Manhattan Grand Jury Indicts Ham Sandwich
On Thursday, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald Trump on reportedly dozens of charges related to the 2016 hush money payment made to Stormy Daniels to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual liaison with Trump.
And while nobody was surprised that an indictment was coming, the timing was unexpected.
It was reported on Wednesday that the grand jury was taking its scheduled hiatus in April and a possible indictment in the case was not expected until late in the month. Then, less than 24 hours later, the indictment happened.
But the news reports being wrong isn’t entirely surprising. What we know about the grand jury probe comes from anonymous sources speaking to reporters. Grand jury investigations are secret, so it isn’t as if someone comes out at the end of each session and provides an on-the-record recap of the evidence and witness testimony from the day.
At the same time, it was pretty obvious from the off that Trump would likely be indicted.
In early March, the New York Times reported that DA Alvin Bragg’s office informed Trump of his legal right to testify before the grand jury. In New York State, prosecutors are required by law to inform potential defendants of their right to testify. That was a clear signal an indictment was in the works.
Typically, however, the target of the probe rarely takes prosecutors up on the offer to testify to a grand jury. And can you blame them? It’s not like a trial. The defense can’t put its case to the grand jurors or call its own witnesses. It’s entirely one-sided since the purpose of convening a grand jury is for prosecutors to lay out their evidence to see if there is enough to bring charges against someone.
And by and large, grand juries oblige.
Former New York State Court of Appeals Chief Judge Solomon Wachtler once said that prosecutors hold so much influence over grand juries that they could get them to indict a ham sandwich.
And on Thursday, Alvin Bragg’s office got the grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Now, as yet, we don’t know the specific charges against Trump since the indictment remains under seal for the time being.
What we do know, however, is that both the Justice Department, through the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the Federal Elections Commission declined to take action against Trump and the Trump 2016 campaign for this hush money payment.
But for Alvin Bragg, Donald Trump is more than just a ham sandwich. He is also Bragg’s white whale.
Like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Bragg’s office will stop at nothing to find a reason to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump. Nor will Bragg’s “star witness,” former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen. Cohen is on a mission to take Trump down with him, and Bragg’s office, eager to “get Trump” was more than happy to take on Cohen’s cause.
So like Stalin’s notorious henchman Laventiy Beria, Alvin Bragg found the man and then went looking for a crime.
You don’t have to be a die-hard Only Trumper to know that this investigation is politically motivated horseshit. Nor do you have to be one of Trump’s ardent fans to see the injustice of this indictment.
Even for someone like me, who wishes that Donald Trump quietly retired to Mar-a-Lago on January 20, 2021, never to return, this case is an obvious sham.
But for a grand jury made up of Manhattanites who hate Donald Trump just as much as Letitia James and Alvin Bragg do, any port in a storm will suffice if the result is Trump facing criminal charges.
Like every other prosecutor in the country supported by Leftwing activists like George Soros, Alvin Bragg ran for office on a “soft on crime” platform. The violent criminals terrorizing the streets of New York are treated with kid gloves, with Bragg’s office often refusing to bring charges against them.
As law professor Jonathan Turley pointed out in his op-ed at the New York Post yesterday, “Trump would have been better off robbing Stormy with a gun – Bragg would have thrown that case out.”
In his op-ed, Turley responds to the “this is a reminder that nobody is above the law” argument peddled by Democrat politicians and pundits alike by noting this:
However, the law also protects people from selective prosecution and affords them protection through the statute of limitations.
One can debate whether Trump may have committed this misdemeanor. That is a good-faith debate. What is not debatable is that the window for such a prosecution closed years ago.
Unless this indictment reveals a previously undisclosed crime, the use of the long-debated bootstrapped offense would defy the rule of law. Nobody is above the law, but nobody is below its protections … including Donald Trump.
I don’t want Donald Trump to be the 2024 GOP nominee. He’s too old for one thing. He’d enter the White House in 2024 as a lame duck limited to only 4 years in office. And, most importantly, he is so universally despised by voters who aren’t Trump Super Fans, that he is not positioned at all well to win the General Election in the first place.
And while I might not want the GOP standard-bearer in 2024 to be Trump, I am perfectly capable of seeing for myself that this case is a politically-motivated clown show that if a politician with a D after his name did the same thing, no prosecutor would have pursued it.
But this weaponization of the criminal justice system has been around since long before Donald Trump rode down the escalator.
We saw it in 2009 when then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s Civil Rights Department refused to bring charges of voter intimidation against the Black Panthers in Philadelphia who stood outside of polling places armed to the teeth.
But some Trump-supporting rando posted a bogus “Avoid the lines and text your vote for Hillary” meme on Twitter in 2016, and yesterday, he was found guilty of election interference for which he could face up to ten years in prison.
The Justice Department brought charges against a pro-life activist and had the FBI raid his home and drag him away in front of his family for pushing a man who was harassing his child outside of a Planned Parenthood.
But the crazy lunatics that have been intimidating conservative Supreme Court justices by “protesting” outside of their homes have no fear because this same Justice Department instructed the US Marshal Service deputies protecting the justices not to make arrests, despite the protests violating federal law.
You don’t need to look at the endless investigations of Donald Trump to see that we have a justice system designed to protect one political ideology while targeting the other. Donald Trump is just one of many Americans who have learned the hard way that some people in this country are most emphatically above the law.
The same US Attorney for the District of Columbia who is throwing the book at the randos who trespassed on the Capitol building on January 6 has declined to prosecute 67% of cases that would have been tried in the DC Superior Court.
And you wonder why our nation’s capital has turned into a criminal playground.
As Mike Cernovich noted on Twitter yesterday:
“Bolsheviks support an agenda of allowing criminals to terrorize citizens, the only prosecutorial priority is directed against their political enemies. In this case J6’ers.”
But pointing out this obvious double standard is a waste of time. Leftists know that the justice system is designed to protect them and attack their political opponents. How could they not know? They’re the ones who designed it that way.
The Justice System is their weapon to exact vengeance on those who do not toe the line.
After the grand jury indicted Trump on Thursday, Jesse Kelly explained the only way to get this to stop:
“Alvin Bragg is not the end. Alvin Bragg is just the beginning of where we’re going. If you understood that, you’d stop saying things like ‘This can’t happen in America.’ You’d be demanding a GOP AG respond in kind. And respond right now. Nothing else stops this.”
If the Left knows that their tactics will be used against them by the Right, that just might be the incentive to get them to stop. It’s mutually-assured destruction.
Unfortunately, too many Republican officials still don’t understand what time it is.
They still believe “reaching across the aisle” and “standing on principles” can get the job done. And while those might be helpful suggestions in a nation that isn’t deeply polarized and whose culture has not been taken over by one side, they are utterly useless today.
Meanwhile, the Republicans who do know what time it is, like Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, are in the minority within the GOP.
Republicans who are willing to take the fight to the Left know that they will face a coordinated, well-funded enemy that has the Democrat Party, Big Tech, and the corporate media on its side. And most Republicans don’t have the mettle to enter such a skewed battlefield in Republican states, let alone in deep blue cities.
No Republican – whether he is a politician like Trump or a random voter — stands a chance of receiving a fair trial in places like New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, or Washington DC. Politically-motivated prosecutors, not to mention the juries that are largely made up of people who believe the bilge spewed on “The View” or Joy Reid’s program, will happily throw the book at you.
This is why, after Trump lied on Truth Social and said he was getting arrested on March 21, I told you not to listen to his demand to “PROTEST” his indictment. It won’t matter if you commit a crime or not. New York prosecutors and New York jurors won’t hesitate to make an example of you.
It was reported on Friday that Trump is expected to travel to Manhattan on Monday. On Tuesday, he will surrender to authorities to be processed and then will go to court to be arraigned on whatever the hell charges he is facing.
According to Susan Necheles, the lead attorney on Trump’s defense team, the former president will plead not guilty to the charges, meaning unless Alvin Bragg gets visited in the night by three spirits, this circus will go to trial.
Whether it helps or hurts Trump politically is anybody’s guess. Some suggest that Trump is now a shoo-in for the GOP nomination thanks to this indictment. I don’t know if I agree or not. It may boost his fundraising and goose his national poll numbers in the short term. But it’s still ages before Republicans head to the polls to vote in state primaries and a lot can happen in the intervening months.
At the same time, the Democrats and their media handmaids want Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee. If we’ve learned anything from the 2022 midterms, it is that Democrats have no qualms about pushing Republicans in the primaries if they believe they can easily beat them in the general.
In an ALL CAPS RANT on Truth Social Friday, Trump called Alvin Bragg’s prosecution “election interference.” And in a sense, I think he’s right, only not in the way he meant it.
I do not doubt for a second that the Democrats will make the most of this indictment to ensure that Joe Biden, or whoever the 2024 Democrat nominee is, faces Trump in November 2024.
Whether their plans work remains to be seen. The truth is, more potential indictments are on the horizon, both in Fulton County, Georgia, and Washington DC.
By the time the Iowa Caucus rolls around, Republican voters may be so weary of the constant drama that trails Donald Trump like slime from a slug that all the Democrat Party’s efforts to ensure their nominee faces a wounded and unpopular Trump won’t make a damn bit of difference.
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