For the first time ever in history, a president-elect was sentenced in a criminal court after being convicted of crimes. Are the crimes bogus? Sure. Was the judge biased? Definitely. Was the district attorney politically motivated in undertaking this prosecution? Undoubtedly. Despite all that, after his sentencing in a New York City court, President-elect Donald Trump will officially be a convicted felon and it is with this classification that he will enter his second White House term. This, of course, was the entire point of the exercise. Following the sentencing, a New York prosecutor said that the conclusion of the case "creates the status of convicted felon." That was the entire point of the undertaking on Friday in Judge Juan Merchan's New York Court.
The entire thing is basically more leftist language games. For the next four years, no matter the result of any appeal Trump brings in New York, CNN and MSNBC will be able to say "President Trump, convicted felon..." Trump's legal team sought a block from the Supreme Court so that Trump would not have to go through this ritual humiliation, but the Court declined to intervene. Instead, the Court said that Trump's concerns about the case and the trial could be heard upon appeal (which couldn't be undertaken until the trial's conclusion) and that since presiding Judge Juan Merchan had already said that there would be no jail time, etc., the sentence wasn't egregious enough to warrant intervention. Siding with the liberal justices in this were Justices Roberts and Barrett. But the sentence isn't the sentence, the sentence is the classification as a convicted felon.
The case should never have been brought. This was a complete and total weaponization of the legal system in an attempt to deny the American people their right to choose their own president. In recent interviews, President Joe Biden has said that he thought his Attorney General Merrick Garland should have moved more quickly in the federal prosecutions against Trump. The Democrats' plan was to have Trump in jail by the time the November election took place. Garland took two shots at the apple, with the classified documents case and the J6 case, both prosecuted by appointed special counsel Jack Smith. Both of them were repeatedly stalled by motions brought by the Trump legal team and neither came to fruition. In the J6 case, one of the motions made its way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a ruling on presidential immunity. The court said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts of the office and this ruling disrupted Smith's other case. Two cases remained, both state level. In Georgia, prosecutor Fani Willis was found to be in violation of all kinds of ethics codes after it was revealed that she had hired her adulterous lover to aid her sweeping RICO case against Trump and 19 co-defendants. She's probably destroyed her career in the process. The only case that made it all the way was Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's case in New York, which concluded on Friday with sentencing.
Let's look at the case: Bragg alleged that Trump committed 34 falsifications of business records. He said that Trump had issued payments to his then-lawyer to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels and that his business records then showed that these payments were classified as legal fees. For Bragg, calling payments to an attorney "legal fees" when that lawyer then uses them for "hush money" is illegal. It's unclear how he thought that payments should have been recorded—"hush money" isn't usually a bookkeeping category and certainly would have been hard to classify in any kind of ledger. Bragg charged Trump with 34 counts of the falsification of business records because he claimed that every time there was an invoice recorded, a payment recorded, or a receipt recorded, that was a crime. Every time Bragg has previously prosecuted the crime of the falsification of business records he has brought misdemeanor charges. That had been the standard. In this case, since the statue of limitations for those misdemeanors had run out, Bragg would not have been able to bring charges at all unless the misdemeanors were in service to the commission of a felony crime. This is what Bragg alleged.
"The case — the core of it — is not money for sex," Bragg said. "We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up. That’s the heart of the case." He claimed these instances were felonies because the said that they were in service to another crime or to aid the concealment thereof.
But what was that crime? What was that other crime that Trump was accused of having committed the falsification of business records in service to? It was not named. However, that did not stop Bragg from charging Trump with 34 felonies. Once the case went to a jury trial, and the New York prosecutors laid out their case, they still did not name the underlying crime that Trump was alleged to have committed. Judge Juan Merchan gave directions to the jury during their deliberations that they did not have to be in agreement as to what that underlying crime was. Throughout the trial against Trump, the underlying crime remained unnamed by prosecutor, judge or jury. How can a man be convicted of crimes without those crimes ever being named? How can a jury be instructed that they can choose their own crime and convict on that?
Bragg and Merchan got their scalp—for now. They won the right, on behalf of the American leftist press and their Democrat cronies, to call Trump a convicted felon. They couldn't get him locked up, despite the mug shots and booking in Atlanta. They couldn't get him on insurrection or inciting a riot, which they've been desperate to do since January 6, 2021. They couldn't get him on holding classified documents, since that's essentially the right of any president. All they could get him on was paying his attorney and classifying those payments as legal fees in service to an amorphous, unnamed crime. They never even proved how hushing up a porn star was useful to his 2016 campaign—this year many voters said they'd pick him for president even if he were behind bars. Do they really think Americans would have not selected Trump because it was revealed he slept with a porn star?
Trump has, of course, vowed to appeal. But until that case comes, the lawfare against Trump has come to an end, one without fireworks, or fanfare, but a rhetorical flourish, a gift for Trump haters in media and the Democrat Party—that's it. The real verdict came in November and was delivered by the American people to the perpetrators of lawfare, the leftist press, and the entire Democrat Party: Trump won, and it doesn't matter what else they call him, he's first and foremost the President of the United States.
