on her website, “Help me end the MAGA mania.” “Far-right politics” is listed as one of her top issues on her campaign website.
Ratings on Ballotpedia describe Stefanik’s district as “Solid Republican,” based on data from three political analysis organizations.
Federal Election Commission filings highlight the weak chances of New York’s 21st congressional district flipping blue. Collins has just $6,337.93 cash on hand and $11,130 in campaign debt. Meanwhile, Stefanik, who is reportedly under consideration as Trump’s running-mate, boasts nearly $5 million in available funds.
Arianna Villarreal is a summer intern at The Federalist.
This morning, many of us are emerging from the late coverage last night after the conviction of former President Donald Trump on 34 felonies. I was in the courtroom for the verdict, which hit like a thunderclap (particularly after a strange snafu with the judge). The question that everyone is asking: what happens next?
The scene in the court was a madhouse. Judge Juan Merchan told the court that the jury had not reached a verdict and would be dismissed for the day. Many reporters in the overflow courtroom were leaving when Merchan suddenly said that there was a verdict. People came running back into the courtroom. That was followed by 34 guilty verdicts.
I am obviously saddened by the verdict, but not surprised. Until the very end, I was hopeful that there would be a hung jury, a result that could restore some integrity to the New York criminal justice system. However, I previously noted that the jury instructions made conviction much more likely. I referred to the deliberations as a legal “canned hunt” due to instructions that made conviction a near certainty.
You could feel the weight of history in the courtroom, though we still have to see what history was made. For some, it was the conviction of the first president of a felony. For others, it was the key moment where the weaponization of the criminal system became clear and inescapable. It was both, obviously. Yet, the trial fulfilled narratives on both sides.
I ran outside to join the coverage. (One humorous moment was an officer screaming at reporters piling out of the courtroom to “walk not run.” It did not work.) It looked like the final judgment with everyone panicking to find an exit.
The scene outside the courtroom was surreal. The Trump supporters were outraged. The anti-Trump protesters were ecstatic, dancing and celebrating in the street.
While I have written a book about what I have called “the age of rage,” I am always shocked by such scenes. There is a dehumanizing element of these moments as people celebrate not just the first conviction of a president but a person. Rage is addictive and contagious. That was vividly evident outside the courtroom.
So, what happens next?
Obviously, appeals will be taken. As I said last night, we must keep the faith. Indeed, moments like this require us to take a leap of faith in a nation that remains committed to the rule of law. Manhattan is neither the entirety of the country nor the legal system. I believe that these convictions will be overturned, but it will take time. Judge Merchan committed, in my view, layers of reversible error. Eventually, this case may reach the United States Supreme Court.
It has been suggested that an appeal could be taken directly to the Supreme Court. I find that doubtful after the Supreme Court rejected an expedited process for Special Counsel Jack Smith in his federal prosecutions. It will work first through the New York appellate system.
As for the criminal process, Trump will have to meet with a probation officer for an interview. That officer will make recommendations to the court.
There is a possibility of a jail sentence for felonies that come with up to four years for each offense. Any jail sentences would almost certainly run concurrently. However, any jail sentence would be ridiculous in Manhattan for an elderly first-offender in a non-violent offense.
Consistent with his past commentary, MSNBC legal analyst and former Mueller aide Andrew Weissmann predicted that Merchan will give Trump jail time. He is not alone as legal analysts seemed to get caught up in a thrill-kill conviction.
It is much more likely that Merchan will impose a sentence without a jail sentence, though with fines. The most appropriate, in my view, would be a conditional discharge that requires Trump not to commit a new crime or face potential imprisonment.
Merchan could also tailor a sentence to require home confinement or even weekend jailing. Those options would raise serious conflicts with his campaigning and obviously, if elected, serving as president. Even the probation process will be awkward since a convicted defendant ordinarily has to get approval for any travel outside of the state from his probation officer.
Sentences can also include community service, counseling and other requirements.
After his ruling in this trial, it is impossible to rule anything out. However, any jail sentence would add even more outrage to an abuse of the criminal law system.
Former President Donald Trump managed to pull off a campaign miracle with a wildly successful rally in South Bronx on Thursday night.
The Bronx is the poorest borough in New York City, and South Bronx is the poorest area. Most residents are black or brown, and they vote overwhelmingly Democrat. No Republican presidential candidate has gone anywhere near the area in decades.
On Thursday morning, heavy rains flooded the park where the rally was to be held. Bronx-based Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., tweeted “God is good” upon seeing the weather, believing it would keep Trump crowds away. She also taunted Trump for being the victim of Democrat lawfare, saying he had to rally in the Bronx because he was in the “legal version of an ankle bracelet.”
God is good regardless of political outcomes, of course. In this case, He dried Crotona Park in the Bronx before a raucous crowd of thousands poured in to hear one of Trump’s best campaign speeches yet.
“Certainly, a bigger crowd than I think Democrats would like to see, particularly given this is one of the bluest counties in the entire country,”one CNN reporter conceded upon seeing the crowds.
Trump barely mentioned the NYC show trial he’s being subjected to and mixed campaign staples with a declaration of love for New York City and the country at large. He seemed truly happy and at home.
“I was thrilled to be back in the city I grew up in, the city I spent my life in, the city I HELPED BUILD, and the city WE ALL LOVE — THANK YOU!” Trump said on Truth Social. Trump grew up in Queens but officially moved to Florida in 2019. His effusive praise for New York shows a remarkably positive attitude from the former president, given that the city and state are currently part of a Democrat campaign plot to bankrupt and imprison him.
Trump reflected on lessons from his success in New York City real estate, doling out career advice along the way, during his hour-and-a-half speech. A parade of local politicians and activists announced endorsements and support of Trump. When he discussed his economic and immigration policy proposals for getting the country back on track, he argued that his policies would help everyone in the country. It’s part of a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to drive up votes from black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote Democrat.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or brown or white or whatever the hell color you are — it doesn’t matter. We are all Americans, and we are going to pull together as Americans!” Trump said.
The contrast with President Joe Biden couldn’t be starker. In three decidedly non-raucous speeches within the last week or so, Biden leaned into racial grievance politics. At a speech at the National Museum of African American History and Culture last Friday, Biden claimed America was beset by “forces trying to deny freedom of opportunity for all Americans.” He claimed there was an “insidious” resistance and an “extreme movement” led by his political opponent to hurt black people. In another disaster of a speech to the NAACP, the White House later had to make 10 corrections to it.
The same day as the NAACP speech, Biden gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s school in Georgia. In a self-centered speech riddled with some of his familiar falsehoods about his life and family, Biden painted a picture of a racist and evil country. He said the country was under the “poison of white supremacy” and falsely claimed Americans were trying to put forth a national book ban to harm black people.
It’s “natural to wonder if democracy” actually works, he said. “What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black — black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?”
Biden also falsely claimed Georgia doesn’t allow anyone to drink water in voting lines and that black election workers are being constantly attacked.Biden’s message is that the country is evil, racist, and full of hatred and that he will fix it by emptying the Treasury to buy votes.
Trump, who has the benefit of having already had one very successful term as president, acknowledges the very real economic, social, and foreign policies the country faces. But unlike Biden, his optimistic campaign speeches show a man who seems to love the country, love its cities, love its people, and want the country to return to health.
Whether Biden’s race-baiting rhetoric or Trump’s unbridled multi-ethnic optimism will win the day remains to be seen. The speech in South Bronx showed how successful the latter can be.
Below is my column on Fox.com on the approaching end of the Trump trial in Manhattan. With the dramatic implosion of Michael Cohen on the stand on Thursday with the exposure of another alleged lie told under oath, even hosts and commentators on CNN are now criticizing the prosecution and doubting the basis for any conviction. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper admitted that he would “absolutely” have doubts after Cohen’s testimony. CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig declared“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star cooperating witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically.” He previously stated that this case would never have been brought outside of a deep blue, anti-Trump district. Other legal experts, including on CNN and MSNBC, admitted that they did not get the legal theory of the prosecution or understand the still mysterious crime that was being concealed by the alleged book-keeping errors. The question is whether the jury itself is realizing that they are being played by the prosecution.
Here is the column:
In the movie “Quiz Show,” about the rigging of a 1950s television game show, the character Mark Van Doren warns his corrupted son that “if you look around the table and you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”
As the trial of former President Donald Trump careens toward its conclusion, one has to wonder if the jurors are wondering the same question. For any discerning juror, the trial has been conspicuously lacking any clear statement from the prosecutors of what crime Trump was attempting to commit by allegedly mischaracterizing payments as “legal expenses.” Even liberal legal experts have continued to express doubt over what crime is being alleged as the government rests its case.
There is also the failure of the prosecutors to establish that Trump even knew of how payments were denoted or that these denotations were actually fraudulent in denoting payments to a lawyer as legal expenses.
The judge has allowed this dangerously undefined case to proceed without demanding greater clarity from the prosecution.
Jurors may also suspect that there is more to meet the eye about the players themselves. While the jurors are likely unaware of these facts, everyone “around the table” has controversial connections. Indeed, for many, the judge, prosecutors, and witnesses seem as random or coincidental as the cast from “Ocean’s Eleven.” Let’s look at three key things.
1. The Prosecutors
First, there are the prosecutors. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg originally (as did his predecessor) rejected this ridiculous legal theory and further stated that he could not imagine ever bringing a case where he would call former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, let alone make him the entirety of a prosecution.
Bragg’s suspension of the case led prosecutor Mark F. Pomerantz to resign. Pomerantz then wrote a book on the prosecution despite his colleagues objecting that he was undermining their work. Many of us viewed the book as unethical and unprofessional, but it worked. The pressure campaign forced Bragg to green-light the prosecution.
Pomerantz also met with Cohen in pushing the case.
Bragg then selected Matthew Colangelo to lead the case. Colangelo was third in command of the Justice Department and gave up that plum position to lead the case against Trump. Colangelo was also paid by the Democratic National Committee for “political consulting.” So, a former high-ranking official in the Biden Justice Department and a past consultant to the DNC is leading the prosecution.
2. The Judge
Judge Juan Merchan has been criticized not only because he is a political donor to President Biden but his daughter is a high-ranking Democratic political operative who has raised millions in campaigns against Trump and the GOP. Merchan, however, was not randomly selected. He was specifically selected for the case due to his handling of an earlier Trump-related case.
3. The Star Witness
Michael Cohen’s checkered history as a convicted, disbarred serial perjurer is well known. Now, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., is under fire after disclosing that “I have met with [Cohen] a number of times to prepare him.” Goldman in turn paid Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, more than $157,000 dollars for political consulting.
Outside the courtroom, there is little effort to avoid or hide such conflicts. While Democrats would be outraged if the situation were flipped in a prosecution of Biden, the cross-pollination between the DOJ, DNC, and Democratic operatives is dismissed as irrelevant by many in the media.
Moreover, there is little outrage in New York that, in a presidential campaign where the weaponization of the legal system is a major issue, Trump is not allowed to discuss Cohen, Colangelo, or these conflicts. A New York Supreme Court judge is literally controlling what Trump can say in a presidential campaign about the alleged lawfare being waged against him.
The most striking aspect of these controversial associations is how little was done to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interests. There were many judges available who were not donors or have children with such prominent political interests in the case. Bragg could have selected someone who was not imported by the Biden administration or someone who had not been paid by the DNC.
There was no concern over the obvious appearance of a politically motivated and stacked criminal case. Whether or not these figures are conflicted or compromised, no effort was taken to assure citizens that any such controversies are avoided in the selection of the key players in this case.
What will be interesting is how the jury will react when, after casting its verdict, the members learn of these undisclosed associations. This entire production was constructed for their benefit to get them to convict Trump despite the absence of a clear crime or direct evidence.
They were the marks and, like any good grift, the prosecutors were hoping that their desire for a Trump conviction would blind them to the con.
Bragg, Colangelo and others may be wrong. Putting aside the chance that Judge Merchan could summon up the courage to end this case before it goes to the jury, the grift may have been a bit too obvious.
New Yorkers are a curious breed. Yes, they overwhelmingly hate Trump, but they also universally hate being treated like chumps. When they get this case, they just might look around the courtroom and decide that they are the suckers in a crooked game.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the first day of the examination of Michael Cohen. He is expected to start his cross examination today. How bad will it be? After lying to Congress, courts, banks, and most everyone else, it will be bad. Years ago, Cohen threatened a journalist and told him “What I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting.” Well, that bad. On cross examination, Cohen faces a reckoning of biblical proportions.
Just before he took the stand, the New York Post revealed that Cohen has been peddling a reality show called “The Fixer,” including working with Colin Whelan, who helped create “Joe Exotic: Tigers, Lies and Cover-Up.” Whelan appears interested to stay within that genre.
The Cohen pitch came with a cheesy promo video where he promised viewers, “I am your fixer.”
His first post-Trump client, Bragg, may have to disagree.
Cohen had only one advantage for Bragg: His notoriously flexible morals and ethics, which allows him to say most anything to support his sponsors.
With the prosecution’s case almost over, Bragg needed Cohen to clearly state that Trump intentionally committed fraud to conceal some still poorly defined crime. The problem is that Cohen only confirmed that Trump knew he was going to pay for the nondisclosure agreement and that it would be buried before the election. None of that is unlawful.
On his reality show promo, Cohen tells viewers that he is now there to fix their problems because “the little guy doesn’t usually have access to people with my particular set of skills.” Those skills seem to have escaped all of the witnesses who were compelled to work with him.
Witnesses detailed how Cohen was ridiculed as someone “prone to exaggeration” and unprofessional. Former Trump associate Hope Hicks said that Cohen was constantly trying to insinuate himself into the campaign and that he “used to like to call himself Mister Fix It, but it was only because he first broke it.”
Cohen only succeeded in confirming that he put together this payment and advised Trump to go forward with it. He assured him that it would effectively kill the story before the election. None of that is illegal. The “Fix it man” assured Trump that he fixed it and now wants Trump to go to jail for following that advice.
This is the man who, according to Stormy Daniels’ attorney, Keith Davidson, expected to be Trump’s Attorney General. Davidson said that Cohen was “depressed and despondent” and “I thought he was going to kill himself” when he realized that he would not be made a cabinet member.
Cohen contradicted Davidson and insisted that he only wanted to be Trump’s personal lawyer.
He also admitted that he was unaware that the publisher of National Enquirer, David Pecker, had long killed negative stories about Trump and other celebrities for decades.
Cohen has yet to fix the problem for Bragg.
More importantly, he has added to the problem for Judge Juan Merchan. Many of us have ridiculed this case as devoid of any criminal act.
Indeed, Merchan has allowed the prosecutors to proceed without clearly stating what crime was being concealed.
It is not even clear why paying one’s lawyer a lump sum for his services and costs (including the NDA payment) was not a “legal expense” or how it was supposed to be entered on a business ledger.
Absent a sudden epiphany in his final testimony on Tuesday, Merchan should rule in favor of a directed verdict — that is, throwing the case out before it goes to a jury. If he instead sends this farcical case to the jury, it is Merchan, not Cohen, who may have a better claim to a reality show as the ultimate “Fixer.”
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
Gag orders are there to protect the defendant in a criminal trial, but the defendant, Trump, is the only one with a gag order? Not Stormy Daniels, Not Michael Cohen, or the prosecution. This is a textbook example of a corrupt kangaroo court.
Bill Maher Destroys Alvin Bragg’s Sham Trump Lawsuit Following Release of Porn Star Stormy Daniels’ 2018 Interview (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft – May 12, 2024
In a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher criticized Stormy Daniels’ credibility in the ongoing hush money trial involving former President Donald Trump, orchestrated by Soros-backed New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Trump was accused of paying porn star Stormy Daniels, AKA, Stephanie Clifford, ‘hush payments’ through his then-attorney Michael Cohen in a scheme to silence her and stop the story about their alleged affair from being published in the National Enquirer. The payments made to Stormy Daniels did NOT come from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Below is an expanded version of my New York Post column on the appearance of Michael Cohen Monday in the Manhattan prosecution of former President Donald Trump. His testimony will not be for the intestinally weak or ethically strong viewers. It has all the draw of a Nascar race on a rainy day.
Here is the column:
Michael Cohen is to criminal justice what car crashes are to Nascar: few want to admit it, but he is the perverse draw for the wreck-obsessed. The difference is that Cohen was already a rolling smoking wreck when he pulled up to the track.
Even for those of us who have long been critics of this case and its dubious legal theory, it has been surprising to see that the prosecutors had no more evidence than what we previously knew about. The assumption was that no rational prosecutor would base a major criminal case virtually entirely on the testimony of Michael Cohen who was just recently denounced by a judge as a serial perjurer peddling “perverse” theories in court.
The calculus of Alvin Bragg is now obvious. He is counting on the jury convicting Trump regardless of the evidence. He believes that all he needs is to check the boxes on the elements of the crime, no matter how unbelievable the vehicle.
The reason is that Bragg likely fears a directed verdict more than a jury verdict. After the government closes its evidence, the defense will move for a directed verdict on the basis that the evidence is insufficient to sustain a conviction.
In other words, when the prosecution rests this week, Trump’s counsel will stand and ask Merchan to end the case before it is even given to the jury. Many of us agree with that assessment. After three weeks of testimony, there is still confusion on what crime Trump was allegedly seeking to cover up.
Bragg has vaguely referred to using the denotation of payments to Daniels as “legal expenses” as a fraud committed to steal the election. However, the election was over when those denotations were made. Moreover, many believe that such a characterization for payments related to a nondisclosure agreement was accurate. (Hillary Clinton’s campaign claimed in the same election that hiding the funding for the Steele dossier as legal expenses was perfectly accurate).
Judge Juan Merchan, in my view, has failed repeatedly to protect the rights of the accused in this case. However, he can claim that there was enough alleged to give Bragg the chance to make his case. Thus far he has not done so and, if he is truly neutral, Merchan should grant the motion.
Bragg is counting on not only a motivated jury but a motivated judge to keep this anemic case alive. All he hopes that he needs to do is get this to a Trump-loathing jury to set aside any reasonable doubt. To do that, he found the ultimate motivated witness with a record of saying whatever serves his interests and those of his sponsors.
Even with a New York jury, however, you cannot assume that every juror will jettison doubt when it comes to the unpopular defendant. Yet, Bragg first has to show Merchan that someone claimed to have evidence directly tying Trump to an intentional fraudulent scheme to conceal a crime.
Thus far, Bragg is not even close. Indeed, many of his witnesses helped Trump more than they hurt him on the actual charges.
Bragg started with testimony on the killing of a story by David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, on an uncharged transaction to kill a story of a Trump affair with a different woman, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model.
The relevancy was marginal but the testimony backfired in that Pecker admitted that Trump told him that he knew nothing about any reimbursement to Cohen for any hush money. He further said that he had killed or raised such stories with Trump for decades before he ever announced for president. He also said that he had killed stories for other celebrities and politicians, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, Rahm Emanuel and Mark Wahlberg.
For good measure, Pecker noted that Cohen often exaggerates and became loud and argumentative.
Witnesses said that Trump likely had a mix of motivations including sparing his family from embarrassment. Daniels’ own counsel contradicted the prosecution’s reference to the payment as “hush money.”
Prosecutors now need Cohen to check virtually every box on his own. It is not enough to say that Trump wanted to hush up the alleged affair. That is no crime and NDAs are common and legal.
Cohen has to say that Trump specifically knew and approved of the characterization of the payments as “legal expenses.” He further has to establish that Trump intended the denotation to conceal the payments for the purposes of election violations or fraud.
That could make this a “he said, he said” case, but only if Trump were to actually testify. However, Merchan’s earlier rulings make such testimony highly unlikely. The court approved a sweeping scope for cross examination if Trump dares to take the stand. No competent lawyer would advise him to do so after Merchan’s rulings.
That is exactly where Bragg wants to be: with a “he said” not a “he said, he said” case. With Trump effectively silenced, Bragg will argue that that is enough to get this to the jury and he can then allow the New York jury to jettison any notion of reasonable doubt when it comes to Donald Trump.
For most people, this cynical calculation will be immaterial when Cohen is called. Calling a convicted, disbarred, serial perjurer to any court is a spectacle in itself. Cohen seems like he has never met an oath that he does not want to break.
Indeed, he appears eager to expand his collection by announcing in the midst of the trial coverage that he is running for Congress. Given the blind rage of many New Yorkers, he could well succeed with single-issue, anti-Trump voters. If so, we will all be back just to see if a vortex to the netherworld opens up when Cohen stands on the House floor and swears that he is taking the oath “without . . . purpose of evasion.”
But before he becomes Rep. Michael Cohen, he will have to appear for his Nascar moment, though he will be the first wreck in search of a race.
As the lawfare crusade continues, former President Donald Trump is racking up significant victories in court. Down in Florida, President Trump secured an indefinite delay in his criminal case involving alleged mishandling of classified documents. This delay was ordered following revelations that Special Counsel Jack Smith and prosecutors mishandled and misrepresented evidence, which is uniquely ironic given the subject matter of the underlying case.
In Georgia, where another criminal case is pending, the Georgia Court of Appeals agreed to hear President Trump’s attempt to remove Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis from the case. The Georgia Court of Appeals is set to consider and decide this issue in the coming weeks.
It is becoming increasingly likely that the ongoing Manhattan criminal case is the only trial that President Trump will face before the November election.
Here’s the latest information you need to know about each case.
Manhattan, New York: Prosecution by DA Alvin Bragg for NDA Payment
How we got here: In this New York state criminal case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who The New York Times acknowledged had “campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president” — charged former President Donald Trump in April 2023 with 34 felony charges for alleged falsification of business records.
Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen paid pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election as part of a nondisclosure agreement in which she agreed not to publicize her claims that she had an affair with Trump (who denies the allegations). Nondisclosure agreements are not illegal, but Bragg claims Trump concealed the payment to help his 2016 election chances and in doing so was concealing a “crime.”
The trial began on April 15, and jury selection was completed on April 19. Judge Merchan, a donor to Biden’s campaign and an anti-Trump cause in 2020, has issued a gag order on President Trump generally prohibiting him from publicly speaking on possible jurors, witnesses, and other personnel in this case.
Latest developments: This week, the jury heard testimony from porn performer Stormy Daniels, also known as Stephanie Clifford. Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal are central to this case because prosecutors allege that former President Trump paid them off and then falsified business records, to prevent negative media stories during his 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels alleges that she had a sexual encounter with President Trump in 2006, but President Trump denies the affair.
On May 8, President Trump’s attorneys cross-examined and discredited Stormy Daniels, highlighting her history of being a pornographer, her strip club tour, and her history of profiting off allegations against Trump. That same day, Judge Merchan denied a second attempt by President Trump to dismiss this case for a mistrial. President Trump’s attorneys argued that Stormy Daniels’s testimony was unfairly prejudicial against Trump due to its inconsistencies and unnecessary detail, which could improperly influence the jury.
The jury is soon expected to hear from President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who is the prosecutor’s star witness. Another key witness, Karen McDougal, is not expected to testify.
Judge Merchan handed the prosecution another win by ruling that former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith, an expert on campaign finance-related issues, is limited as to what he can say in his testimony in the case. One of the defenses raised by the president’s legal team is that even if such payments were made, they were not necessarily to influence an election but rather to protect Donald Trump’s name, his brand, and his family. Chairman Smith was expected to testify in support of this theory, as he has long asserted that “almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to ‘influence an election’” but “not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.” But after Judge Merchan’s ruling, Smith can now only testify as 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 this case, such as for example ‘campaign contribution.’”
Fulton County, Georgia: Prosecution by DA Fani Willis for Questioning Election Results
How we got here: The Georgia state criminal case is helmed by District Attorney Fani Willis and her team of prosecutors — which until recently included Nathan Wade, with whom Willis had an improper romantic relationship. Willis charged Trump in August 2023 with 13 felony counts, including racketeering charges, related to his alleged attempt to challenge the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump is joined by 18 co-defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and others. Some of President Trump’s co-defendants have reached plea deals; others have petitioned to have the case removed to federal court, each attempt of which has been denied. A trial date has not yet been set, though prosecutors have asked for a trial to begin on Aug. 5, just a few short weeks after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Latest developments: On May 8, the Georgia Court of Appeals agreed to hear former President Trump’s attempt to disqualify Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis from the pending criminal case in Georgia. Trial court judge Scott McAfee previously denied President Trump’s attempt to remove Willis from the case, but the Georgia Court of Appeals will now determine whether that denial was permissible.
Southern District of Florida: Prosecution by Biden DOJ for Handling of Classified Documents
How we got here: In this federal criminal case, special counsel Jack Smith and federal prosecutors with Biden’s Justice Department charged former President Trump in June 2023 with 40 federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The trial was set to begin on May 20, 2024, but this date has now been postponed indefinitely. Additionally, venue matters: The trial is currently set to take place in Fort Pierce, Florida, in a locality that heavily backed President Trump in the 2020 election. If that remains unchanged, the demographics of the jury pool may result in a pro-Trump courtroom.
Latest developments: On May 7, Judge Aileen Cannon postponed the trial date indefinitely in this case. In an order, Judge Cannon stated “that finalization of a trial date at this juncture … would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court.” This delay comes after Special Counsel Jack Smith and other prosecutors admitted to tampering with evidence, stating “there are some boxes [of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago] where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” Prosecutors previously represented to the court that the documents were “in their original, intact form as seized.” Judge Cannon also recently unredacted documents showing the Biden administration’s involvement in this case.
As a result of this indefinite delay, it is unlikely that a trial will occur before the November election.
Washington, D.C.: Prosecution by Biden DOJ for Jan. 6 Speech
How we got here: In this federal criminal case, special counsel Jack Smith and federal prosecutors charged former President Trump in August 2023 with four counts of conspiracy and obstruction related to his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. President Trump’s lawyers have argued that immunity extends to actions taken by a president while acting in his official capacity and that, in any event, the First Amendment protects his right to raise legitimate questions about a questionable election process.
Latest developments: This case is currently stalled while awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court on former President Trump’s immunity claim.
New York: Lawsuit by A.G. Letitia James for Inflating Net Worth
How we got here: In this New York civil fraud case, Democrat Attorney General Letitia James — who campaigned on going after Trump — sued former President Trump in September 2022 under a civil fraud statute alleging that he misled banks, insurers, and others about his net worth to obtain loans, although the loans have been paid back and none of the parties involved claimed to have been injured by the deals.
Following a no-jury trial, Judge Arthur Engoron — whom Trump’s lawyers have accused of “astonishing departures from ordinary standards of impartiality” — issued a decision on Feb. 16, 2024 ordering Trump to pay a $454 million penalty. Trump has appealed this decision and posted a required $175 million appeal bond. The appeals court plans to hold hearings on the merits of the full case in September 2024.
Latest developments: This case mostly remains on hold.
Steve Roberts is a partner and Oliver Roberts is an associate with Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinksy & Josefiak PLLC. They can be reached at sroberts@holtzmanvogel.com and oroberts@holtzmanvogel.com.
Despite high per-pupil spending, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and other states see low test scores in math and reading, as does D.C. Catholic schools, however, outperform. (Photo illustration: Comstock Images/Getty Images)
Terence P. Jeffrey is investigative editor for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The public schools in the state of New York doled out $29,284 per pupil in “current expenditures” in fiscal year 2022, according to a report published this week by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.
“Current expenditures comprise expenditures for the day-to-day operation of schools and school districts for public elementary and secondary education, including expenditures for staff salaries and benefits, supplies, and purchased services,” the National Center for Education Statistics says.
“General administration expenditures and school administration expenditures are also included in current expenditures,” it says.
The $29,284 that New York spent per pupil on these items was more than any other state. So, what did taxpayers get in return for this investment?
Not much.
In the mathematics test of the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 28% of eighth graders in New York state public schools scored proficient or better. Only 32% scored proficient or better in reading.
In our capital city of Washington, D.C., which the NCES lists with the states, the public schools had $28,128 in “current expenditures” per pupil. That was more than any state except New York. So, how did the students do in D.C. public schools? Only 16% of eight graders in the D.C. school system scored proficient or better in math. Only 22% scored proficient or better in reading.
New Jersey had the next-highest level of per-pupil spending in its public schools in fiscal year 2022. In that state, it was $25,550. The students there scored a little better in reading and math than those in New York or the District of Columbia. But they did not do great. Only 33% of New Jersey eighth graders were proficient or better in math, while 42% were proficient or better in reading.
Vermont, the state represented by Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, finished slightly behind New Jersey in per-pupil spending in its public schools. It spent $25,073. Vermont also finished behind New Jersey in its NAEP test scores. Only 27% of eighth graders in Vermont public schools scored proficient or better in math, and only 34% scored proficient or better in reading.
Connecticut, another New England state, came in fifth—behind New York, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, and Vermont—in per-pupil sending. It spent $23,868 per student. Only 30% of its eighth graders scored proficient or better in math, and only 35% scored proficient in reading.
Connecticut was followed by three other New England states when the 50 states are ranked by per-pupil spending. Massachusetts spent $22,778; Rhode Island spent $20,498; and New Hampshire spent $20,424.
Yet only 35% of eighth graders in Massachusetts public schools scored proficient or better in math; only 40% scored proficient or better in reading. In Rhode Island, only 24% of eighth graders scored proficient or better in math; only 31% scored proficient or better in reading. In New Hampshire, only 29% scored proficient or better in math; only 33% scored proficient or better in reading.
Did the results significantly improve if a state spent less money per pupil in its public schools? No.
Utah spent $9,496 per pupil in its public schools in fiscal year 2022. That was less than any other state. Only 35% of eighth graders scored proficient or better in math, and only 36% scored proficient or better in reading.
Similarly, Idaho finished next to last in per-pupil spending in its public schools, putting up $9,662. Only 32% of eighth graders scored proficient or better in math, and 32% scored proficient or better in reading.
As this column has noted before, students at Catholic schools score better on these NAEP tests than students at public schools. In 2022, eighth graders in Catholic schools had an average score of 288 on the math test, while eighth graders in public schools had an average score of 273. Similarly, eighth graders in Catholic schools had an average score of 279 on the reading test, while public-school eighth graders had an average score of 259. The average tuition at Catholic elementary schools in 2023, according to U.S. News and World Report, was $4,840. The average tuition at Catholic high schools was $11,240.
In the upcoming school year, DeMatha Catholic High School—in Hyattsville, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.—will have a tuition of $22,700, according to its website. That is $5,428 less than the $28,128 that D.C. public schools spent per pupil in 2022.
Parents in the District of Columbia and every other community in this country should not be forced to send their children to government-run schools. All parents should be given a voucher equal to the per-pupil expenditures in the local public schools and they should be free to redeem that voucher at any school—public or private, religious or secular—that they choose.
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Below is my New York Post column on the unseemly scene in the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan as prosecutors used porn star Stormy Daniels to present lurid details on her alleged tryst with former president Donald Trump. It was a dumpster fire that Judge Merchan watched burn for a full day and then said the jury may have to disregard much of what they saw and heard.
Here is the column:
Before the start of the Manhattan prosecution of former president Donald Trump, I characterized the case of District Attorney Alvin Bragg as based on a type of obscenity standard.
In a 1984 pornography case, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote “I shall not today attempt further to define [obscenity]. . . . But I know it when I see it.”
Bragg has refused to clearly define the crime that Trump was seeking to conceal when payments for a non-disclosure agreement were listed as a legal expense. We would just know it when we saw it at trial. We are still waiting, but this week, Bragg seems to be prosecuting an actual obscenity case.
The prosecution fought with Trump’s defense counsel to not only call porn star Stormy Daniels to the stand, but to ask her for lurid details on her alleged tryst with Trump. The only assurance that they would make to Judge Juan Merchan was that they would “not go into details of genitalia.” For Merchan, who has largely ruled against Trump on such motions, that was enough. He allowed the prosecutors to get into the details of the affair despite the immateriality of the evidence to any criminal theory.
Neither the NDA nor the payment to Daniels is being contested. It is also uncontested that Trump wanted to pay to get the story (and other stories, including untrue allegations) from being published.
The value of the testimony was entirely sensational and gratuitous, yet Merchan was fine with humiliating Trump. Daniels’ testimony was a dumpster fire in the courtroom.
The most maddening moment for the defense came at the lunch break when Merchan stated, “I agree that it would have been better if some of these things had been left unsaid.” He then denied a motion for a mistrial based on the testimony and blamed the defense for not objecting more. That, of course, ignores the standing objection of the defense to Daniels even appearing, and specific objections to the broad scope allowed by the court.
This is precisely what the defense said would happen when the prosecutors only agreed to avoid “genitalia.” There was no reason for Daniels to appear at all in the trial. Even if he was adamant in allowing her, Merchan could have imposed a much more limited scope for her testimony. He could also have enforced the limits that he did place on the testimony when it was being ignored by both the prosecutors and the witness.
Merchan said that he is considering a limiting instruction for the jury to ignore aspects of the testimony. But that is little comfort for the defendant.
The court was told that this would happen, it happened, and now the court wants to ask the jury to pretend that it did not happen. Merchan knows that there is no way for the jury to unhear the testimony. More importantly, the prosecution knew that from the outset.
Daniels appeared eager to share the stories for the same reason that she was eager to sell her story. While she said that she “hates” Trump and wants him “held accountable,” Daniels is no victim. She had an alleged tryst with Trump and then sought to cash in on the story.
It is a standard form of extortion of celebrities. She later sought to cash in on the notoriety by appearing in strip clubs as part of a “Make America Horny Again” tour. She is in her element in Merchan’s courtroom.
In New York, the relevance or credibility of witnesses like Daniels is largely immaterial.
New Yorkers elected a state attorney general, Letitia James, who ran on the pledge to bag Trump on something — without specifying any crime.
Bragg then indicted Trump without clearly defining any crime — a debate that continues among legal experts after two weeks of testimony.
This is entertainment for many in New York — as is the thrill of the possibility of his going to jail under Merchan’s poorly written and arguably unconstitutional gag order.
When it comes to a thrill kill trial, who better to call than Daniels?
After all, she has been treated as a heroine by many, even being given the key to the city of West Hollywood, California, on “Stormy Daniels Day.”
Well, it was Stormy Daniels Day in Judge Merchan’s courtroom this week, and it is a bit late for the court to express shock over her testimony.
It is not the witness, but the case that seems increasingly obscene.
You have a judge who should have recused himself given his daughter’s major role as a Democratic activist and fundraiser.
You have a gag order that is allowing a New York Supreme Court justice to regulate what the leading candidate for the presidency may say in an election on the weaponization of the legal system.
Our universities melting down seems to be part of the Democrats’ Cloward and Piven strategy of destroying the capitalist system in order to rebuild it into a utopia resembling that of the former Soviet Union or Communist China, throwing away our constitution with all power and control resting with a few wealthy elitists in the Democrat party.
Chaos at Columbia: Anti-Zionist NYC College Protest Gets Physical Last Night, “Arrest that Zionist piece of s***” (VIDEO)
By Benjamin Wetmore – April 19, 2024
Protests at Columbia University in New York City got heated Thursday night as protesters demanded charges be dropped against pro-Palestinian activists who were shutting down the college’s buildings to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. The protesters were upset that the police arrested those making a ‘tent city’ inside the college’s buildings and on campus grounds. 108 were arrested after three days of protests. The protesters wanted those arrested released without charges. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Almost everyone on the planet knows that Trump can not get a fair trial in New York, including the Democrats who are launching this travesty of justice. Trump is being charged with a misnomer that is beyond its statute of limitations, transformed into a felony based on a clerical error with no victim for the purpose of interfering in the 2024 election.
Radical Lawless Judge Merchan Seated Juror Who Was Arrested for Destroying/Vandalizing Conservative Political Signs
By Jim Hoft – April 18, 2024
The search for impartial jurors continued on Thursday in the New York City lawfare case of President Donald Trump in the courtroom of conflicted far-left Judge Juan Merchan. A fresh pool of 96 Manhattan residents entered the courtroom earlier today. A significant number of these potential jurors, 48 in total, were immediately excused after admitting to biases against the former president. An additional nine were dismissed for undisclosed reasons.
FOX News reported today that Trump-hating Judge Juan Merchan seated a juror who was arrested in the 90’s for destroying/vandalizing conservative political posters. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
It’s pretty clear at this point that Democrats’ main election strategy against Donald Trump has nothing to do with Joe Biden running a savvy political campaign. Instead, they’re attempting to defeat Trump with a series of obviously politically coordinated lawsuits and criminal charges, hoping this will both drain Trump’s resources and any resulting convictions would tarnish him in the eyes of voters. Suffice it to say, this strategy is not working out well for them — Biden hasn’t led in the polls in six months.
And while there’s a lot to be said about the dubious nature of the charges being brought against him, the point has been driven home by the recent decision by a New York appeals court to reduce Trump’s bond in his civil fraud trial from $454 million to $175 million. Or rather, the issue is what no one is saying about this case: It’s such complete bunk that no one among the legion of Trump’s critics in and out of the corporate media is even trying to defend this case on the merits.
To recap: Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump’s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.
However, the state of New York, where the current Attorney General Letitia James campaigned for office on the insane premise of convicting Trump without even saying what he was guilty of, combed through the paperwork of these loans and charged Trump with fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to get favorable loan terms. They did this in spite of the fact that no bank has accused Trump of wrongdoing.
The case was decided by a judge who is personally bizarre and professionally incompetent and adversarial. In a case where Trump was accused of inflating the value of his assets, in Judge Engoron’s ruling he concluded that Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s historic estate on 17 oceanfront acres in the heart of the most exclusive neighborhood in America, was worth between “$18 million and $27.6 million.” Even CNN was incredulous about Engoron’s low valuation of Trump’s assets: “Real estate insiders question how Trump fraud judge valued Mar-a-Lago.” For those who believe that Trump inflated the value of his assets to get a loan — this would not exactly make him a unique figure in the business world — Engoron’s judgment is still unreliable.
The ruling against Trump is, in the words of former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, “a fraud case in which there are no fraud victims.” McCarthy’s National Review colleague Dan McLaughlin, who has decades of experience litigating business fraud in New York, notes, “The idea that Trump caused half a billion in damages to his lenders doesn’t pass the straight face test. A tenuous-at-best theory of illegality should not be a springboard for draconian punishment.” (It should also be noted that though McCarthy and McLaughlin are on the right, neither man has much affinity for Trump.)
This case is so obviously politically motivated, and even America’s corrupt media are at a loss to defend this: “An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of similar cases showed Trump’s case stands apart: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”
For months now, I have been on the lookout for any notable journalist or pundit who is willing to write an actual defense of Engeron’s judgment against Trump. Outside of a handful of ill-considered tweets from the #resistance crowd, I haven’t seen anything substantive at all. While I pay attention to this stuff much more closely than most, I’m obviously not omniscient. So, I went on X and asked if anyone had written anything substantive defending Engeron’s decision on the merits. (My question was almost immediately retweeted by Dilbert cartoonist and unorthodox political commentator Scott Adams, who has more than a million followers, giving it wide exposure.)
So far, the closest thing I’ve found was this column at the libertarian-ish legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy. Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr defends the ruling, taking a strict read on what the state was allowed to do here. However, even he is conflicted about whether the case should have been brought, admirably and transparently states his opinion is contingent on the fact he’s not an expert in New York law, and concludes, “So if the opinion is wrong, and gets reversed, I certainly don’t mind that.”
Well, Monday a New York appeals court did conclude that Engeron’s opinion was substantially wrong and reduced the bond Trump has to present from $454 million to $175 million. (Incredibly, New York law dictates Trump has to post this still obscene amount before he can further appeal the decision.)
In addition to reducing the size of Trump’s bond, the appeals court also threw out Engeron’s ruling barring Trump from serving as an officer or director of a New York company for three years and the order barring Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump from serving as officers and directors of New York companies for two years. The plan was clearly to slap Trump with an egregious fine while simultaneously hamstringing Trump’s business in ways that would make it harder to raise money to pay the penalty.
Even by the very low standards set by the other Trump charges, what’s happening here is appalling. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado may not bar Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment’s provision against insurrectionists. The fact that there was a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, does not mean we automatically get to presume it was a serious insurrection attempt, much less that Trump has been convicted in a court of law for any crime related to it.
From the beginning, this was a desperate and quixotic attempt to stop Trump from participating in a free election, as well as disenfranchise millions of voters. It was so bad it prompted a unanimous SCOTUS ruling. And yet, in the weeks and months leading up to SCOTUS’s ruling there were dozens of op-eds from ostensibly serious and high-profile commentators assuring us that the unilateral decision by Colorado’s secretary of state was sound constitutional law. Anti-Trump pundits such as David French and many others eagerly staked out a position on this case to the left of avowedly progressive Supreme Court Justices Kentanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.
As crazy as the Colorado case was, the reaction to it is an instructive comparison. In the Trump civil fraud case, we have an overtly partisan attorney general bringing charges and a solitary judge handing down a verdict so insane that even the regrettably prominent segment of America’s commentariat willing to abase itself at the drop of a hat to stop Cheeto Mussolini is looking at the facts of this case and deciding to steer clear of the blast zone.
While the appeals court’s rebuke of Engeron’s decision is strong confirmation the case is as bad as it seems, it was hardly Solomonic in its wisdom. The reality is that the man leading in the polls to be the next president is still being rung up by the opposition party with an outrageous fine that reeks of an Eighth Amendment violation on a case that never should have been brought. And we should probably throw in a Fifth Amendment due process violation while we’re at it, because the idea that Trump has to pay the state $175 million for the privilege of continuing to appeal in court is something I’m confident the reanimated corpse of James Madison would tell us is exactly the kind of injustice the Bill of Rights was trying to prevent, right before he dies a second time upon finding out about the existence of a federal income tax.
In the end, what’s really telling is that while the “country over party” crowd won’t defend this decision on the merits, they’re also not speaking out about the perversion of justice here. They’re content to let it happen to Trump even if it erodes the very norms and concerns about “rule of law” they insist Trump threatens as president.
Well, people are noticing that this isn’t a very principled position. And based on the polls, voters are coming to the entirely rational conclusion that Trump, for all his considerable flaws, is less of a threat than an establishment that will eagerly distort the law to subvert an election they’re afraid they can’t win on the merits.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
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.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Tuesday that the $464 million judgment against Donald Trump in the New York civil fraud case is “unconscionable” and “unconstitutional,” and it is designed to prevent the former president from being able to appeal.
“It encourages lawless judges to simply impose fines that are so high that nobody can ever get the bond to appeal, and it means that they preclude themselves from being reversed on appeal,” Dershowitz said on Newsmax’s“Wake Up America.” “It’s unconscionable, and the state of New York has to change the process. I would hope that the New York Court of Appeals would do something about it.
“It just gives the judges the incentive to impose high fines to avoid being reversed on appeal. In this case, the fine was outrageous and will be lowered on appeal. Nobody has ever heard of a fine of close to a half a billion dollars without a finding of any damage whatsoever. Nobody was hurt. No lender, no bank was hurt. The money was made up.”
Trump has thus far been unable to obtain a bond that would allow him to appeal the $464 million judgment against him without posting the full amount himself, his attorneys said Monday. Trump must either find the cash or post a bond to prevent New York authorities from seizing his properties while he appeals last month’s ruling.
Dershowitz said Justice Arthur Engoron imposed such a high fine to prevent Trump from being able to appeal.
“The purpose of imposing so high a fine was precisely to prevent the appellate courts from slapping down the judge and saying, What are you thinking? That kind of money for this kind of event?” Dershowitz said. “It’s a cruel and unusual fine in violation of the Eighth Amendment and the process by which he’s being denied an appeal is also in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
“I hope his lawyers will bring these matters to the attention of the higher courts because it affects not only Donald Trump. This kind of a tactic, this ploy, could be used by judges against anybody. Impose a high fine, make it impossible for you to raise the bail and then avoid being reversed on appeal.”
Compounding Trump’s legal woes, Dershowitz said, is the difficulty in obtaining first-rate legal counsel due to a campaign of intimidation.
“Trump has had a hard time getting the top, top, top-tier attorneys in many instances because there’s an organization called Project 65, a McCarthy-ite left-wing organization which has as its goal deterring lawyers from representing Trump,” Dershowitz said. “They file bar charges, including one against me, and any other lawyer who defends Trump.
“I’ve had lawyers call me and say we’d love to defend the former president, but we can’t afford to have a bar charge. I’m obviously fighting mine — everybody should.
“There’s a systematic effort by this McCarthy-ite, unethical Project 65 to prevent lawyers from defending Trump and, unfortunately, it’s working.”
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Why did President Joe Biden reverse former President Donald Trump’s order excluding noncitizens from being counted in the census, while simultaneously issuing a slew of executive orders decimating the integrity of our southern border? While illegal immigrants cannot vote in elections (despite Democrats’ best efforts), the left is using their illegal presence to rig elections by shifting the political landscape through apportionment.
Both congressional and electoral college apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area. Trump signed a memo in July of 2020 that barred illegal immigrants from being counted in the census, which is used to apportion representation in Washington. Biden, however, reversed the policy and ordered the census to include illegal immigrants and other noncitizens.
This means that American citizens aren’t receiving balanced representation in their government.
States can pick up — or lose — a congressional seat depending on the size of their population, despite the fact that some of that population may not even be allowed to vote. Millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom are in large, left-leaning cities, dilute the voting power of American citizens who may live in a mildly populated area composed of legal residents.
Democrat New York Rep. Yvette Clark said during a 2021 hearing that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”
NY Congresswoman Clarke (D) saying the quiet part out loud about the border:
Clark’s resurfaced clip prompted Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and others to introduce the “Equal Representation Act” which would mandate only legal citizens are counted for congressional districts and the Electoral College map.
Sanctuary Cities
So-called “sanctuary cities,” which promise not to enforce immigration laws and often guarantee lodging to illegal residents, have long blurred the lines of law, bucking federal immigration policy and then begging taxpayers to foot the bill. But despite the drain on government resources — and sometimes violence — these policies invite, these cities and left-leaning states have reason to incentivize illegal immigrants because it helps them adjust for apportionment.
As residents flee blue states like California and New York for more family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly states like Florida and Texas, Democrats need to recoup their population losses. Illegal immigrants inflate the census data, which in turn could help Democrats retain their power.
Constitutionally Suspect
The framers likely would not support Biden’s position that illegal immigrants deserve to be counted in apportionment to determine representation.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment stipulated that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”
But “whole number of persons” was likely not intended to encompass those illegally residing in the states.
Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.
The three-fifths compromise also lessened the incentive for slaveholding states to import more slaves in order to expand their population and increase their representation.
No ‘Colorable Constitutional Claim’
Lower courts had blocked Trump’s memorandum from taking effect after 23 states challenged the memo, saying it violated the Constitution and federal census statutes. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on the question nor answered whether the word “persons” encompasses illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment. But the high court has previously ruled in Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous court:
Neither the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.
If voting, which is a benefit exclusively for citizens, is off-limits to illegal immigrants, it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents. And yet, thanks to Democrats, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
A private grant for K-5 pilot programs in civics education in California, Georgia, Missouri, New York, and Wisconsin promotes a radical agenda, including ideological “action civics” as a substitute for the traditional approach. (Photo illustration: skynesher/Getty Images)
Everyone agrees that American students need better civics education.
Civic knowledge in America is abysmal. Fewer than half of American adults can name the three branches of government—and a quarter can’t name any branch at all.
Likewise, a quarter of Americans couldn’t name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.
That’s why supporters of civics education might be inclined to celebrate the recent announcement that a private initiative called Educating for American Democracy would award $600,000 in grants for K-5 pilot implementation projects to applicants from California, Georgia, Missouri, New York, and Wisconsin.
But for supporters of true civics education, popping the champagne in this case would be a grave mistake.
“EAD is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” warns Mark Bauerlein, a professor emeritus at Emory University. In his telling, the seemingly innocuous goals of Educating for American Democracy, such as inculcating an “inquisitive mindset towards civics and history,” mask a more radical agenda. As Bauerlein explains:
Yes, [Educating for American Democracy] contains a few traditionalist elements that deflect the charge of anti-conservatism. Overall, however, the EAD Roadmap circumscribes those elements with identity politics that left-wing teachers can plunder all year long. Here is what EAD really means by ‘inquisitive mindset’: a takedown of heroes, emphasis on victims (women and racial minorities), denial of American exceptionalism, and a focus on the failings of the founding.
According to David Randall, director of research at the National Association of Scholars, Educating for American Democracy is among the worst civics education resources.
Why the poor grade? Randall said EAD is “the central political-administrative push to reshape American civics education into a radical mold,” with the goal “to get every state civics education standard aligned for action civics and abbreviating as much as possible traditional civics education.”
What is “action civics”? According to the Pedagogy Companion to the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, it is “a specialized form of project-based learning that emphasizes youth voice and expertise based on their own capabilities and experience, learning by direct engagement with a democratic system and institutions, and reflection on impact.”
If you’re still confused, that’s because, as Randall observes, the proponents of action civics and other radical pedagogies use “impenetrable, jargon-heavy terms” to mask their true agenda.
In his report, Randall explains what action civics really entails:
What this means is that in ‘action civics’ history and government classes, students spend class time and receive class credit for work with ‘nongovernmental community organizations.’ This substitution degrades teachers’ and students’ esteem for classroom instruction, which is deemed not to have sufficient civic purpose in itself. It reduces the scarce time available for students actually to learn about the history of their country and the nature of their republic.
Most importantly, it introduces a pedagogy that facilitates teachers’ ability to impose their personal predilections on their students, by influencing the process by which students choose ‘community partners’ with which to work. It also facilitates the ability of peer pressure to impose group predilections on individual, dissenting students. We may note that the advocates of ‘action civics’ explicitly distinguish this activity from volunteering: action civics is meant to change the political system, not to support civil society.
In other words, Randall explains, in place of real civics, action civics “substitutes radical progressive pedagogy as a vocational training for activism.”
In action civics courses, students get class credit for attending protests or supporting progressive organizations. The EAD website’s “Educator Resources” includes links to resources from left-wing organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose “Learning for Justice” curriculum provides lessons on the “concepts of intersectionality, privilege and oppression.”
Instead of inculcating students with a Madisonian appreciation for our constitutional order, EAD-backed action civics programs train Alinskyite activists.
It’s easy to see why the Democrat-controlled Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and public school districts in Los Angeles and New York are excited to accept EAD funds. What’s harder to understand is why the Georgia Department of Education would be.
Georgia’s superintendent of schools, Richard Woods, is a Republican who previously wrote that the “ideology of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has no place in our schools and classrooms” and cautioned that “[w]e must be vigilant against embracing polarizing practices that only seek to divide us.”
Vigilance against embracing radical and polarizing practices in education is certainly necessary. Georgia policymakers should start by exercising greater vigilance over the grants they accept to further civics education.
On Wednesday, a Manhattan judge denied a motion to dismiss several indictments filed against Marine Daniel Penny in relation to the death of an erratic ex-convict.
The incident in question occurred on May 21, when Jordan Neely — who had been arrested 44 times for “criminal conduct” and, at the time, “had an outstanding warrant for felony assault” — began threatening and getting violent with NYC subway passengers. During the episode, Neely allegedly kept repeating the phrases, “I’m going to kill you,” “I’m prepared to go to jail for life,” and “I’m willing to die.”
In response, Penny and two of his fellow passengers attempted to restrain Neely, which involved the former placing the latter in a headlock. Neely ultimately died during the encounter, with NYC’s medical examiner ruling the death a homicide.
Penny — who is currently free on $100,000 bail — was indicted by a grand jury in June “on one count each of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter.” If convicted, the former Marine could face up to 19 years in prison, according to the New York Post.
In his Wednesday ruling, Judge Maxwell Wiley reportedly denied Penny’s motion to dismiss the manslaughter case “because of alleged issues with prosecutors’ instructions to the grand jury and claims that the medical examiner didn’t establish that Penny’s actions killed Neely.” According to the Post, Wiley claimed Neely’s death certificate and testimony from the case’s medical examiner provided enough corroboration to “establish that defendant’s actions caused the death of Neely.”
Penny’s next court hearing is scheduled for March 20.
Unequal Application of the Law
Whereas Penny‘s ongoing prosecution and the criminalization of defending oneself and others against a threatening agitator is egregious, what’s particularly offensive iscity residents’ unequal application of a single standard of justice for individuals who partake in similar acts of alleged misconduct.
Similar to Penny, Queens resident Jordan Williams — who is black — was charged by a Brooklyn prosecutor in June for his role in the death of an ex-convict on a Brooklyn subway. Video footage of the incident reportedly showed ex-con Devictor Ouedraogo “choking Williams and slugging his girlfriend,” actions which resulted in Williams stabbing Ouedraogo and the latter’s death.
This led prosecutors to charge Williams with “manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.”
Unlike Penny, however, prosecutors’ request that Williams be placed on a $100,000 cash bail was denied by a local judge. Less than a month later, a grand jury dismissed Williams’ charges altogether.
Neither Penny nor Williams should have been charged in the first place. Both men were clearly defending themselves and others against threatening, violent agitators. But NYC residents’ decision to indict Penny and not Williams is further emblematic of Democrats’ hierarchical worldview.
The American left doesn’t believe in a single standard of justice. Rather, it supports and actively fosters a system that levies punishment based on one’s political affiliation or identitarian features such as race or sexual orientation — not the merits of the case. It’s through this distorted worldview that NYC Democrats believe that Williams — who is black and therefore “oppressed” — should go unpunished while Penny — who is white, therefore privileged and an “oppressor” — should have the book thrown at him.
For Democrats, the facts of a case don’t matter. All that matters is whether the person on trial is wearing their team’s jersey. Everything else is secondary.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Barred from giving a formal closing argument, Donald Trump still got a brief chance to speak in court at the conclusion of his New York civil trial Thursday, calling the proceedings “a fraud on me” before the judge cut him off.
“We have a situation where I am an innocent man,” the former president said. “I’m being persecuted by someone running for office and I think you have to go outside the bounds.”
After about six minutes, Judge Arthur Engoron — who had denied Trump permission earlier to give a closing statement at the trial — cut him off and recessed for lunch.
The exchange took place hours after authorities responded to a bomb threat at the judge’s house.
Police checked out the threat at Engoron’s Long Island home, which came a day after he denied the former president’s extraordinary request to deliver his own courtroom close, officials said. The proceedings were not delayed.
Trump, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has repeatedly disparaged Engoron, accusing him in a social media post Wednesday night of working closely with the New York attorney general “to screw me.”
“At this moment the judge is not letting me make the summation because I’ll bring up things he doesn’t want to hear,” Trump said as he walked into the courtroom, characterizing the decision as “political interference.”
“Forty-four days of trial — not one witness came into this courtroom, your honor, and said there was fraud,” Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said, contending his client “should get a medal” for his business acumen instead of punishment he deemed the “corporate death penalty.”
At 5:30 a.m. on Thursday, hours before the trial’s final day was to begin, Nassau County police said they responded to a “swatting incident” at Engoron’s Great Neck home. Nothing amiss was found at the location, officials said.
The false report came days after a fake emergency call reporting a shooting at the home of the judge in Trump’s Washington, D.C. criminal case. The incidents are among a recent spate of similar false reports at the homes of public officials.
Taking the bench a few minutes late, Engoron made no mention of the incident at his home.
On Wednesday, Engoron had nixed an unusual plan by Trump to deliver his own closing remarks in the courtroom, in addition to summations from his legal team, after lawyers for the former president would not agree to the judge’s demand that he stick to “relevant” matters.”
That left the last words to the lawyers in a trial over allegations that Trump exaggerated his wealth on financial statements he provided to banks, insurance companies and others.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, wants the judge to impose $370 million in penalties. Trump says he did nothing wrong. He contends outside accountants that helped prepare the statements should’ve flagged any discrepancies and that the documents came with disclaimers that shield him from liability.
The former president had hoped to make that argument personally, but the judge — initially open to the idea — said no after a Trump lawyer missed a deadline for agreeing to ground rules. Among them, Engoron warned that Trump couldn’t use his closing remarks to “deliver a campaign speech” or use the opportunity to impugn the judge and his staff.
“This entire case is a manufactured claim to pursue a political agenda,” Kise said in his closing argument. “It has been press releases and posturing but no evidence.”
Lawyers from James’ office were to deliver their closing argument Thursday afternoon.
Trump returned to court as a spectator Thursday despite the death of his mother in-law, Amalija Knavs, and the launch of the presidential primary season Monday with the Iowa caucus.
Since the trial began Oct. 2, Trump has gone to court nine times to observe, testify and complain to TV cameras about the case, which he called a “witch hunt and a disgrace.”
He clashed with Engoron and state lawyers during 3½ hours on the witness stand in November and remains under a limited gag order after making a disparaging and false social media post about the judge’s law clerk.
Thursday’s arguments were part of a busy legal and political stretch for Trump.
On Tuesday, he was in court in Washington, D.C., to watch appeals court arguments over whether he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election — one of four criminal cases against him. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
In New York, James sued Trump in 2022 under a state law that gives the state attorney general broad power to investigate allegations of persistent fraud in business dealings.
Kise argued the case amounted to the “weaponization” of a consumer protection statute and, urging Engoron to consider his legacy as a judge, warned that a ruling in the state’s favor would have a chilling effect on every company doing business in the state.
Engoron decided some of the key issues before testimony began. In a pretrial ruling, he found that Trump had committed years of fraud by lying about his riches on financial statements with tricks like claiming his Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three times its actual size.
The trial involves six undecided claims, including allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.
Trump’s company and two of his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are also defendants. Eric Trump was also in court for closing arguments.
Besides monetary damages, James wants Trump and his co-defendants barred from doing business in New York.
State lawyers say that by making himself seem richer, Trump qualified for better loan terms from banks, saving him at least $168 million.
Kise, however, said the bank didn’t lose out on anything.
He pointed to testimony from bank officials that the former president more than qualified for special services afforded to ultra-rich people, and that the bank adjusted his numbers downward and still loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars.
Kise, praising Trump as “part of the fabric of the commercial real estate industry” for a half-century, pointed to Trump’s testimony that he intended lenders to do their own research and vetting after receiving his financial statements.
The lawyer also argued that the documents understated — rather than overvalued — the former president’s net worth.
Kise acknowledged that some holdings may have been listed “higher by immaterial” amounts, but he added” “there’s plenty of assets that were undervalued by substantial sums.”
Engoron said he is deciding the case because neither side asked for a jury and state law doesn’t allow for juries for this type of lawsuit. He said he hopes to have a decision by the end of the month.
Last month, in a ruling denying a defense bid for an early verdict, the judge signaled he’s inclined to find Trump and his co-defendants liable on at least some claims.
“Valuations, as elucidated ad nauseum in this trial, can be based on different criteria analyzed in different ways,” Engoron wrote in the Dec. 18 ruling. “But a lie is still a lie.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Former President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he “wanted to testify” in his civil fraud trial in New York on Monday, but said he couldn’t because of the limited gag order from Judge Arthur Engoron.
“I wanted to testify on Monday, despite the fact that I already testified successfully, answering all questions having to do with the Fake, No Victims, No Jury lawsuit, thrown at me by the Corrupt Racist A.G., Letitia James, and presided over by a Trump hating judge who suffers from a massive case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and is a puppet for the CROOKED A.G.,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social page.
Trump added that Engoron “put a GAG ORDER on me, even when I testify, totally taking away my constitutional right to defend myself,” and said his side is appealing. “How would you like to be a witness and not be allowed free and honest speech. THE TRIAL IS RIGGED. I DID NOTHING WRONG!!!”
Trump on Sunday said he wouldn’t testify, saying that the evidence in his case is strong.
In a statement to ABC News on Monday, Trump attorney Chris Kise said he also partially blamed the limited gag order for Trump’s decision against taking the stand.
“There is really nothing more to say to a Judge who has imposed an unconstitutional gag order and thus far appears to have ignored President Trump’s testimony and that of everyone else involved in the complex financial transactions at issue in the case,” Kise said.
Meanwhile, Engoron said Tuesday that he will allow James to call two witnesses during the state’s rebuttal after the Trump team rests its case, and Kise argued that the “government has held these witnesses back. “
State Attorney Kevin Wallace said the rebuttal witnesses — former Trump Organization executive Kevin Sneddon and Cornell professor Eric Lewis — will only discuss arguments made in court, but Kise said they’ll be “filling a hole” left by the defense team’s lack of evidence.
Engoron, though, said he saw “no reason not to allow these two purported experts to testify.” Trump attorneys said they may present an additional witness after the state’s rebuttal.
This article is part one of Crisis in New York, a series examining the effects public policies have on the city’s already strained housing, law enforcement and drug services.
NEW YORK CITY — Frank Tammaro, a 94-year-old Army veteran, loved the senior center he’d called home for five years until he was told to find somewhere new to live.
“I felt horrible,” Tammaro told Fox News. “It’s no joke getting thrown out of a house.”
Months later, after two moves and an injury that put him in the hospital, the senior was living with his daughter when he learned migrants were moving into his old residence, free of charge.
A lifelong New Yorker, Tammaro says he grew up in the “slums” of the Lower East Side during the ‘30s and ’40s. “I do get upset when I see them handing out all this money and all these things, and I’m paying taxes and getting kicked out,” he said. “I’ve never got anything from the city. Or the state.”
Tammaro planned to live out his years at the Island Shores Senior Residence when notices went up in September 2022 informing residents the facility was shutting down and they needed to pack up and leave by March. Many of the 53 seniors living there, including Tammaro, ignored the letters for months until it was brought to their attention that they only had weeks to find somewhere else to live.
“It was scary,” Tammaro recalled. “Very scary. Especially when I don’t get around like I used to. I didn’t know where I was going.”
The facility’s owner, a New York City nonprofit called Homes for the Homeless, said in a statement that it intended to sell Island Shores “to focus on its core mission of serving homeless families” and the preferred buyer “would be another senior operator.”
Staff assured the upset seniors that Island Shores would likely be sold and reopened. However, Tammaro’s daughter, Barbara Annunziata, was skeptical of the claim and reached out to the building’s management for answers.
Frank Tammaro lived in Island Shores Senior Residence for five years before he was told he and all the other residents needed to move out by March 1. (Fox News/Megan Myers)
“We knew something was going to go in there,” Annunziata said. “They kept saying, ‘oh, they’re going to sell it. They’re going to sell it.’ That’s what they kept telling me.”
During the Korean War, Tammaro served stateside for two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps fixing telephone lines and improving communication between military camps. He was one of eight veterans who lived in Island Shores before it shut down.
“I was not in combat,” Tammaro said. “But these boys that went over and went into combat — and now they’re all settled in there with their lives and everything else — and they’re all disrupted, it isn’t fair.”
When he was evicted from Island Shores, the 94-year-old had difficulty finding a new assisted living facility that suited his needs.
“I was pretty slow getting out,” Tammaro said. “I figured they were gonna have my luggage on the curb.”
The 94-year-old veteran was living with his daughter just a few minutes from Island Shores when he learned the senior center was being converted into a temporary shelter for migrants. (Fox News/Teny Sahakian/Megan Myers )
Shortly after moving to another senior residence, Tammaro had a fall that landed him in the hospital. He told his daughter he didn’t want to return to the new facility.
“He hated it there,” Annunziata said. “And for somebody his age, why should he live the rest of his life someplace he didn’t like?”
In the end, Annunziata moved her father into her home in Midland Beach, New York, where she cares for him around the clock.
“I can’t leave him home alone. … I raised my kids already. They’re all grown up,” she said. “I mean, he’s a piece of cake, but still he’s 94 years old.”
In August, Tammaro found out along with the rest of the community that Homes for the Homeless had made an arrangement with city hall to move migrants into Island Shores.
The facility was one of 200 buildings converted into emergency shelters to house some of the 130,000 migrants that landed in New York City after crossing the southern border since October 2022. The influx of asylum seekers has stretched the city’s budget and many of its services to their limits, with Mayor Eric Adams saying they are in “a desperate environment” during his trip to Mexico in October. And with 10,000 new refugees entering the city each month, he said there is “no end” in sight.
In September, 15 asylum-seeking families moved into the Island Shores. As the news spread, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the facility, and 10 people were arrested for trying to block a bus with migrants from reaching the building, according to law enforcement.
Tammaro’s daughter, Barbara Annunziata, is still angry that her father was kicked out of his home and said the situation is “not fair to anybody.” (Fox News/Teny Sahakian/Megan Myers)
“I don’t understand it at all. It’s not fair to anybody,” Annunziata said. “These migrants, they’re getting everything. They’re getting everything and I can’t get nothing for [Tammaro]. It angers me.”
She said she’s struggled to get help for her father. His insurance rejected any long-term request for care.
“I can’t even get him an aide. I only could get him an aide for 30 days and then they cancel it,” Annunziata told Fox News. “So what, he has to pay for it then?”
“Meanwhile, [migrants] get everything. And he’s not entitled to anything,” she added
After the “horrible experience,” Tammaro has settled in with his daughter, only a few minutes away from his old home, which is now called the Midland Beach Migrant Center.
“I felt bitter at the beginning,” Tammaro told Fox News. “But I’m satisfied where I am now.”
“I was satisfied where I was until they threw me out,” he added. “But making the best of a bad situation, that’s what we’re doing.”
Annunziata remains angry about how her father was treated.
“They’re worried about the migrants more than they’re worried about the U.S. citizens,” she said.
Homes for the Homeless declined to comment.
Megan Myers is an associate producer/writer with Fox News Digital Originals.
The 2024 Republican presidential front-runner is faced with 91 state and federal charges one year from Election Day. After a series of failed attempts to capture the criminal conviction of Donald Trump, Democrats have charged their primary political opponent with nearly 100 crimes to thwart the former president’s triumphant return to the Oval Office. Here’s a “who’s who” of the key players in the Democrats’ latest crusade to achieve the top item on their policy agenda.
Alvin Bragg
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was the first prosecutor to land the coveted indictment of Democrats’ Public Enemy No. 1. In April, the New York prosecutor unveiled a 34-count indictment against Trump, carrying a maximum 136-year prison sentence. The charges stem from 2016 hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels in a case prosecutors previously declined to pursue.
The Manhattan charges, however, marked the fulfillment of a campaign promise Bragg made two years ago to prosecute the former president. Prosecuting Trump was apparently the top issue of his platform in 2021.
“Bragg often reminded voters on the campaign trail that he helped sue the Trump administration ‘more than a hundred times’ as a deputy in the New York state attorney general’s office,” Reuters reported that year.
The 50-year-old prosecutor’s own supporters pointed to his ability to pursue Trump in court as a reason to back him. The New York Times reported on Bragg’s endorsement from a former U.S. attorney in July 2021.
“Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump,” the Times read.
Bragg was also promoted to his current office with financial support from left-wing billionaire financier George Soros. The super PAC backed by Soros, Color of Change, pledged to bankroll Bragg’s campaign with a seven-figure sum in the spring of 2021. Soon after the cash infusion, the committee pulled back $500,000 of the donation when Bragg faced allegations of sexual misconduct of his own.
Bragg’s record in New York, meanwhile, has been one of unleashed crime while prosecutors pursue politicized investigations against the most popular Republican in the country. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Soros admitted to backing candidates who promised to be soft on crime, branded as “reform prosecutors.” Bragg has held up to the pledge by prioritizing Trump instead of dangerous criminals. According to The New York Times, major crime spiked 22 percent during Bragg’s first year in office.
Letitia James
While Bragg pursues criminal charges against the former president, New York Attorney General Letitia James has Trump in civil court on allegations of fraud. In September last year, the attorney general filed a $250 million fraud suit with the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, accusing the former president of inflating corporate assets to obtain financial benefits.
“We found that Mr. Trump, his children, and the corporation used more than 200 false asset valuations over a 10-year period,” said James at a press conference.
James, 65, won in a partial summary judgment a year later, and in October, the trial began after the judge found the Trump family, including Trump himself, liable for fraud. The judge in the case ordered the termination of Trump’s New York business license and will now examine charges by James to determine additional penalties. In October, an appeals court put a hold on the judge’s mandate to dissolve Trump’s business in the state.
The aggressive effort against the Trump family’s New York business empire marks another campaign promise fulfilled by the state attorney general. Similar to Bragg, James ran for office in 2018 on a platform to prosecute the president. When first campaigning for the statewide job five years ago, James railed against the Republican president as “illegitimate” and an “embarrassment.”
“NY Attorney General Letitia James has a long history of fighting Trump and other powerful targets,” headlined an Associated Press profile of James in September.
“Letitia James fixated on Donald Trump as she campaigned for New York attorney general, branding the then-president a ‘con man’ and ‘carnival barker’ and pledging to shine a ‘bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings,’” the AP reported. “Five years later, James is on the verge of disrupting Trump’s real estate empire.”
James was reelected last fall just more than a month after she unveiled the $250 million lawsuit against the Trump family. Now James is on the cusp of capturing Trump’s corporate exile from the Empire State.
Arthur Engoron
The state-friendly judge presiding over James’ civil lawsuit against Trump is a Democrat who held the former president in contempt last year over subpoena violations. Arthur Engoron is a judge in the New York Supreme Court’s 1st Judicial District who ran unopposed for the seat in the 2015 general election.
In September, Judge Engoron devalued the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Florida estate from between $426 million and $612 million, as estimated by the Trumps, to a mere $18 and $28 million.
The stunning devaluation stands in contrast to smaller properties at Palm Beach, which sold for far more. Rush Limbaugh’s former residence, for example, sold for $155 million despite a $51 million appraisal. Mar-a-Lago, meanwhile, is the only property at Palm Beach to face the waterfront on both the ocean and the waterway.
Last month, Engoron also implemented a gag order to prevent Trump from even speaking out against the accusations against him. Trump was fined twice over violations of the gag order for a combined $15,000.
Jack Smith
Jack Smith, 54, a veteran prosecutor with years spent at the Justice Department, was appointed last November to lead two of the federal efforts seeking Trump’s conviction. Now special counsel in a pair of cases prosecuting Democrats’ top political opponent, Smith was previously head of the DOJ public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015. Among his most notable cases was the prosecution of former Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell, whom the Supreme Court exonerated of a bribery conviction in 2016. Smith was also involved in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax scandal targeting conservative nonprofits.
Now Smith is spearheading the federal government’s criminal efforts against Trump regarding classified documents and the events related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In June, Trump was indicted with 37 counts of mishandling classified information, with three more charges handed down in the case about two months later. Smith indicted Trump with an additional four charges in a separate case this summer over objections to electoral certification, such as Democrats have made for decades.
Tanya Chutkan
Smith’s team at the Justice Department could not have landed a more friendly judge in the government’s Jan. 6 case against Trump than U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. An activist judge with an obvious animus against the former president and his supporters, the Obama appointee was assigned to preside over the politically fraught Jan. 6 case after building a reputation as “a tough punisher of Capitol rioters.”
“Other judges typically have handed down sentences that are more lenient than those requested by prosecutors,” the AP reported. “Chutkan, however, has matched or exceeded prosecutors’ recommendations in 19 of her 38 sentences. In four of those cases, prosecutors weren’t seeking any jail time at all.”
When Trump complained the federal charges against him amounted to election interference by the DOJ, Chutkan shrugged off the accusations, saying, “That’s how it has to be.” Chutkan previously condemned comparisons between the Capitol turmoil and the far-left riots that characterized the summer of 2020 in other rulings of pro-Trump demonstrators. The fiery riots, she claimed, were actually “the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights.” Chutkan said comparisons between the two “ignore[] a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”
In September, Chutkan predictably denied Trump’s request to recuse herself from the Jan. 6 trial. In October, Chutkan handed down another gag order to prevent the president from speaking publicly and openly about the case. On Nov. 1, Chutkan handed down an order allowing Smith’s team to conceal evidence from Trump’s attorneys that the DOJ has identified as “classified.”
Fani Willis
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia upset a six-term incumbent when she defeated her former boss, Paul Howard, three years ago. Willis, who beat Howard in the primary runoff, carried the general election unopposed after no Republicans qualified for the November contest.
Willis’ investigation of Trump and the former president’s campaign team was one of her first acts in office and will define her legacy. In August, the DA for Fulton County, which covers most of Atlanta, charged Trump with 13 counts related to the former president’s efforts to protest aspects of the 2020 election. The Georgia prosecutor also indicted 18 Trump allies, several of whom have taken plea deals. Trump adviser Jeffrey Clark, however, filed a motion on Oct. 31 to dismiss the “massive and grotesque abuse of prosecutorial power.”
A September report from The Federalist revealed Willis possesses evidence exonerating Georgia’s alternate electors but continues to pursue criminal convictions anyway.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
A “disinformation” group is out with new reports flagging online information as “misinformation” for corporate tech giants known for censoring such info — even if the content is true.
VineSight, a Tel Aviv-based tech company with offices in New York, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to scan the internet for “toxic narratives” and “misinformation.” A thorough examination of the company’s recent reports, however, reveals so-called “toxic narratives” and “misinformation” are synonymous with conservative arguments and inconvenient truths.
The company’s report on clean energy, for example, highlights a post from a “bot-like” account as misinformation that reads, “China emits the most CO2.” The statement, however, is verifiably true. China is by far the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet and has been for almost two decades.
VineSight’s clean energy report also highlights statements from human accounts as misinformation including, “Climate advocates are hypocrites,” and “[electric vehicles] repeatedly catch on fire.” Climate advocates, however, are often hypocrites when they endlessly lecture about fossil fuels while flying to glitzy conferences courtesy of private air travel. And electric vehicles, including bikes and scooters, are seeing a rise in spontaneous combustion triggered by the malfunction of lithium-ion batteries.
On Facebook, allegedly misleading viral topics include a claim from conservative radio host Glenn Beck saying an “EV battery factory needs fossil fuels to run” and another from Breitbart that “Biden’s green policies benefit China.” But studies have shown that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts — in part because of the pollution-inducing production of lithium-ion batteries, a market China dominates. In other words, the more President Joe Biden subsidizes rich Americans buying electric vehicles, the more Beijing stands to profit.
Almost every energy-related statement VineSight flagged in its “misinformation” report is backed by either an outright truth or, at minimum, evidence to support the claim. For example, VineSight identified as misinformation a statement attributed to former President Donald Trump that went viral on TikTok: “The Green New Deal is the Destruction of Our Country.” The Green New Deal is a far-left proposal to radically reengineer the nation’s economy and power grid to prioritize climate change above all else. Residents in California are already suffering the effects of state officials implementing aspects of the Green New Deal on a local level; frequent blackouts and strict rules on water use are the new norm.
VineSight’s reports on climate change and voter fraud are not much different. Its climate change report this month flagged topics such as “climate change is a hoax” and “there is no climate crisis” as top examples of viral misinformation. Yet earlier this year, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist became the second Nobel laureate to sign a declaration with more than 1,600 other scientists that emphatically says, “There is no climate emergency.”
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” reads the declaration, organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
Another climate “topic” written off as disinformation by the misinformation group is, “China opens a new coal transportation network.” Yet here’s a headline from National Public Radio (NPR) in March: “China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds.”
A VineSight press release in May celebrated the firm’s updated disinformation technology to “not only identify and alert organizations to disinformation attacks faster but also help mitigate, counter-message, takedown or label content before it damages a company’s reputation and business.”
“Today VineSight’s premier solution is used by major Fortune 500 brands including financial, manufacturing and pharmaceutical institutions, political campaigns, and other causes across the globe,” the company wrote.
The same press release highlights how “VineSight works with the terms of service of each social platform and where possible, get [sic] messages labeled or removed, to counteract any attacks or minimize virality.” In other words, by VineSight’s own admission, it shares its reports with major tech platforms to flag posts for censorship.
The company also admits its concerns about “disinformation” are related to election outcomes. “Disinformation is disrupting the legitimacy of the election process, threatening democracy, and allowing extremist views to become prevalent,” VineSight said in its May press release.
VineSight’s “tracking report” on voter fraud identified conservative themes on election integrity as “viral misinformation and toxic narratives.”
Here are a few The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway highlighted on X:
The topics also included “allowing illegal immigrants to vote is an insult to Americans,” and “MAGA movement was able to make election fraud a top voters issue.” The group also flagged the topic: “the 2020 election was stolen and now Democrats are trying to interfere with 2024.”
Democrats did of course rig the 2020 election — a conspiracy they’ve admitted to — by way of exploiting Covid-19 to transform “Election Day” into election season with the radical expansion of mail-in voting, the least secure format to conduct elections. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also dumped some $350 million into the leftist nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, which funded and staffed local government election offices. These dollars flowed overwhelmingly to the blue areas of swing states, effectively making the operation a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
Then there was the collusion of Big Tech and the media, which openly suppressed blockbuster stories surrounding the corruption of the Democratic nominee and his involvement in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures. Hemingway wrote an entire 448-page book documenting the myriad ways Democrats rigged the 2020 contest.
As for the upcoming election, Trump, now the Republican front-runner in his third run for the White House, is faced with 91 felony indictments just over a year ahead of the next election. On Monday, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination was slapped with a gag order from an activist judge who effectively barred the former president from even campaigning against his top political opponent: the federal government. It bars Trump from publicly defending himself against attacks from potential witnesses, court personnel, or his federal prosecutors, including Special Counsel Jack Smith. According to VineSight, none of that constitutes election interference. Saying as much is amplifying “misinformation.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Former President Donald Trump ripped into the judge presiding over his $250 million civil case on Monday, saying the judge is “an operative” who should be disbarred.
Appearing on the steps of the courthouse during a lunch break after the morning session on the first day of the trial, Trump chided Judge Arthur Engoron.
“This is a judge that should be disbarred. This is a judge that should be out of office,” Trump said. “This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing. He’s interfering with an election, and it’s a disgrace.”
Trump also directed his ire toward New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the fraud trial against him, saying she should be focused on violent crime.
James is a “disgrace to our country. Take a look at Jack Smith. Take a look at these people,” Trump said, also tearing into Smith, the special counsel in two of Trump’s criminal trials. Smith has no part in this civil trial.
“We’re going to be here for months with a judge that already made up his mind. It’s ridiculous,” Trump said. “They waste their time with this, with banks that were very happy that got all their money back. They weren’t defrauded. I’ve been defrauded.”
Trump was referring to Engoron’s summary ruling last week, when the judge sided with James that Trump had committed fraud.
In Monday morning’s opening statements, the attorney general ‘s office accused Trump and his adult sons of deceiving banks, insurers, and others by habitually misstating his wealth in financial statements.
“No matter how powerful you are, and no matter how much money you think you have, no one is above the law,” James said on her way into the courthouse.
Engoron will also decide on six claims in the lawsuit brought by James, who is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York. It’s a nonjury trial because, as Engoron pointed out, Trump’s legal team failed to check a box that it preferred a jury trial.
Trump also took aim at a clerk in Engoron’s courtroom.
“This guy’s getting away with murder. And his clerk should not be allowed to be in his ear with every single question. You should take a look at her. She hates Trump even more than he does,” Trump said.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A New York state judge on Wednesday denied Donald Trump’s request to delay the start of a scheduled Oct. 2 trial in Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit accusing the former president, his family, and the Trump Organization of inflating the value of his assets.
Trump’s lawyers late Tuesday asked Justice Arthur F. Engoron to “briefly” delay the trial until three weeks after he ruled on both sides’ requests for summary judgments, which seek victory on various legal issues without the need for a trial.
“A trial of this magnitude should not begin in chaos,” his attorneys wrote. “The court and the defendants are entitled to know the claims and issues to be tried sufficiently in advance to prepare adequately for trial.”
Engoron called Trump’s arguments for a delay “completely without merit.”
Earlier this year he said the trial date would not change “come hell or high water.”
In a separate filing, Trump also asked that James withdraw what he called her “frivolous” motion to sanction the defendants and their lawyers $20,000 for continuing to raise arguments that Engoron has rejected.
James is seeking at least $250 million, and to bar Trump and his sons from leading their family business.
The defendants have denied wrongdoing, and Trump has called James’ case part of a partisan “witch hunt.”
In another legal development on Wednesday, a federal judge found Trump liable for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll by denying in 2019 that he had raped her, and said jurors will decide only how much Trump owes in damages.
Trump has separately pleaded not guilty to charges in four separate federal and state criminal indictments, including two indictments for attempting to reverse his 2020 election loss.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed legislation into law that has made the state a sanctuary for those who have illegally given children sex-change drugs, hormones, or surgeries. Hochul finalized the legislation ahead of her appearance at the New York City Pride parade according to TimCast, which was co-sponsored by four New York state senators.
Authorities in the state are henceforth prohibited from cooperating with investigations from other states into individuals who have broken related laws in their jurisdiction. The state will not provide information about or arrest individuals who have been involved with what is colloquially known as “gender-affirming care” by those who support sex changes for children. The changes also affect family law in New York; the state will not remove a child from their guardian if that person was attempting to illegally provide their child with a sex change.
New York Senate Bill S2475B “prohibits consideration of a law of another state that authorizes a child to be removed from their parent or guardian based on the parent or guardian allowing their child to receive gender-affirming care in custody cases,” the law reads.
Law enforcement agencies are barred from “cooperating with or providing information to any individual or out-of-state agency or department regarding the provision of lawful gender-affirming care performed in this state,” as well.
“I stand together with champions of this movement who have joined us today to say no more,” Hochul said, according to the Gothamist. “We will give you the template, rest of the country. We will show you what you need to do.”
The state now “prohibits the issuance of a subpoena in connection with certain out-of-state proceedings relating to seeking health or related information about people who come to New York to receive gender-affirming care,” and “prohibits the arrest of a person for performing or aiding in the lawful performance of gender-affirming care within this state.”
New York has become a state where children can unequivocally be given sex changes without punishment from the government as the bill plainly stated such a person cannot be arrested:
“A police officer may not arrest any person for performing or aiding in the performance of gender-affirming care within this state, or in procuring or aiding in the procurement of gender-affirming care in this state, if the gender-affirming care is performed in accordance with the provisions of any other applicable law of this state.”
TimCast also reported that Governor Hochul signed an amendment that required New York State employees to use “preferred pronouns” as well.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
If the veteran who restrained the homeless man is prosecuted, it will establish a right to terrorize subway passengers and help revive the ‘anti-racist’ assault on justice.
Daniel Penny is not going quietly to the slaughter. The 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran who took action when fellow subway passengers were being threatened by a maniacal homeless person has lawyered up and will need all the legal help he can get if he hopes to avoid spending decades in prison.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has assigned Joshua Steinglass, a veteran prosecutor who led the trial team in the case that prosecuted former President Donald Trump’s family business, to conduct the probe that will determine whether Penny will be put on trial for killing Jordan Neely. But the decision won’t be made in a vacuum. The liberal commentariat is already damning Penny as the civilian version of Derek Chauvin. Leftist politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., are accusing him of having committed a “murder” and Democrat and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is saying Penny’s actions were unjustified and demanding that “justice” be given Neely’s family.
Neely, the 30-year-old homeless person who died during an incident on a New York City subway train on May 1, had a record of mental illness. He had been arrested 44 times for criminal conduct and had an outstanding warrant for felony assault. On an F train stopped at the Broadway-Lafayette Street subway station in Manhattan, he allegedly began acting in a threatening manner to other passengers. It was at that point that Penny restrained him and put him in what appears on a cell phone video of part of the incident to be a chokehold.
In doing so, it could well be argued that he prevented Neely from committing another crime against a fellow passenger. Video released Sunday also seems to show Penny put Neely in a recovery position after Neely was subdued and appeared to be OK.
But the reason this case is already a cause Celebre, leading to leftist demonstrations in the subways and an endless stream of articles in corporate media, is that Neely’s fate is blamed on the supposed indifference of the public to the lives of the homeless.
Broader Racial Ramifications
Penny’s fate will, as Peachy Keenan wrote in The Federalist, be a test of whether young American men should dare to act courageously when others are in peril. But there’s even more at stake in this case. With Neely being anointed as the new George Floyd, the questions of whether Penny was right to restrain Neely or if he used inappropriate force to do so are merely sidebars to a broader narrative about American racism.
Floyd’s death became a metaphor for a myth about systemic police racism. Floyd’s actions the night of his death, his criminal record, and the fact that his body was full of what might have been a lethal dose of fentanyl were dismissed as irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that he was a black man and that the cop who had, in an act of undoubted callous brutality, snuffed out his life was white. In the name of a belief, however mistaken, that Floyd’s death was just one of countless incidents in which blacks were being slaughtered with impunity, millions took to the streets in “mostly peaceful” riots that shook the nation.
More than that, it set off a moral panic in virtually every sector of American life that elevated the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to a new secular religion — since accepted by the Biden administration as mandatory for every government agency and department — that treats color-blind policies and even the goal of equal opportunity as forms of racism that must be eradicated.
Parallels to 1984 Case
Penny’s actions might, for those with a long memory of controversial New York subway criminal controversies, have more in common with those of Bernhard Goetz than of Chauvin. In 1984, Goetz opened fire on four black teenagers he said were trying to mug him on a No. 2 train. In an era of rampant crime, Goetz was largely supported by public opinion and acquitted of attempted murder, though he was fined and sentenced to six months in prison for illegal weapons possession. One of the people he shot, who was paralyzed in the incident, later won a $43 million civil judgment against Goetz that, as late as 2017, still hadn’t been paid.
As racially charged as that incident was, nearly 40 years later, we are living in a very different post-Black Lives Matter world. Any New Yorker who rides the subways knows how dangerous they have been made by authorities’ willingness to tolerate the presence of threatening people. But someone who isn’t a “person of color” is always going to be assumed to be in the wrong in any violent confrontation today, when the claim that America is an irredeemably racist nation is treated as inarguable by the chattering classes.
The prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse case told him that “everybody takes a beating sometimes” and that he had no right to defend himself against lethal threats from armed BLM rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Penny’s chances of winning a trial in a New York City courtroom in 2023 are immeasurably lower than were Goetz’s.
Leftist Campaign Against Justice
As such, and regardless of the facts of the case, the campaign against Penny must be viewed as merely the next stage in a long-running leftist campaign against the justice system in which pro-criminal prosecutors like Bragg, elected with the help of leftist billionaire George Soros, are in the forefront. The sympathy for Neely, which is framed as compassion for the homeless, is akin to the so-called decarceration movement that takes it as a given that too many nonwhite people are being jailed for crimes and calls to defund the police.
The prosecution of the ex-Marine will not just establish a precedent that there is a “right” of a deranged, drug-addicted person to terrorize others with impunity. It will also, like Floyd’s death or that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or a dozen other equally dubious cases, be routinely cited from now on as proof of American racism and a reason for doubling down on woke policies that will further divide and racialize the nation.
Talk about our indifference to the lives of the homeless is gaslighting, since it is the policies of the political left that have allowed such persons to camp out on streets or in subway cars rather than be taken by police to shelters and hospitals. The freedom for the homeless that has been established in New York — where the “broken windows” policing of the administrations of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg has been abandoned — means the rights of other citizens to a livable city are abrogated. When people like Neely can harass people into buying their safety with donations in honor of performances like his Michael Jackson imitations or violent rants, then the rule of law is dead.
Leftists believe that, like Floyd, Neely died for our sins as a racist nation. That is why he is now being elevated to the status of secular saint regardless of or perhaps even because of his dysfunction and willingness to threaten others. The Floyd case led to de-policing throughout the country as cops, the only defense minority communities have against the black-on-black crime that afflicts their neighborhoods, have backed down in the face of prosecutions and demonization.
Penny’s prosecution will now pump new life into the BLM movement and ensure that public discourse about race and crime will continue to ignore the facts in favor of ideological myths that will send America’s cities into even greater squalor, violence, and racial conflict.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
A New York City law firm with “strong ties” to Democrats and the Biden administration, and a big-time fundraiser for both, lent the Manhattan district attorney three lawyers to help him take down Donald Trump. This cohort included former Special Assistant District Attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, whose leaked resignation letter appears responsible for the Manhattan prosecutor’s decision to indict Trump.
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a former president when he moved forward last week with the arraignment of Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The pathetic, barebones indictment was quickly denounced by pundits on both sides of the political aisle. Then on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee raised additional concerns about the role Matthew Colangelo, the former No. 3 man in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, played in the targeting of Trump.
While Bragg’s hiring of Colangelo to reportedly “jump-start” the investigation into Trump further indicates the indictment was politically motivated, the Manhattan D.A. office’s unprecedented use of outside, Democrat-connected lawyers to investigate Trump pre-dates Colangelo’s arrival by nearly a year.
A Pattern
In early to mid-February of 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, arranged for private criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to be a special assistant district attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Pomerantz, whom The New York Times noted was to work “solely on the Trump investigation,” took a temporary leave of absence from his law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he had defended former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., against alleged campaign finance violations. But even before being sworn in as a special assistant to the Manhattan D.A., Pomerantz had reportedly “been helping with the case informally for months…”
According to the Times, “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” One must wonder, then, how much more unusual it is for the Manhattan D.A.’s office to receive the “informal” assistance of a private criminal defense attorney. The legacy news outlet, however, justified the hiring of Pomerantz based on the “usual complexity” of “the two-and-a-half-year investigation of the former president and his family business.”
A few months later, the D.A.’s office welcomed two more outsiders, Elyssa Abuhoff and Caroline Williamson, who also both took leaves of absence from the New York powerhouse Paul, Weiss to work on the Trump investigation as special assistant district attorneys.
For a law firm to lend not one but three lawyers to the Manhattan D.A.’s office seems rather magnanimous, until you consider Paul, Weiss’s previous generosity to Joe Biden. During Biden’s White House run, the law firm hosted a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for about 100 guests.
The chair of the Paul, Weiss law firm, Brad Karp, also topped the list of Biden fundraisers, bundling at least $100,000 for the then-candidate. “As someone who cares passionately about preserving the rule of law, safeguarding our democracy and protecting fundamental liberties, I’ve been delighted to do everything I possibly can to support the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket,” Karp wrote in an email.
Karp’s support of the Democrat presidential ticket isn’t surprising given that his fellow Paul, Weiss partner Robert Schumer is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s brother.
Biden’s connection to the firm, however, dates much further back, with the former secretary of homeland security in the Obama-Biden administration, Jeh Johnson, also heralding from Paul, Weiss. Once elected president, Biden nominated Jonathan Kanter, a former partner of Paul, Weiss, to serve as the top antitrust enforcement official at the Justice Department. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Paul, Weiss has “emerge[d] as Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center.”
A Resignation
The three Paul, Weiss alumni sent to the Manhattan D.A.’s office to bolster the Trump investigations would all make news, but for different reasons. Pomerantz first garnered headlines when he resigned as a special assistant district attorney in early 2022, after Bragg became Manhattan’s D.A.
In his resignation letter, leaked to The New York Times, Pomerantz said that in late 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, Vance, had “concluded that the facts warranted prosecution, and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.” But after replacing Vance as D.A., Bragg decided “not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time,” Pomerantz wrote, adding, “The investigation has been suspended indefinitely.”
What Pomerantz’s letter did not say, however, was that in late 2021, “at least three career prosecutors asked to move off the investigation,” reportedly “concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly, without clear evidence to support possible charges.” Instead, in his resignation, Pomerantz declared he believes “Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations,” that “the public interest warrants the criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump,” and that “such a prosecution should be brought without any further delay.”
Pomerantz later rejoined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and authored a book about the Trump investigation.
Pomerantz’s letter and his claims that Bragg had suspended the Trump probe triggered a political firestorm, which the Manhattan D.A. sought to quell by telling the public the investigation was ongoing.
Criminal Charges
Meanwhile, the Manhattan D.A.’s office pushed forward in its criminal case against the Trump Corporation. A grand jury had indicted the Trump Corporation in late June of 2021 on charges it engaged in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on the salaries of high-level executives by instead funneling compensation through perks, such as luxury apartments and cars. A second Trump corporation would later be added to the criminal case that went to trial in late 2022.
The trial team that prosecuted the case included the other two Paul, Weiss attorneys on loan to the Manhattan D.A.’s office: Abuhoff and Williamson. Bragg borrowed a third outside attorney, Gary T. Fishman, from New York’s Democrat Attorney General Letitia James. Along with three regular members of the Manhattan D.A.’s office, the three “special assistant district attorneys” helped convict the Trump-related business entities in early December 2022.
After securing convictions of the two Trump corporations, Abuhoff and Williamson ended their “special assistant district attorney” relationship with Bragg’s office in December 2022 and went back to Paul, Weiss — a return that would be short-lived. Abuhoff rejoined the Manhattan D.A.’s office in February 2023, and Williamson returned the next month, but now both as regular members of the staff.
So short was their time back at Paul, Weiss, in fact, that one must wonder if the firm paid them bonuses following their departure from the Manhattan D.A.’s office. The Federalist posed this question to Paul, Weiss, but the inquiry went unanswered. Paul, Weiss also did not respond to questions concerning whether the lawyers received any compensation or Paul, Weiss benefits while on leave to the D.A.’s office.
Abuhoff and Williamson’s return to the D.A.’s office followed the news that in early December, Bragg had hired Matthew Colangelo from the Biden DOJ to “jump-start” the office’s investigation into Trump. Upon his inauguration, Biden had appointed Colangelo to serve in the No. 3 slot at the DOJ, showing the trust Biden has in the lawyer now charged with taking down his opponent Trump.
Colangelo had also previously worked in the Obama-Biden administration and as chief counsel and executive deputy attorney general in A.G. James’ office, where he and Fishman reportedly investigated Trump. As noted above, James would later lend Fishman to the Manhattan D.A.’s office, keeping with her campaign promise to “be a real pain in the -ss” to Trump. It’s no wonder House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan is concerned about Colangelo’s role in the unprecedented indictment.
Connecting the Dots
But the issue goes much beyond Colangelo, for it seems likely Bragg never would have hired Colangelo had Pomerantz’s resignation letter never been leaked to The New York Times. It’s outrageous that Pomerantz was reportedly “informally” advising the former Manhattan D.A. while working for the “Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center” law firm with extensive connections to Democrats. Equally outrageous is the fact that the same law firm lent the D.A.’s office three lawyers to bolster the Trump investigation.
It seems Bragg was swayed by New York politics to alter the communist boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” The Manhattan D.A. had the man but couldn’t find the crime.
“Lend me your top attorneys to show me a crime,” is the new motto of the political machine New York Democrats built to purge the country, communist style, of Trump. That should horrify every American.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A Manhattan grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed following late-Thursday media leaks. While the indictment remains under seal, one thing seems certain: America has now entered the era of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” politics.
The Democrat district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, breathed new life into the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Manhattan prosecutor targeted the former president in connection to a 2016 payment made to Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s decision to push for an indictment against Trump, presumably for falsifying business records, promises to herald in a new political age — one in which local prosecutors will target partisan enemies, big and small, making a mockery of the criminal justice system in the process.
The fact that news of the charges leaked to the left’s favorite scribes at The New York Times, while the indictment remained still under seal, punctuates perfectly the Sovietesque times in which we live: The legacy media may not be state-run, but they peddle propaganda, nonetheless.
Guesswork
Until the indictment is unsealed, any discussion of the charges requires some guesswork, and with sources late Thursday reportedly telling CNN the grand jury charged Trump with more than 30 counts, the prognostication is much more difficult. But from earlier reports, it appears the D.A.’s criminal case against Trump revolves around Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York penal code.
Both sections define the state crime of “falsifying business records,” with Section 175.05 providing “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Section 175.10 converts the “second degree” misdemeanor to a felony if the person falsified business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
The factual theory for charging the former president with falsifying business records seems to rest on “Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as ‘legal expenses,’ when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the porn star from publicly claiming she had sex a decade earlier.” The Trump Organization then reportedly paid Cohen $35,000 a month for “legal services” in 2017, while Cohen never provided any legal work for the business.
Legal pundits believe the indictment will ratchet up the alleged falsifying of “legal expenses” offense to a felony by charging Trump with lying about the payments to Cohen to conceal a violation of federal election law. Cohen has already admitted to paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, and he appears poised to be a star witness against Trump. Another possibility, however, is that the Manhattan D.A.’s indictment accuses Trump of falsifying the organization’s “legal expenses” to aid in tax fraud.
The U.S. attorney has already declined to charge Trump with federal election law violations, making any attempt by Bragg to tie the federal offense to the state charge of falsifying business records reek of political payback.
Bragg’s expected use of Trump’s physical absence from New York — ironically because he was serving as commander-in-chief in D.C. — to sidestep the five-year statute of limitations that applies to a felony of falsifying business records, will also add to the stench of the case. And a public that watched Trump hounded since he first announced his candidacy for president isn’t likely to focus on the legal technicalities of the statute of limitations. Rather, the average American will consider the delayed charging of Trump to be a desperate ploy to concoct a crime.
Trump himself was quick to advance this theory, opening his press release by calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.” “From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,” the former president continued, the “Radical Left Democrats … have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement.”
“You remember it just like I do,” Trump stressed, ticking off the attacks: “Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”
30-Count Craziness
Trump will reportedly appear in a Manhattan court on Tuesday for his arraignment. Whether the indictment is unsealed before then is unknown. But the leaks continue, including, as noted above, news that the grand jury reportedly charged Trump with more than 30 criminal counts.
Unless Bragg has uncovered something much beyond the details already reported about the Daniels payment, the Manhattan prosecutor will have only made matters worse by pushing for an indictment of the former president on more than 30 criminal counts. Given the lack of leaks about anything new, the most likely scenario is that the grand jury got to 30-plus counts by charging Trump with separate counts for each of the monthly payments made to Cohen in 2017. Then, the grand jury could add additional counts for each month Trump allegedly made the payment to “aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
With this approach, it isn’t hard to see how easily the grand jury could convert one hush-money payment into some 30 crimes. And while the left and the Never Trump right might see a lengthy indictment as further proof of Trump’s malfeasance, if the indictment contains no new details, the piling on to reach the reported 33 counts against the former president doesn’t make Trump look more guilty — it makes Bragg look more like Beria.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
American media has bombarded us daily from all directions to make sure we know that Donald Trump indirectly paid a woman to shut her mouth as she and her now-convict lawyer, Michael Avenatti, shook him down for money.
In New York, false financial accounting can be a low-level misdemeanor, but it’s rarely prosecuted. Now Alvin Bragg, a municipal prosecutor, is trying to make a name for himself by charging former President Trump with that crime.
This is the equivalent of a nationally televised jaywalking arrest to humiliate a person due solely to personal hate. George Soros, Bragg’s benefactor, must be grinning from ear to ear.
Hillary Clinton Got Off For a Worse Deed
Trump’s former lawyer accounted for the payment as consulting or attorney’s fees. Allegedly, so did President Trump, and $130,000 changed hands.
For perspective, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid $1 million for the infamous fictional “Steele dossier.” They paid for this using one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent lawyers, Marc Elias, as a cutout to hide who was paying for this opposition research that falsely claimed Trump was colluding with Russia.
They then laundered the dossier through various contacts to try to destroy Trump and get Clinton elected president. Those people officially accounted for the $1 million dossier expense as “legal fees.” So, one side paid people to lie. The other paid someone not to lie, or at least not to speak.
Clinton lives in New York, the state in which Trump is likely to be charged over a $130,000 payment. She has not been charged for the $1 million payment. Do these events really sound vastly different to you?
Bragg hopes to spin that unserious charge into a federal campaign finance violation. Meanwhile, the dossier fraud, which affected two presidential elections and two presidential impeachments, was settled with a $113,000 fine.
Bragg’s Case Is a Mess
City prosecutors cannot charge people with federal crimes. Only feds can charge federal crimes, not some city prosecutor. Bragg has allegedly met with the Secret Service about how they will react to a New York City police officer approaching President Trump with handcuffs (if they can find one who will do it). Bragg is way over his head and wading into deep political waters.
New York Attorney General Tish James ran for office almost exclusively on a “get Trump” platform. She hated the man and promised to find a crime he committed, rather than responding to a crime and looking for a perpetrator. After years of not finding anything, she did not charge Trump with any crimes. Same state. Same New York laws. More investigative tools. Yet she passed on the opportunity to arrest a president.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the same alleged crime and also chose not to prosecute. Every prosecutor in the state above Bragg’s office passed on this one knowing they could not prove President Trump committed a crime. Or they realized that no serious person could charge Trump and not also indict Democrats.
Bragg is the same Manhattan DA who has publicly decriminalized crimes in the name of wokeness. This alleged prosecutor will ignore criminal violence and release people on their own recognizance after a stern talking to for beating someone half to death or attacking police. But he wants to charge Trump for this garbage after every one of his superiors has declined to do so. Why? Incompetence? Tunnel vision? Irrational hate? Why choose?
Democrats’ Hate Could Prompt a Constitutional Crisis
Many Democrats want Trump arrested for anything. They want to see him in cuffs more than they want their own kids to be happy and healthy. They have been searching for someone stupid or reckless enough to “perp walk” the man for the cameras. They might very well have found him. If Bragg does it over this fluff, it will prove to be a poor career choice for him and could have much broader implications that are rungs above his pay grade.
Some Dems even want conservatives to riot if a cop cuffs Trump, just like a lack of security made it easy for people to barge into the Capitol through open doors just to be charged and arrested. They might get their wish. And it is likely a trap. If it happens and people protest, see whether New York City will give them all “room to vent” like city officials gave lefty rioters for months. Hopefully, any protests will be peaceful. I will not be involved in any of it.
A lot of people continue to be surprised at these events and have truly had enough of the second set of rules for conservatives. If the hard left keeps pushing this kind of thing, it will eventually be deeply sorry.
Feds raided Trump’s house with a tactical team over papers a librarian wanted. Oddly, CNN was present and ran the story on a loop. Joe Biden dropped 50 years of classified documents all over the country and the feds let his personal lawyers (who lacked security clearances) sort them before giving them to the government at their leisure.
They investigate Trump from all sides. They give Biden a pass on everything. The feds investigated Trump’s sons and son-in-law for any irregularity. Yet Hunter Biden, a man in a long line of alleged Biden bag men, lives in a $40,000-per-month Malibu beach house and sells splatter paintings to anonymous purchasers for exorbitant amounts.
Wildly Unequal Legal Treatment
Everyone is supposed to just sit back and accept the different treatment and think it is okay and normal. This is far from normal—it is a thumb in the eye of half the American population.
Even apparently peaceful Jan. 6, 2021 protestors have been in pre-trial detention for two years. Black Lives Matter and Antifa got carte blanch to riot and burn courthouses with impunity with at least tacit support from the White House and open support from the vice president, who encouraged people to donate money to bail the rioters out of jail.
Firebomb a pro-life crisis pregnancy center and take credit for it, and Biden’s inept AG will give you a pass. Pray in front of an abortion clinic and you will be charged with a list of felonies. This is not sustainable. People, in large numbers, will eventually stop taking it.
The Acceleration of Dangerous Trends
In accordance with their oaths, prosecutors are not supposed to charge people with crimes they cannot prove, since doing so can ruin people’s lives even if they are eventually acquitted. The citizenry remembers the charge, not the acquittal.
Likewise, presidents are not supposed to issue executive orders they know will be overturned as unlawful, just for political gain and show. Both have been happening for the last two years at a clip never before encountered. Team Biden is daring half the country. Stand up, but do not take the bait.
Many think Bragg will charge Trump soon because he can. These people might not be ready for the fallout they will provoke. And by that, I do not mean violence. I mean turnabout.
Republicans may politically finally address Democratic Party lawfare, taking an eye for an eye. Some have recently shown backbone their predecessors lacked. Their voters will increasingly elect officials who promise to do so. Trump himself was a harbinger of this.
Republicans Need to Respond, Good and Hard
If Bragg pulls the proverbial trigger, everyone had better be really sure about his next moves. Bragg and his upstream cronies will not be able to take it back, apologize, call for calm, or put that leftist authoritarian genie back in the bottle.
If they think they are right and their ideas the best, Democrats should square up and try to beat at the polls whomever the Republican candidate is in 2024. Another round of transparent politically driven rigging, especially like this, after the ridiculous failures of their impeachment efforts and Jan. 6 show trials, will light a dangerous fuse for which the American people have lost patience.
Most countries that fail to address unequal treatment start dying from within. Every American should want to avoid that for all our sakes. Bragg staying out of presidential politics and focusing on the skyrocketing violent crime rate in his own backyard would be a welcome next step.
When Republicans take the White House, they should make sure prosecutors at every level have every resource and unclassified document they require to investigate and, if mandated, charge everyone on team leftist. No letting things slide. If the Dems want old-fashioned dirty politics, the other side might finally give it to them good, hard, and thoroughly.
Thomas Crist is a husband, father, lawyer, and political conservative who loves his country and despises all myopic hypocrisy regardless of its source.
(Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)
The New York State Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that New York City cannot fire employees for not getting vaccinated against COVID-19, dealing a blow to Democratic Mayor Eric Adams’ pandemic policy. The court ordered the city to reinstate all fired employees and grant them backpay, citing the fact that being vaccinated against COVID-19 does not stop an individual from catching or spreading the virus, and thus being vaccinated does not grant enough community-wide benefit to warrant a mandate. The health commissioner “acted beyond his authority” by issuing an indefinite vaccine mandate rather than a temporary one, according to the court.
Adams said earlier this year his administration would not bring back workers who had been fired due to being unvaccinated. Roughly 1,400 workers were ultimately let go, including a number of firefighters and police officers. Adams came under fire for not allowing an exception to the mandate for those workers after he granted one to celebrities who were competing in sports or putting on performances in the city.
“States of emergency are meant to be temporary,” the court said in its ruling. “The question presented is whether the health commissioner has the authority to enact a permanent condition of employment during a state of emergency.”
Many COVID-19 vaccine mandates were put in place based on the rationale that the vaccines could drastically reduce the chances of a person becoming infected or transmitting the virus if they were infected, so getting vaccinated was not only a benefit to the individual getting the shots, but everyone around them.
However, as more data emerged to indicate that the vaccines are only marginally effective at stopping spread, particularly against newer variants of the virus, that rationale became less convincing. The New York Supreme Court pointed this out in its decision, saying “being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting COVID-19… the Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves.”
Former President Donald Trump celebrated the victories of Democrats and Republicans in the Tuesday primaries, many of whom he endorsed. The former president jokingly endorsed two Democratic candidates running in the New York primary, Rep. Carolyn Maloney and attorney Dan Goldman. Goldman then won the Democratic nomination to represent New York’s 10th district in Congress, while Maloney lost her bid to Democratic New York Rep. Jerry Nadler.
“Looks like a fantastic evening of ALL WINS — Great Candidates!!!” Trump wrote on a Truth Social post.
“26 and 0 tonight, turning numerous tight races into big endorsements and easy wins!” Trump said in a separate Truth Social post. “Overall for last 4 years, 98.4% on Endorsements!”
Trump-endorsed Republican New York Reps. Nicole Malliotakis, Elise Stefanik and Claudia Tenney all won their primaries Tuesday night.
(Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Trump’s preferred Republican candidates also achieved victories in the Florida primary. Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz defeated his opponent, former FedEx executive Mark Lombardo, in Florida’s 1st district. His other endorsed candidates in Florida, including Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Anna Paulina Luna, Kat Cammack, and John Rutherford, swept their races. (RELATED: Trump Endorsed Candidate Kari Lake Wins GOP Arizona Gubernatorial Primary)
Other candidates who won their primaries include Democratic Florida Rep. Val Demings, who captured the Democratic nomination and will attempt to unseat Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. Democratic Florida Rep. Charlie Crist won the nomination to challenge Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the gubernatorial race.
Meanwhile, Trump-endorsed Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin defeated T.W. Shannon, a banking executive, in the Republican senate primary run-off election.
The former president made over 40 endorsements in recent primaries taking place in Washington, Michigan, Missouri, Arizona and Kansas, where the majority of the Trump-endorsed candidates achieved victories, Politico reported.
A group of far-left organizers sponsoring watch parties for Thursday’s show trial hearing by the House Jan. 6 Committee demanded soft treatment for a pair of attorneys sentenced last week in firebombing a New York City police car. Demand Progress, a project of the leftist Sixteen Thirty Fund, is named as a partner organization for January 6 Watch Events gearing up for Thursday’s prime time programming to “uncover the truth, demand accountability and ensure violence like this never happens again.”
“We need to make sure these hearings break through the busy news cycle and reach the American public,” the event website’s description reads. “We cannot allow Trump Republicans to successfully cover up one of the greatest attacks ever planned against American’s freedom to decide who governs in our name!”
The flagship watch party across from Capitol Hill Thursday night will even feature free Ben and Jerry’s ice cream while attendees watch what Democrats routinely characterize as the worst assault on American democracy on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The committee recruited a former ABC News executive to up the drama for prime-time television.
While Demand Progress sponsors parties to raise the alarm over right-wing “insurrection,” the group demanded soft sentencing for two radical attorneys who torched a New York City police vehicle two years ago amid nationwide street violence over George Floyd’s murder.
On Thursday, attorneys Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman each pled guilty to conspiracy charges in a deal struck with federal prosecutors for tossing the Molotov cocktail at a Brooklyn riot on May 30, 2020. The pair had previously pled guilty to possession of a destructive device in October, but the threat of added years through a “terrorist enhancement” remained. In the plea deal landed last week, prosecutors dropped the enhancement and requested maximum prison time of two years as opposed to the decades they faced months ago. Mattis and Rahman officially pled guilty to conspiracy to commit arson and to make and possess an unregistered destructive device.
In a coalition letter with more than a dozen other leftist groups on June 22, 2020, Demand Progress condemned the prosecution as “excessive and politically-motivated charges.”
“The Trump Administration is wielding the punitive force of this system against Colin and Urooj, who are Black and South Asian, respectively, in order to chill popular protest against the unjust status quo,” the coalition wrote led by the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We call for the immediate release of Colin and Urooj on bail and for the federal government to drop these excessive charges.”
A day later, the Demand Progress shared the letter on Twitter demanding charges to be dropped.
Demand Progress’ about-face on criminal prosecution over civil unrest marks another episode of endless double standards for political violence. Democrats on Thursday will pursue wall-to-wall coverage of the events on Jan. 6, 2021 after spending the entire summer and fall preceding the Capitol riot normalizing violent uprisings when it served their cause.
“This is more proof that socialist Democrats don’t care about rioting,” Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, told The Federalist. “They want to put on a show to attempt to distract from their failures.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
New York is a blue state, right? Yes, but Democrats attempted to go too far in using their redistricting powers to make it an even deeper blue. In going so far to try and block Republicans from being able to win seats, the Democrats broke the law, so their redistricting plan just got slapped down by the state appeals court. The Hill, reporting on that decision, notes that:
The ruling noted that under the 2022 congressional map, there are four Republican-majority districts and 22 Democratic-majority districts; in comparison, in the 2012 map there were eight elected Republicans and 19 elected Democrats, indicating that the latest map was skewed blue.
Further, the court itself, describing the horribly biased nature in which the New York Democrats went about designing the map and how elections analysis expert Sean Trende was able to show that the districts were so biased in favor of the Democrats as to be impermissible, said:
Trende concluded that the enacted congressional map pressed republican voters “into a few [r]epublican-leaning districts, while spreading [d]emocratic voters as efficiently as possible.” Trende analyzed the differences between his ensemble of simulated maps and the enacted map using various methods, including application of the “gerrymandering index,” which, he concluded, rendered it “implausible, if not impossible” that the enacted redistricting plan had been drawn without partisan intent. Trende also portrayed his results in scatterplots, which he explained showed how “[t]he only place where the [e]nacted [c]ongressional [m]ap falls within expectations is in safely [d]emocratic districts,” whereas the more competitive districts were made safer by packing republican voters into other republican leaning districts.
Continuing, and giving another example of the bias involved in the district-shifting, said:
Specifically, Trende’s simulation reflected that the four most republican-leaning districts in the enacted congressional map were more republican-leaning than any of his initial 5,000 simulated maps. Of the next nine most competitive districts, the enacted map was, in each, more democrat-leaning than any or nearly all of the initial 5,000 simulated maps.
The court then ordered the legislature to create a new map, one that would survive its scrutiny, by April 30th, though an appeal from New York’s far-left leadership is expected. If that appeal is unsuccessful and the current map, which would probably take four seats away from Republicans, doesn’t hold, that’s bad news for Democrats. 2022 is already predicted to be a red wave year with Democrats needing every tool available to keep the wave from turning into a tsunami. When that’s paired with how DeSantis has gone about redistricting Florida and the mixed results of redistricting elsewhere, the loss of the four seats Democrats could have been handed by New York’s efforts is substantial.
The GOP is predicted to retake the House regardless. But the magnitude of that victory depends on a number of factors, including redistricting. With this win for the GOP in even deep-blue New York, the likelihood of the red wave becoming a red tsunami looks higher than ever.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg scrapped two policies Friday following immense public backlash as the city sees a rise in violent crime. Bragg appeared to deflect blame onto his staff in his memo released Friday, noting his Jan. 3 memo was meant to provide “framework” with which his office should follow.
“As I emphasized in my remarks to the office, you were hired for your keen judgment, and I want you to use that judgment – and experience – in every case,” Bragg wrote.
US President Joe Biden’s motorcade drive past New York Police Department officers near the NYPD Headquarters in New York on February 3, 2022. (YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)
Under the new memo, Bragg said commercial robberies committed with a gun “will be charged as a felony” regardless of if the gun “is operable, loaded, or a realistic imitation.” Robberies committed at knifepoint or with another weapon will also be charged as a felony, according to the memo. Bragg also said “people walking the streets with guns will be prosecuted and held accountable” and that the “default in gun cases is a felony prosecution.”
“Violence against police officers will not be tolerated,” the memo continued. “We will prosecute any person who harms or attempts to harm a police officer.”
Prior to the changes, Bragg’s initial memo said armed robberies would be treated as petty larceny, a misdemeanor, if no victim was seriously injured and there was no “genuine risk of physical harm.”
Widow of slain New York Police Department Officer Jason Rivera, Dominique Luzuriaga, slammed Bragg for not keeping the city safe during her husband’s funeral service.
WATCH: Widow of @NYPDnews officer Jason Rivera slams @ManhattanDA though not by name: "We are not safe anymore. Not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he's watching you speak through me right now." pic.twitter.com/zHPQ1scMgy
“The system continues to fail us,” Luzuriaga said. “We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these new laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has signed a short-term contract with the non-profit division of Endeavors to provide temporary shelter and processing services for families who have not been expelled and are therefore placed in immigration proceedings for their removal from the United States,”said in a statement the ICE acting Director Tae D. Johnson.
“The $86.9 million contract provides 1,239 beds and other necessary services. The families will receive a comprehensive health assessment that includes COVID-19 testing.”
Endeavors is a non-profit organization which provides direct care, migrant wellness support, case management, home study and post-release services, staffing, and holistic programming for unaccompanied migrant children and families. Endeavors has served migrants since 2012.
“Our border is not open. The majority of individuals continue to be expelled under the Centers for Disease Control’s public health authority,”continued ICE acting Director in his statement.
Project Veritas Exclusive Photos From Inside Texas CBP Facility Show Horrific Border Crisis
In a stunning revelation of how horrific conditions at the border have become, Project Veritas released exclusive photos Monday from reportedly inside one of the border’s detention facilities.
The never-before-seen photos are said to have been taken from inside a Customs and Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas. In the images (scroll down for more) you can see asylum seekers in tight spaces wrapped in space blankets, lying shoulder to shoulder on the floor.
The facility currently houses thousands of immigrants that travel illegally across the border and is beyond its capacity. Indeed, according to the Project Veritas source that provided the photos, “there are eight pods with eight cells each in the facility. At any given moment,” the source explained, “an average of 3,000 people in custody here.”
In addition, the source tells Project Veritas that the immigrants are “separated by age or physical size depending on room. Fifty were Covid positive in these cells over the last few days. There have been multiple sexual assaults, normal assaults and daily medical emergencies.”
Courtesy: Project Veritas
Axios also reported horrible conditions at the same facility. In a report Monday, Axios quoted Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) who recently toured the Donna facility and described the conditions as “terrible for the children.” The Congressman added that Border Patrol agents are “doing the best they can under the circumstances” but are “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration.”
A reported 15,500 children are now in federal custody at the border.
Though Representative Cuellar was unable to take pictures, he was able to gain a tour of the facility. But he’s one of the few to have seen the conditions directly. Indeed, there has been what appears to be a deliberate and coordinated effort to keep journalists out of the facilities.
Meanwhile, an attorney representing migrant youth in the custody of the U.S. government was recently denied a tour of the Donna, Texas facility. Naha Desai told CBS News, that she interviewed children who said they were hungry and never saw the sun. “Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor,” she explained.
On March 2nd, the Donna complex was said to be holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to CBS. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security head is calling on volunteers to assist CBP at these facilities complaining that the most number of migrants in 20 years have arrived.
New York, California, and numerous other states could soon become some of the highest tax places in the world if the Biden Administration gets its way. The Biden tax plan that Congress is debating this week would raise the top income tax rate to 39.6% from its current 37% today.
And that’s not all…
Biden wants to place a new payroll tax of 15% on earnings over $400,000 (or $200,000 each for a married couple.) This combined payroll and income tax hike would bring the marginal tax rate on an additional hour of work to 54%.
State and city taxes can no longer be deducted from federal returns. As such, high-tax states like New York, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Iowa, Arizona and New Jersey would all see marginal tax rates approaching 70%.
Meanwhile, if California and New York get their way, taxes could go even higher. Both states are discussing ways to shore up their disastrous finances. In California, the General Assembly is considering raising the state income tax to 16.5%. And, in New York, the embattled Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a two percentage point hike. This would raise income taxes in New York City to 15.5%.
As economists at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity point out, if New York and California are successful with their tax hikes, they will officially become home to some of the highest tax places in the world.
Hey, who needs Bernie Sanders when President Joe Biden is willing to go so far left and turn us into a socialist state?
To be clear — higher taxes is not a sustainable path forward for America. Instead, we need pro-growth policies that will generate more wealth for the country as a whole, instead of onerous taxation that will discourage prosperity.
The Biden tax hikes, the largest since 1993, should not be approved.
New York Assembly member Ron Kim, a Democrat, and Jessica Ramos, a Democrat, held a rally at City Hall on Wednesday. Kim was joined by fellow elected officials, advocates, and the family members of seniors, to announce a key list of demands from the Cuomo administration. The victims want justice!
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FOX News meteorologist Janice Dean spoke at the rally today. Dean lost her in-laws to the coronavirus after the caught COVID in a New York nursing home. Janice Dean has been leading the charge against the Cuomo administration and their lies to New Yorkers.
Way back in May we reported that New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, MD and Executive Deputy Commissioner Sally Dreslin’s actions led to thousands of deaths in New York state.
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Yaacov Apelbaum at the Illustrated Primer shared that these New York politicians are accountable for thousands of nursing home deaths because of their insane directives related to the China coronavirus. Apelbaum first pointed out the ludicrous directive from New York’s Department of Health, including:
During this global health emergency, all NHs [nursing homes] must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to NHs.
and:
No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.
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As we reported in May, the reason for the Cuomo’s insane directives is related to money:
In 2018, as Governor Andrew Cuomo faced a challenge to his reelection bid in the New York State Democratic primary, he got a last minute $1m cash infusion from the General New York Hospital Association (GNYHA)—a powerful NY healthcare industry group. On April 2, 2020, he repaid the favor when he quietly signed legislation shielding hospital and nursing home executives from any lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The clauses, inserted into the annual budget bill by Cuomo, gave blanket immunity protections for healthcare industry executive and administrators, the same individuals and institutions that have made a fortune moving sick Covid-19 patients to nursing homes.
The GNYHA gave to the Democrats an unheard of $3 million in the 2018 election cycle. Of this, Cuomo and his state party committee received close to $2.3m from various hospitals and nursing home industry donors. Governor Cuomo returned the favor with his directive forcing COVID-19 patients back into elderly homes. This directive provided a massive increase in revenues to organizations associated with the GNYHA who were paid handsomely for COVID patients. It was a bonanza for these entities.
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The impact of this decision on elderly New Yorkers in nursing homes is the elderly in these nursing homes spread the disease and died. They died at the worst rate in the country and the world.
The Gateway Pundit reported numerous times that the mortality rates for the China coronavirus are not much worse than a bad flu season across the US with the exception of New York and New Jersey. The death rates in these areas are way above the rest of the country and the world for that matter. It is clear that Governor Cuomo’s policies in New York led to the unnecessary massive number of deaths in the state.
We next reported that Cuomo’s insane and deadly policies not only targeted nursing homes, they also targeted adult care facilities and group homes for people with disabilities.
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
It’s time for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to resign, New York Rep. Claudia Tenney (R) said in response to the recent “bombshell” reports that the governor hid the real coronavirus death toll in New York state’s nursing homes. “Governor Cuomo is a sociopathic liar,” Tenney told BlazeTV host Andrew Wilkow during an interview Friday. “He’s been the governor for 11 years. I’ve called him out to resign recently for this issue — I’ve called him to resign for many other abuses of power that he has exhibited on a number of issues throughout his term as governor, but this is particularly egregious.”
Tenney said she had asked former Attorney General William Barr to look into nursing home deaths in New York as early as March 2020, after a nursing home resident contacted her to report that COVID-positive patients were being moved from hospitals into nursing homes. She also talked about the recent reports that Cuomo’s secretary, Melissa DeRosa, admitted that the administration intentionally hid data on the coronavirus death toll in nursing homes out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors.
“Now this cover-up has become a crime,” Tenney said. “It could very much be at least criminal negligence, what the governor has done.”
Watch the video below to catch more of the conversation:
Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Reign Has Been Devastating, And It’s Time For A Reckoning
We need a full, thorough, and independent investigation with subpoenas to Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, the governor’s staff, and the governor himself.
A few weeks ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, without a hint of self-awareness, said, “Incompetent government kills people. More people died than needed to die in COVID.” Sadly, I couldn’t agree more.
While many in corporate media glorified Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping create a cult of personality for him among Democrats across the country, an examination of his decision-making reveals that he failed New Yorkers on many fronts.
Cuomo was given near-unilateral emergency powers to tackle the pandemic, with the state legislature forfeiting all decision-making and responsibility to the governor and his team. Thus, Cuomo’s decisions and the repercussions of his actions fall squarely on his shoulders. First, and most jarring, is the revelation that the Cuomo administration’s decided to cover up the true cost of their Department of Health order on March 25 that sent COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes. That fateful order was subsequently deleted from the state’s Department of Health website in the beginning of the cover-up by the Cuomo administration.
Following that order, tens of thousands of nursing home residents lost their lives and the Cuomo administration moved into overdrive on blocking transparency efforts, shutting down inquiries at every turn, and even releasing a phony report absolving them of any responsibility. Two weeks ago, we learned in a report by New York Attorney General Tish James, a Democrat, that Cuomo’s administration hid the true cost to lives of this non-scientific order, under-counting nursing home deaths by almost 50 percent. Just this weekend, we learned the Cuomo administration intentionally hid and withheld information from federal authorities.
We need a full, thorough, and independent investigation with subpoenas to Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, the governor’s staff, and the governor himself.
It also speaks volumes that for months on end, the governor stonewalled transparency efforts by families that lost loved ones while mocking their efforts. His cruelty in this regard was on full display in January when he said “Who cares?” when asked about the death toll.
We care, governor. Those families deserve answers and justice.
Second, Cuomo’s administration forced out many of the public health experts who should have been developing New York’s vaccine plan, deciding instead to recruit expensive consulting firms. This led to an incredibly slow, ineffectual, and confusing rollout of the vaccine. My legislative office is still receiving daily calls from seniors older than 80 who simply cannot get an appointment no matter how hard they look.
While media outlets continue to sing Cuomo’s praises, the reality on the ground is that his top-down, Soviet-esque management style has hampered the efficacy and speed of the vaccine rollout, tying local health departments in knots. Every county health department in New York already has a mass vaccination plan, yet the governor refused for weeks to let them use those plans, instead of forcing them into the system created by his high-priced and high-brow consulting firms, all at taxpayers’ expense.
Third, Cuomo’s extensive lockdowns and subsequent non-scientific decisions to limit capacity in houses of worship shut down indoor dining, and restrict in-person learning (even temporarily) have hurt millions more. Setting unconstitutional caps on houses of worship was rejected by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, a case that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. Many houses of worship, spanning all types of faiths, were already setting limits on themselves to ensure the health and safety of their worshippers. Recommending that they be shut down or capped was ludicrous, and an affront to the basic right to freedom of religion in our nation.
Another group whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by Cuomo’s insatiable desire for control is restaurant owners and restaurant workers. Shutting down indoor dining in New York City made zero sense at the time, with people being infected at less than 1.5 percent (lower than the state positivity rate) when dining indoors. Now, Cuomo has reopened dining when the infection rate has climbed significantly.
These decisions are not being made based on science, but what the governor “feels” is the right move. That is a recipe for disaster that cannot be allowed to continue. Cuomo’s actions are driven by his need for control, his ego, and his ability to legislate freely, as Democrats in the state legislature have completely abdicated all their duties as a co-equal branch of government.
Finally, it’s clear that New York students are rapidly falling behind other students around the globe. The lack of in-person interaction and learning is having devastating impacts on our children’s academic and social futures, as they are not learning the important lessons we all learned in grade school. To the governor’s credit, he didn’t outright ban in-person learning, but he certainly hasn’t been a champion for it either. Hybrid-learning programs are still leaving our kids behind, and his silence on this subject is deafening. I’d hazard a guess he’s spent more time bashing former President Trump at his press conferences than he has talked about the needs of our students.
In short, the governor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been nothing short of disastrous for the millions of New Yorkers who call the Empire State home. While CNN, MSNBC, and other major news outlets remain busy pumping up Cuomo’s ego and image to the American public, Americans need to hear that his decisions cost tens of thousands of New Yorkers their lives, hundreds of thousands of students their educational advancement, and millions of New Yorkers their livelihoods.
NEW YORK, NY – MAY 10: The Empire State Building is seen behind the tombstones at Calvary Cemetery on May 10, 2020 in the Queens borough of New York City. The Catholic Archdiocese of New York is opening COVID-related cemetery-visitation restrictions for Mothers Day. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)
“Ballots have been mailed in to the New York City Board of Elections in the name of dead voters,”reports the New York Post.
Frances Reckhow, who was born in 1915, would be 105 today, and died in 2012, requested a mail-in ballot, filled it out, and returned it.
Gertrude Nizzere, who was born in 1919, would be 101 today, and died in 2016, requested an absentee ballot, filled it out, and returned it.
These are just the ones that have been found.
What’s so troubling about this is that there is no way this is an oopsie, no way it happened by accident,. You don’t “accidentally” request a mail-in ballot that belongs to a dead person, fill it out, and return it.
This feels like an organized effort on behalf of some person or organization that is going to a lot of trouble to find out who’s dead but still on the voter rolls, and vote on their behalf.
And you can bet this isn’t a Republican effort. If it were, it would be the biggest story in the world right now. But because it is almost only Democrats who cheat, we’re gas-lighted with the media lies about how voter fraud isn’t a real problem.
This, despite the fact, Jack Kennedy almost certainly beat Richard Nixon in 1960 thanks to all those dead voters in Chicago.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
The State of New York’s curriculum for the “Week of Action” was leaked online with lesson plans and supplemental material. The Week of Action is being defined as, “a national uprising that affirms the lives of Black students, teachers and families. This week centers classroom lessons about structural racism, intersectional Black identities, Black history, and anti-racism through the 13 Guiding Principles from the Black Lives Matter movement. “
This curriculum is being promoted by the big teacher’s unions in New York to be adopted by the entire state. This curriculum is being used by teachers in New York. These lessons and one like them are why teachers are concerned about “spectators” listening to them since school will be virtual this fall.
Yes in one week your elementary school-aged child will learn everything they need to know to become a social justice warrior with these 12 “mini-lessons.”
Oh, but just you wait, there is so much more…
This was perhaps my favorite lesson because action week is supposed to be about becoming a social justice warrior for oppressed minorities right? WRONG!
It’s also to support your local fascist teacher’s union.
In one of the lessons, elementary school kids are to role play teacher’s going on strike. The lesson instructs teachers as follows:
You may want to pair this activity with our lesson Why Did LA Teachers Go on Strike, which invites students to learn about and discuss some of the issues surrounding the January 2019 strike by teachers in Los Angeles.
…
This roleplay introduces students experientially to the concept of a strike, including some of its risks and benefits. You as teacher play the role of district superintendent and students play the role of teachers. By having to make decisions about whether to strike, and by defending their reasoning, students will better understand the risks and benefits of the choice to strike, both for the teachers themselves and for the school district as a whole.
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The roleplay ends with a debrief that is, in some ways, the most crucial part of the lesson. In the debrief, you will encourage students to step back and reflect instead on how public education faces larger systemic issues. Be sure to leave plenty of time for the debrief; students are often eager to explain their choices and question others about theirs.
Keep in mind this lesson is for elementary school-aged kids and I’m only scratching the surface.
How about this lesson designed for grades K-5 on how art and LGBTQ rights and compares the quest of the LGBTQ community to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. Below are screenshots of the lesson:
Also provided in the state of New York’s 2020 curriculum resource guide is these wonderful coloring pages for pre-kindergarten students:
In high school students will be equipped with the “#TrayvonTaughtMe” toolkit, “digital campaign highlights the beginnings of the BlackLives Matter movement, and how Trayvon’s extrajudicial murder and his family commitment to ending gun violence and strengthening communities catalyzed a generation of organizers and activists to take action for Black lives.”
The toolkit provides students with posts they can place on social media to remember Trayvon Martin and demand “state-sanctioned violence.” You are also provided with Snapchat/Facebook live video scripts.
Like I said I am only scratching the surface. I firmly believe in equality and that people should be judged on the content of their character, not of their skin, gender, or sexual preference. However, what the state of New York has produced is not curriculum on equality it’s manipulating children into becoming woke, social justice, zombies. As I looked through the piles and piles of anti-racist critical theory curriculum not once did I see the simple principle…treat others the way you want to be treated.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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