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| Blumenthal and Murphy - Getty images |
Consumer Protection U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has said recently concerning former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict by a New York City jury, "Our justice system, although not infallible, is the most reliable in the entire world, so we'll see what happens on appeal, but I think the jury spoke with a resounding, powerful voice that Donald Trump is not above the law."
Most of the Trump prosecutions have been delayed beyond the
2024 presidential campaign. These delays have astonished Trump’s critics on the
left less bland than Blumenthal who seem to believe that while no president
should be “above the law,” Trump, alone among citizens of the United States,
should occupy a place, devoted to tyrants and devils, below the law.
Trump has been found guilty by a New York jury in the so
called “hush money trial” involving a headline-seeking porn star, Stormy
Daniels, and a serial liar, Michael Cohen, often referred to in news stories as
Trump’s “fixer.” There is, critics of prosecutor Alan Bragg tell us, a load of
reversible error in the trial, now ripe for appeal.
Before he moved into the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal was for two
decades the Attorney General of Connecticut, largely a prosecutorial office.
The office of Attorney General, called “the king’s lawyer” in colonial times,
is one of the oldest political offices in Connecticut, known throughout the
nation as “The Constitution State.”
It would therefore seem reasonable to assert that Blumenthal
is more familiar than most work-a-day legislators with normative legal process,
constitutional law, the manifold vagaries of government, the doctrine of the
“presumption of innocence,” and our sometimes confusing judicial system.
The post-Constitutional U.S. justice system, with us since
the founding of the country, allows for judicial appeals, trial delays when complex
cases are appealed, and extraordinary efforts by judges to protect the rights
of accused butchers, bakers and candle stick makers – ordinary citizens -- in addition
to once and possibly future presidents.
Blumenthal’s immediate reaction to the New York City’s
verdict was considerably more temperate than that of Connecticut’s Junior U.S.
Senator Chris Murphy.
“Trump toadies,” Murphy squawked, “are going to attack the
jury and the court because they have a plan to dismantle our democracy and it
relies on everyone believing the justice system is rigged. It isn’t. Donald
Trump committed a crime. He got caught. He got convicted. That’s the rule of
law.”
Actually, Murphy is here describing a partial, as yet
incomplete, legal process, not “the
rule of law.” Murphy’s hasty politically partisan comment leaves no room for a
testing of the case in appellate courts, also part and parcel of the legal
process.
Some lawyers, by no means all of them Trump “toadies,” have
said publically that the New York case is awash in reversible error.
Prosecutors in the case did not announce until the jury was due to retire to
issue its verdict precisely what was the surreptitious charge that allowed Bragg to bootstrap an
elapsed misdemeanor tax fraud case into a federal felony, nor did the
politically compromised judge overseeing the case, the honorable Juan Merchan,
pause to consider whether the jury should hear from former chair of the Federal
Election Commission Brad Smith who, according to Jonathan Turley, was prepared to testify
that “there was no federal campaign violation.”
The judge did not allow the jury to hear Smith’s testimony. Moreover,
Turley writes, “even if Trump’s legal settlement money could be viewed as a
federal campaign contribution, it could not have been part of a conspiracy to
influence the election since any reporting of a contribution would have had to
occur after the election.”
If leading Democrats did indeed use the New York judiciary
to attain a specific political end, the subversion of the Trump campaign for
president, Murphy has now exposed himself as the nuclear-tipped missile encouraged
by anti-Trump Biden insiders to blow up a campaign that some Biden critics might
consider a justifiable response to the president’s faltering domestic and
foreign policy initiatives.
Although Biden is approaching the end of his first term as
president, Ukraine is still hunkered down in an apparent irreversible defensive
posture; Israel is being pressured by the Biden team to make accommodations
with terrorist groups financed by Iran, so that the forward looking Biden
administration might continue its pointless Iran diplomacy; the southern border
is still suppurating unvetted illegal migrants; China, now suffering economically
from its tyrannical communist policies, has yet to receive from the Biden administration
the boot in the rear it so richly deserves; and the giant fig leaf the Biden
administration is using to deflect critical analysis by a largely uncritical
media is shrinking by the minute.
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