This may seem too little, too late, but at least the New York state criminal matter into trump's hush money felonies ruling will reach a conclusion before Inauguration Day as Judge Merchan will issue sentencing this Friday January 10th (via Ximena Bustillo at NPR):
In a decision Friday, New York Judge Juan Merchan noted that his inclination was to not impose a sentence of incarceration. In the filing, Merchan noted that if a sentence was unable to be given before Trump took the oath of office, the only other viable option may be to postpone proceedings until after Trump's presidential term is over.
In May, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, officially labeling him a convicted felon. The decision also comes after Merchan ruled last month that Trump is not immune from a conviction in the case...
After about a day and a half of deliberations, 12 New York jurors said last May that they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 election.
Following the verdict, Trump virtually completed a routine pre-sentencing interview with the New York City Department of Probation. The prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, who prosecuted Trump, and Trump's legal teams each submitted sentencing recommendations last month. Those documents have not been released to the public.
Trump also turned his attention to mobilizing donations for his campaign and mounting legal fees by using the conviction as a fundraising tool. Within 24 hours of the guilty verdict, Trump's campaign boasted raising millions of dollars. Trump and his legal team have also vowed to appeal the conviction, a process that could take years...
In a sane world, that May conviction should have been the end of trump's efforts to regain the White House to avoid all legal accountability. Instead, too many other Americans don't seem to give a rat's ass about ethics or character or the necessity of more honest, less criminal leadership. /fume
But if America is supposed to stand for Truth and Justice -if the rule of law and loyalty to the constitution matters more than loyalty to any one person - then it matters that trump face some measure of justice so that history - so that our better angels of our nature - can denounce the lies and gaslighting that trump and his followers will use to wipe away the facts of his sins.
As Austin Sarat notes at Salon:
Merchan has set an example of resistance on the cusp of a second Trump presidency. His ruling will serve this country well as we enter a period in which the occupant of the Oval Office intends to bend judges and others to his will and in which serving him will be the standard against which government officials, journalists, and others will be judged.
Before looking more closely at Merchan’s decision, let me say more about the role of history and memory in a democracy.
Writing in 2019, Jeffries Martin observed that in a democracy, respecting and learning from the past is a singular virtue. “Historical work,” Martin explained, has “long served as a major intellectual bulwark for democratic republics….” He conceded that such work would not in itself “preserve our democracy. But when fostered in a critical and democratic spirit, they constitute an important piece of what we might call a culture of resistance and liberty.”
In a democracy, we can argue over what history means or what parts of the past should be venerated and which should not be, as fights over monuments have shown. But, no one gets to re-write history or erase memory to suit their convenience or serve their partisan purposes. In authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, history and memory belong to the powerful. Rewriting and whitewashing the past, whether of a nation or its leaders, is standard operating procedure. As Jason Stanley puts it, “Authoritarians…erase history… seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused.”
Once Merchan's sentencing is a matter of record, trump can try to lie and deceive and ignore it as much as he wants, but it will exist as a counter to the false narratives of his "greatness" that will undermine his attempts to literally rewrite history. trump and his lackeys/followers will attack anyone who refers to the ruling, to anyone who openly points out how trump is a convicted felon - and the implications of his failures at both business and deceit - but those attacks will run into the reality that right there in Westlaw (and the legal court references at your law libraries) there is proof trump is a crook.
Merchan has already noted that he will not seek to impose any jail time - either that trump will face only fines and probation, or if any jail time occurs it will be suspended until after his term of office - but trump now faces the possibility that his future - which may be shorter than he thinks because the 22nd Amendment says the presidential term limits is two and nothing about them being consecutive - is not going to be all victory parties at Mar-A-Lago rolling around in millions in cash.
Unless trump decides to act up in court this Friday and compels Merchan to hold him physically in contempt.
One can always hope.
The pity of this tiny amount of justice getting delivered unto trump is how tiny it is. he WAS facing federal charges and Georgia criminal charges in other matters, but now his impending presidency closed shut the federal cases and may prevent the Fulton County office - once they figure out if the DA can oversee the entire case any further - from keeping his charges active (they may still bring to trial the other defendants in that election interference / fake electors cases).
Any justice that may arise here is that the Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is required to issue his (final?) reports on those inquiries, much like Mueller did with his report, only except this time it's unlikely Attorney General Merrick Garland will redact the ever-loving hell out of Smith's reports the way Barr did to Mueller's.
Which is why trump is now pleading - demanding - that Garland delay the release of those reports, so that HIS puppet Matt Gaetz Pam Bondi can commit massive redactions and rewrites of Smith's findings and hide trump's sins from the public and from history itself.
For the love of God and Truth and America, Garland: Release the Smith Reports in full, without serious redaction (only the names of the innocent and the witnesses who need protection from trump's wrath). And re-release the Mueller Report unredacted while you're at it, so that Barr and trump can wriggle in public disdain for those sins as well.
Truth and Justice, goddammit. Those aren't just words. They're supposed to define what America stands for.
1 comment:
I've long been saying that whatever the outcomes of Fergus' legal troubles may end up being, they probably won't feel very satisfying. And that we need to remember that this isn't about satisfaction, it's about justice and beginning to course correct from the previous mistakes in holding presidents accountable.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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