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How Long Is This Trump Trial Going To Take?

From ZeroHedge & Twitter:


"This Is Insanity": Judge In Trump Case Issues Unbelievable Jury Instructions​

Update (1345ET): Legal minds are beside themselves at how the judge in the Trump 'hush money' case has instructed jurors to rule - first in what constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley called "the coup de grace instruction," Judge Juan Merchan said that there is no need to agree on what occurred - and can disagree on what the crime was among the charges.



"Merchan just delivered the coup de grace instruction," Turley wrote on X. "He said that there is no need to agree on what occurred. They can disagree on what the crime was among the three choices. Thus, this means that they could split 4-4-4 and he will still treat them as unanimous..."


"This is absolute insanity," posted Missouri Attorney General Andrew Baily, in response to another Turley observation - namely that the jury will not be given copies of their instructions, but can ask for them to be read again.

What could be behind this activist judge?

* * *

With closing arguments in Donald Trump's hush money trial having ended on Tuesday, jury deliberations have officially begun, putting the outcome of the case in the hands of a dozen New Yorkers.

Former President Donald Trump at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 28, 2024 in New York City. (Julia Nikhinson-Pool/Getty Images)
A jury of seven men and five women were instructed to begin deliberating just before 11:30 a.m., where they will weigh in on the first criminal trial of a former US president. While the jurors' discussions will be in private, they can send Trump-hating Judge Juan Merchan notes asking to rehear testimony or review evidence.

"It is not my responsibility to judge the evidence here. It is yours," said Merchan.

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with an alleged scheme to shelve potentially embarrassing claims during the 2016 US election - similar to how the Clintons paid Paula Jones $850,000 to drop a sexual harassment lawsuit after more than four years of legal action.

According to Merchan, "Your verdict on each count you consider, whether guilty or not, must be unanimous," adding "That is, each and every juror must agree to it."

That said, they do not need to be unanimous on what crime they think Trump is guilty of.

"You should discuss the evidence and consult with each other, listen to each other, give each other's views careful consideration. And when you deliberate, you should do so with a view to reaching agreement when that can be done without surrendering an individual juror," Merchan continued.

As the Epoch Times notes further, all the evidence from trial has been loaded onto a laptop, and Juror 4 and Juror 6 volunteered to operate it for the group.

Merchan checked with defense attorney Todd Blanche about whether defense counsel explained to President Trump about evidence being on the laptop for jurors.

Mr. Blanche affirmed that defense counsel reviewed the contents of the laptop and have no objections to this protocol.

"I always watch the jurors. I watch to see who is paying attention and who is not," said Merchan. "Justice Merchan said. "Each of you is very engaged in this case. But we're not going to excuse [alternates]."

During closing arguments on Tuesday, Merchan criticized Blanche for telling the jury that the former president could go to prison if they convict - and reminded them that their decision would be based on the word of Michael Cohen, who Blanche described as a "liar" who "lied to" the jury.

"You cannot send somebody to prison, you cannot convict somebody based upon the words of Michael Cohen," said Blanche - to which prosecutors jumped in and objected.

Merchan agreed, sustaining the objection.

"That was outrageous, Mr. Blanche," he said. "Someone who’s been a prosecutor as long as you have, someone who’s been an attorney as long as you have knows that it’s highly inappropriate."
 
From The Western Journal comes an analysis that I have seen re-broadcast my several mainstream media sources.

Basically, the fix is in. The judge gave instructions to the jury, as described by legal scholars, that can only lead to the conviction of President Trump.

Pretty much every legal analyst says the case will be overturned in appeal. However, this case is clearly designed by political opponents to keep President Trump off the campaign trail, destroy his ability to fund raise, cost him money, and besmirch his reputation. It gives his opponents the ability to campaign off his conviction.



Judge Merchan Issues Last-Minute Jury Instruction Designed to Convict Trump, Even if Jurors Don't Agree

By Rachel M. Emmanuel May 29, 2024 at 1:42pm
The jury is now deliberating on the first-ever criminal trial in history of a former president of the United States.
And by every account, this case has displayed the most egregious use of lawfare against a political opponent the nation has ever seen.
Earlier, Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the hush-money case against the former president in Manhattan, disclosed that his daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of Authentic Campaigns, a digital consulting firm that has worked on the campaigns of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats, according to CNN.
Two Democratic clients of Loren Merchan raised over $90 million, partly by using Trump’s case in their solicitation emails, according to the New York Post.
However, Merchan refused to recuse himself from the case.
Not only that, but he has also continuously undermined Trump’s defense with his rulings and instructions.
Renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz wrote last week in the New York Post,
“In my 60 years as a lawyer and law professor, I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday. The judge in Donald Trump’s trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn.”
But the final instructions to the jury by Merchan take both the cake and the bakery and strip the proceedings of any facade of fairness — not that there was much of that to begin with.
On Wednesday, Merchan determined that jurors will not need to unanimously agree on the underlying crime motivating the alleged falsification of business records Trump is accused of, according to Politico.
If Trump loses, will the Supreme Court overturn Merchan’s kangaroo court decision?
Merchan rejected arguments from Trump’s defense team that all 12 jurors should have to agree on what underlying crime Trump was trying to cover up through the alleged falsified records, which is a felony in New York.
“He said that there’s no need to agree on what has occurred,” Fox News’ Harris Faulkner read out as she received the breaking news. “They can disagree on what the crime was, among the three choices. Thus, this means that they could split 4-4-4 and the judge would still treat them unanimously.”
In other words, the jury doesn’t even have to agree on why Trump committed the alleged crime of falsifying documents.
Motive, which is generally a huge part of any criminal trial, goes out the window.
 
Trump will beat this on appeal none the less after the election. No higher court would allow what has been done here.
Of course. Literally every legal scholar says this is a sham and will be overturned.

BUT, it keeps him shackled in NYC so he can't campaign.

AND it is draining funds he could use for campaigning.

AND it is taking time away from real issues like what his opponent has done to the economy, to inflation, via regulation, to our competitiveness, to our manufacturers, etc etc etc

So we can all take comfort in knowing it will be overturned, but this is still a hugely political, totally lawless, travesty.
 
There's a verdict!

Judge Juan Merchan told the courtroom that the jury has reached a verdict.

In reading a note from the jury, Merchan said: “We the jury have a verdict. We would like an extra 30 minutes to fill out the forms if that’d be possible.”
 
As insane as the verdict is, it's actually good news for Trump and his supporters. It guarantees his re-election because it will galvanize them to vote for him. And it will swing independents in his favor for two reasons: It makes him appear as the victim, and thus a sympathetic figure. And it proves him right that he IS the target of political persecution. If they had got him on some of the other stuff where they had more of a case, it might be different. But this one is so blatantly and obviously wrong, that it will serve to GAIN him support. Wait for the next polls and that will show you if I'm right.
 
As insane as the verdict is, it's actually good news for Trump and his supporters. It guarantees his re-election because it will galvanize them to vote for him. And it will swing independents in his favor for two reasons: It makes him appear as the victim, and thus a sympathetic figure. And it proves him right that he IS the target of political persecution. If they had got him on some of the other stuff where they had more of a case, it might be different. But this one is so blatantly and obviously wrong, that it will serve to GAIN him support. Wait for the next polls and that will show you if I'm right.

Some Independents I know aren't going to vote for a "convicted felon". Wasn't that part of the Democrat plan all along?
 
Some Independents I know aren't going to vote for a "convicted felon". Wasn't that part of the Democrat plan all along?
YES

The Democrats now have their "hammer" point and they will beat on it for a good long while.

Some will simply not for him for that exact reason.

Others may vote for him for that exact reason.

Some large donors have also jumped in, donating for him yesterday just because of the verdict, claiming it was a devastating day for American legal fairness. We know that the donation websites for Trump crashed minutes after the verdict, donations poured in. But were they $5, $50, $500 or $500,000 each?

The next 72 hours will probably tell us a lot.
 
YES

The Democrats now have their "hammer" point and they will beat on it for a good long while.

Some will simply not for him for that exact reason.

Others may vote for him for that exact reason.

Some large donors have also jumped in, donating for him yesterday just because of the verdict, claiming it was a devastating day for American legal fairness. We know that the donation websites for Trump crashed minutes after the verdict, donations poured in. But were they $5, $50, $500 or $500,000 each?

The next 72 hours will probably tell us a lot.
Almost a third of the donations yesterday were new donors. That gives us a hint that this conviction has created new Trump supporters.
 
Interesting article about HOW the appeal should get to the US Supreme Court.




Dershowitz: Trump Could Fast-Track His Appeal To Supreme Court

Retired Harvard Law Professor and Jeffrey Epstein's former attorney Alan Dershowitz thinks that former President Trump has a path to expedite his conviction to the US Supreme Court before the November presidential election.
Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal 'hush money' payments to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.
In a Friday interview with Megyn Kelly, Dershowitz suggested that Trump's legal team should immediately push to get their appeal heard before the New York Court of Appeals, asking them to bypass the Appellate Division - which, Dershowitz suggested, are elected and more likely to work against Trump.
"The Appellate Division or Manhattan judges that are elected and they don’t want to have to face their families and say you were the judge who allowed Trump to become the next President of the United States. They don’t want to be Dershowitz'ed," he said, referring to the fact that he defended Trump during his first impeachment trial in the Senate.
"They don’t want to be treated in New York, the way I have been treated in Martha’s Vineyard and Harvard and New York because I defended Donald Trump, so they should skip the Appellate Division."
And so, to avoid the politicized Appellate Division, Trump's attorneys should ask the Court of Appeals for an expedited appeal while preparing to argue in front of the US Supreme Court that the Manhattan case was rushed to try and get a verdict before the election.
Dershowitz further suggested that the Supreme Court has an obligation to review the case before the election so that the American public has resolution.
As Tom Ozimek of the Epoch Times notes further, Dershowitz has in the past accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of unfairly building the case against the former president by using a novel legal theory to elevate misdemeanor business falsification charges into a felony by alleging that the records fraud was carried out to conceal an underlying crime. In the Trump case, the underlying crime that was alleged was seeking to interfere in the 2016 election by using non-disclosure agreements to prevent unfavorable media coverage about an alleged affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels that the former president has denied.
Mr. Dershowitz said that Trump attorneys should consider supporting their petition to the New York Court of Appeals by highlighting two issues, with the first relating to the fact that the state’s highest court recently reversed Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction because the trial judge prejudicially allowed testimony on allegations unrelated to the case.
The retired law professor alleged that Judge Juan Merchan “improperly” allowed irrelevant salacious details of President Trump’s alleged tryst with Ms. Daniels to be admitted into the record, while also raising the so-called “missing witness” issue.
The second point that Mr. Dershowitz said would bolster a petition for an expedited review to the New York Court of Appeals is that the judge allegedly didn’t instruct the jury properly on why prosecutors didn’t call former Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg to testify in the case. The judge was open to having Mr. Weisselberg testify but the prosecution didn’t call him, framing him as an unreliable witness due to earlier perjury charges in an unrelated case, while the defense also didn’t call him, citing the fact that prosecutors had undermined his credibility.
Mr. Dershowitz argued that failure to call Mr. Weisselberg left a hole in proving the case because it was expected that his testimony would have undermined some of the claims from another witness, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who testified against the former president.
Number two, I think would be the failure to give an instruction on the missing witness,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “The way the judge and the prosecution handled Allen Weisselberg really denied the defendant the right to a presumption that the only reason he wasn’t called was because he would not have corroborated the very important testimony, lying testimony of Michael Cohen.”
Mr. Dershowitz said those two issues are what Trump attorneys should highlight in their request for an expedited appeal.
This is a winnable appeal,” he insisted.
The Epoch Times was unable to reach Trump counsel for comment on Mr. Dershowitz’s remarks.
The guilty verdict made President Trump the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime.

Other Legal Experts Weigh In

Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Epoch Times that he shares frustration expressed by critics of the verdict, including the House speaker, at what he described as an obvious “miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. von Spakovsky said that the prospect of the Supreme Court getting before the appeals process plays out in New York state courts is not realistic.
“There are certainly issues that give the Supreme Court jurisdiction over the state court conviction, given the fundamental violation of Donald Trump’s substantive due process rights under the U.S. Constitution in the way the trial judge and prosecution mishandled the case,” he said. “But I don’t believe the Supreme Court will take the case until the state appeals process is exhausted.”
Jonathan Emord, a constitutional law and litigation expert, told The Epoch Times that he believes that the trial violated President Trump’s due process rights and was “riddled with bias” but that he, too, sees little hope for Supreme Court intervention until the New York Court of Appeals has weighed in.
“The fact of the matter is that a trial violated President Trump’s due process rights and was riddled with bias, evidentiary rulings that deprive him of a full and fair opportunity to present his case,” he said.
On the merits, there really is no foundation for a legal basis for decision because it’s a novel theory of law that’s been applied,” Mr. Emord said of the way the case was brought by Mr. Bragg.
Asked why Mr. Johnson suggested that the Supreme Court should step in at an earlier-than-normal stage of the appeals process, Mr. Emord suggested it’s because of “exceptional circumstances.”
“He’s arguing that there are exceptional circumstances that would warrant the Supreme Court to intervene and while there certainly are exceptional circumstances, I suspect that the Supreme Court would not intervene in the first instance, but would allow an appellate court in New York to issue a determination,” he said.
Short of a successful appeal, President Trump could now be facing such penalties as jail time, probation, or fines.
Sentencing in the case has been set for July 11, just four days before the Republican National Convention where President Trump will be formally designated as the Republican presidential nominee.
While there are no laws barring President Trump from running for the White House as a convicted felon, an overturned verdict before Election Day would likely boost his chances of victory.
 
Well well well . . . maybe the fix was in?

Mistrial?



Full story, and general updates available at ZeroHedge. If you don't visit that page at least 1 time a day then you are, in my opinion, uninformed. Please give them a look.

Mistrial? Trump 'Hush Money' Judge Suggests Juror May Have Had Predetermined Guilty Verdict

The judge in the Trump 'hush money' case, Juan Merchan, just issued a very strange note to both parties indicating that a comment made on the court's Facebook page suggests that one of the jurors may have arrived at a 'guilty' verdict before the end of the trial, and told a family member.
"My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted. Thank you folks for all your hard work!!!" reads the Facebook post highlighted by Merchan.
As the Conservative Treehouse speculates...
Why would Judge Merchan want to draw public attention to this?
Either something bigger is being diluted by this story, or perhaps Merchan is using it as a provocation to get Trump to talk about the jury and violate his gag order ahead of sentencing.
Or, perhaps Merchan is looking to create a mistrial to exit the case, or do it over again and extend the gag order. Also, why not include the entire quote from the Facebook Page:
Not sure what’s going on, but something. Something….
 
Public opinion polls seem to indicate that a large percentage of Democrats thing that President Trump should be sentenced to prison. I still don't understand the charges against him. I do understand that Hillary Clinton committed crimes that seemed much more egregious and simply paid a small fine, no felony conviction, and no concept or prospect of jail, so seemingly we have serious evidence of a 2-tier justice system. But that is a side note.

Still, roughly 40% of the poll thinks Trump belongs in prison.

Full story from THE HILL, a center left new source that is known to show a modest leftwing bias but tried to play reasonably neutral in the press. Still worthy of looking at their site on a regular basis.

One side note, public opinion polls are often NOT relevant to actual LAW. So take all opinion polls about legal matters with a grain of salt as they are based by new sources.



40 percent in new poll say Trump should be sentenced to prison in hush money case

Four in 10 U.S. voters believe former President Trump should receive jail time for his hush money conviction, though this sentiment varies at the party level, according to a new poll.
A survey from Emerson College Polling, released Thursday, found 40 percent of registered voters think Trump should be sentenced to prison, while 25 percent said he should pay a fine and 15 percent said probation. Twenty percent were unsure.
Trump became the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a felony on May 30, when he was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his New York hush money case. The charges were in connection with reimbursements made to Trump’s former fixer and onetime attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged past affair.
Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, though incarceration would be a rare punishment for a first-time offender convicted of Trump’s charges in New York.
Pollsters noted more than half — or 67 percent — of Democrats surveyed said Trump should serve prison time, while 46 percent of Republicans think he should pay a fine. Independents were split more evenly, with 42 percent of the party voters saying Trump should serve prison time, 22 percent choosing a fine and 14 percent choosing probation, per the poll.
Trump appears to have maintained his support in the immediate aftermath of his felony conviction, according to the poll.
The former president’s support stayed at 46 percent, the same as the poll found in April, though his lead over President Biden has shrunk, tightening from 3 points to 1 point in the most recent poll.
A plurality of 40 percent said Trump’s convictions do not impact their decision at the polls . . .
STORY CONTINUES AT THE LINK ABOVE TO THE HILL
 
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