As of Saturday morning, former President Donald Trump was exactly where he wanted to be: at the top of websites, on TV screens, and trending on Twitter.
She’s at her best playing the victim.
After more than a week of leaks from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and other anonymous sources, it appears New York prosecutors plan to indict Trump on charges related to his alleged $130,000 hush payment to the porn star. Stormy Daniels.
Trump denies having an affair with Daniels, but his story nonetheless was the source of dramatic gossip during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond.
In fact, Michael Cohen, the MSNBC guest who was once Trump’s fixer-turned-favourite, went to prison for financial crimes related to his arranging the payment. And Daniels’ own lawyer, the once-ubiquitous media operative Michael Avenatti, went to prison for his own unrelated misdeeds.
As always, Trump, the master of public relations, jumped on the news to twist it in his favor.
Tearing at the prosecution, he thundered in all caps on Truth Social that the case is ‘BASED ON AN OLD FAIRY TALE AND TOTALLY DISAPPROVED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!)’.
And like any good producer would do, he got ahead of the real drama. His possible arrest of him!
‘THE LEADING FAR & AWAY REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE ARRESTED TUESDAY NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE BACK OUR NATION!’ she wrote.
It is now highly unlikely that the former president will be taken in shackles in front of the cameras to a Manhattan police station. Even the far-left progressive district attorney Alvin Bragg isn’t that stupid. And he’s pretty dumb.
As always, Trump, the master of public relations, jumped on the news to twist it in his favor.
And like any good producer would do, he got ahead of the real drama. His possible arrest of him! ‘THE LEADING FAR & AWAY REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE ARRESTED TUESDAY NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE BACK OUR NATION!’ he wrote.
Because guess what? Trump is very right!
This apparent accusation is a joke. He not only faces an enormously arduous road to conviction, but also undermines the American legal system and will likely help Trump in his campaign for president.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I despise Trump. His division tears apart the social fabric of America and, as the ultimate narcissist, puts his own interests before those of the nation.
I am also a friend of Mrs. Daniels. I interviewed her several years ago on ‘The View’ and she wrote about her experience in her book.
Daniels said he had “insane respect” for me, because I didn’t wholeheartedly believe his story like the rest of the mainstream media. But I kept an open mind and today I think she did have an affair with Trump that he paid her to keep her mouth shut about.
Here’s the thing though: my hatred of Trump doesn’t prevent me from seeing the reality that paying hush money is not a crime.
Read the opinions of today’s most influential legal commentators and you will realize that this pending indictment would be a travesty of justice.
George Washington University law professor and legal scholar Jonathan Turley notes that while the impeachment may be “politically popular” among Trump critics, it is “legally pathetic.”
like turley explains it, the case faces enormous obstacles. First, if prosecutors have any hope of convicting Trump, they must show that his payment to Daniels was a campaign expense and therefore a campaign finance violation. They must convince a jury that Trump wrote the check to benefit his 2016 political campaign and not to avoid public humiliation, save his marriage or protect his children from embarrassing revelations about his father.
It’s similar to a case federal prosecutors brought against former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, and lost.
Second, the Manhattan District Attorney probably doesn’t even have jurisdiction to bring this case.
As Edwards’s prosecution made clear, campaign finance violations are federal crimes. Bragg’s predecessor has already refused to bring this case for these same reasons.
Another legal heavyweight, Alan Dershowitz has also intervened. He writes: “After spending months searching the penal code for a law that Mr. Trump could be charged with violating, Mr. Bragg has apparently arrived at a highly questionable campaign contribution provision that has never before been used in a situation comparable”.
But these two legal scholars have something that’s in short supply in America today: integrity.
They know that no matter what one’s private feelings are: it is wrong to manipulate the criminal justice system to attack one’s political opponents.
I’m a friend of Mrs. Daniels. I interviewed her several years ago on ‘The View’ and she wrote about her experience in her book.
It is now highly unlikely that the former president will be taken in shackles in front of the cameras to a Manhattan police station. Even the far-left progressive district attorney Alvin Bragg isn’t that stupid. And he’s pretty dumb.
Guess who else may have misused campaign funds in the 2016 presidential election: Hillary Clinton. There is no question that the Clinton campaign used intermediaries to pay former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the discredited and false Russia Dossier, which plunged the country into years of needless and divisive turmoil. But do I not hear the cry to judge her?
Maybe he would if he ran for president again. Trust me, he didn’t keep it out of the Republicans either.
It’s not hard to see how a society that rushes toward retaliation, selective prosecution, and revenge ends in disaster. For Democrats who claim to be so concerned about the future of democracy, they may want to think twice about corrupting the legal system.
No, this case is not about justice. It’s about getting Trump by any means necessary, and it will backfire.
On Saturday afternoon, Trump posted again on Truth Social. Surely, do not miss the opportunity to capitalize.
‘WE CAN NO LONGER ALLOW THIS. THEY ARE KILLING OUR NATION WHILE WE SIT AND WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!’
Trump is responsible for his own words. But why give him this opportunity?
As I wrote after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last summer, if they don’t have information on Trump, then his detractors will embolden him and his supporters will see him as evidence of a corrupt, partisan legal system.
Trump’s voter base believes, and not without reason, that an entrenched and irresponsible elite in Washington is out to get him. They are justified in this belief, and frankly, I sympathize more with that sentiment every day.
Months after the Mar-a-Lago raid, we still don’t know what it was about Trump that required an unprecedented operation at the home of a former president. However, we have reason to believe that President Joe Biden (not to mention Vice President Mike Pence) was guilty of similar acts. Biden received a kid glove treatment, while Trump felt the heavy hand of the FBI.
We are now supposed to believe that Trump’s bribery of Daniels is so deeply criminal that state prosecutors are justified in inventing a new legal precedent to indict a former president for the first time in history. Don’t you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
The left failed to point it out as a Russian plant. They couldn’t charge him no matter how many times they tried. They failed to prove that he led an insurrection, though he rightfully wears the disgrace of the January 6 riots around his neck, which is why he’s in for the next try.
Michael Cohen, the one-time Trump fixer and favorite MSNBC guest, went to prison for financial crimes related to his arranging the payment.
The irony of this is that even if Trump is convicted (which I wouldn’t say beyond the politicized judges and juries of New York City) it won’t prevent him from being elected.
Believe it or not, even a convicted felon can become President of the United States.
“Absolutely, I won’t even think about leaving,” Trump told reporters at CPAC in early March, when asked about a possible impeachment.
‘It will probably improve my numbers, but it’s a very bad thing for the United States. It’s very bad for the country,’ she said.
You are absolutely right. This bogus prosecution only fuels mistrust in institutions, creates sympathy for Trump, and undermines the mainstream media, when they cheer for him.
The only way America will end Trump is by defeating him at the polls, over and over and over again.
And, in fact, the United States is doing quite well at that. Trump lost in the 2018 midterm elections, the 2020 election, and the 2022 midterm elections.
If these faithless liberals get out of the way, we can kill him by 2024. But they keep throwing him a lifeline. They just can’t leave Trump.