Trump’s Tongue Is Trapped in Our Two-Track Justice System
The Democrat double-standard machine is in sixth gear, its default position when it concerns Donald J. Trump.
Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan slapped a gag order on the former president in his so-called hush-money case. Merchan accused Trump of making “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” comments about various parties to his legal proceedings, not least Merchan’s daughter. Loren Merchan has been president of Authentic Campaigns, a Democrat digital-marketing company. Her LinkedIn page, captured before it went private, shows that she was director of digital persuasion for the Kamala Harris for the People campaign in 2019.
Authentic Campaigns’ website lists such Democrat clients as Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, House Majority Forward, Senate Majority PAC, and President Joe Biden.
“It is now quite clear that Authentic has made money by assisting clients who have solicited donations using communications that specifically reference this case,” Trump’s attorneys pleaded on April 5. “The Court’s future rulings stand to further benefit those clients by harming President Trump, while Authentic and Ms. Merchan make money in the process.” Trump’s lawyers calculate that Authentic has earned $18 million from its clients since far-Left Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump in March 2023.
These facts should have prompted Judge Merchan to recuse himself from Trump’s case. As New York state’s Judiciary Law Article 2 § 14 states:
A judge shall not sit as such in, or take any part in the decision of, an action, claim, matter, motion or proceeding to which he is a party, or in which he has been attorney or counsel, or in which he is interested, or if he is related by consanguinity or affinity to any party to the controversy within the sixth degree.
Juan and Loren Merchan are consanguineous, or related by blood, in the first degree. So, this law applies here.
Never mind! Merchan judges on.
While Merchan might claim never to have discussed business with his daughter, his own bias is well-documented.
According to CNN:
Merchan contributed $15 earmarked for the Biden campaign, and made two $10 contributions, one earmarked to the Progressive Turnout Project, a voter outreach organization, and another to Stop Republicans, a subsidiary of the Progressive Turnout Project.
While that $35 could not finance the croutons at one of Biden’s $250,000-per-plate fundraisers, Merchan’s small gifts confirm his convictions: A judge who wants to “Stop Republicans” should not hear a case involving America’s No. 1 Republican.
For telling these truths, Merchan hammered Trump for “[t]his pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists” and added, “[T]he threat is very real.”
In fact, Trump threatened neither Merchan, his daughter, nor anyone else. Trump merely raised legitimate questions about Judge Merchan’s actual or apparent conflict of interest. Lawyers, judges, and politicians are supposed to avoid such appearances like poison ivy.
Compare Merchan’s restrictions on Trump’s freedom of speech with the impunity that Democrats enjoy when they pressure, threaten, or even physically confront judges and those associated with the judiciary.
Speaking at a pro-abortion rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on March 4, 2020, Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer of New York verbally threatened Trump-nominated Associated Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brent Kavanaugh.
“I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh,” Schumer shouted. “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”
Whirlwind?
Pay the price?
What hit you?
If Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were elected officials, they could face the “whirlwind” of defeat at the polls.
If they were Cabinet secretaries, they could “pay the price” of impeachment by the House and then get “hit” by removal from office after U.S. Senate trials (as might befall lying DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas).
But as judges with lifetime tenure, unaccused of impeachable offenses, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would face only “the whirlwind” of grave disability or early demise. Schumer’s comment smacked of a death threat, for which he deserves infinite excoriation.
In typically measured tones, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed.
“This morning, Senator Schumer spoke at a rally in front of the Supreme Court while a case was being argued inside,” Roberts wrote in a rare ex curia statement. “Senator Schumer referred to two Members of the Court by name and said he wanted to tell them that ‘You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.’ Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.”
Schumer paid no legal or political price for bullying two Supreme Court justices.
In summer 2020, in conjunction with the George Floyd riots, far-left radicals repeatedly attacked Portland, Oregon’s Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse. This included nightly arson attempts, fireworks shot at court officers, and laser beams aimed at those who guarded this palace of justice.
“Vandalism and violence detract from the importance of the larger movement for justice,” Portland’s left-wing Mayor Ted Wheeler complained via Twitter on July 3, 2020. “Groups continue to target the Justice Center, threatening the safety of hundreds of inmates and employees inside.”
Then–Attorney General Bill Barr detailed this mayhem before the House Judiciary Committee later that month. “[Portland’s rioters] have these powerful slingshots with ball bearings that they shoot. They have used pellet guns, we believe. We have found those projectiles have penetrated Marshals to the bone. They use the lasers to blind the Marshals. They do start fires. They start fires, if they can get the fire inside or through the windows. And they start fires along the outside of the courthouse. When the Marshals come out to try to deal with the fires, they are assaulted.”
The Associated Press’s Michael Balsamo reported from inside the Hatfield Courthouse. “I watched as injured officers were hauled inside,” he wrote in July 2020, also via Twitter. “In one case, the commercial firework came over so fast the officer didn’t have time to respond. It burned through his sleeves & he had bloody gashes on both forearms. Another had a concussion from being hit in the head w/ a mortar.”
Top Democrats denied that this carnage ever happened.
“Portland, Oregon is not out of control,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon insisted. Asked about Antifa violence in Portland, the House Judiciary Committee’s then-chairman, Jerrold Nadler of New York, said, “That’s a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.”
Even worse, few, if any, perpetrators got punished. Multnomah County’s leftist district attorney, Mike Schmidt, saw to that. Among 1,060 protest-related arrests through January 22, 2021, according to OregonLive.com, Schmidt refused to prosecute 73.7 percent of them.
Living on the left means seldom having to say you’re sorry.
On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leaked copy of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that vacated Roe v. Wade. A half-hearted internal probe failed to find the leaker, and Democrats were studiously incurious about identifying him.
The leaker gave the Left seven extra weeks to try to muscle pro-life justices into saving Roe. Soon after the leak, the radical pro-abortion group Ruth Sent Us began “urging protesters to come to the homes of the ‘six extremist justices, three in Virginia and three in Maryland,’” the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan explained.
The groups Our Rights DC and Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights targeted these jurists’ residences. ShutDownDC offered bounties to those who sighted these justices in public.
Kavanaugh was “unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant” in Washington on July 6, 2022, a spokesman for the steakhouse chain told Politico.
These protests raged outside these justices’ homes, never mind that they violated 18 U.S. Code § 1507, which prohibits picketing or parading “in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” to pressure or influence any such individual. Biden could not care less about this lawbreaking.
“I know that there’s an outrage right now, I guess, about protests that have been peaceful to date — and we certainly continue to encourage that — outside of judges’ homes,” then–White House press secretary Jen Psaki told journalists on May 10, 2022. “And that’s the President’s position.”
Worse still, the Justice Department instructed the U.S. Marshals Service to backpedal this law. According to relevant training materials, Marshals should “[a]void, unless absolutely necessary, criminal enforcement actions involving the protests or protestors, particularly on public space.”
Also, with emphasis in the original: “Making arrests and initiating prosecutions is not the goal of the USMS presence at SCOTUS residences.”
Finally, the DOJ directed the marshals not to waste their time, or the department’s, with probable cause arrests that the U.S. Attorney’s Office would ignore: “It is counter-productive to make PC arrests on cases that the USAO will not charge and prosecute.”
Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito called the Dobbs leak “part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.” In a mid-April 2023 Wall Street Journal interview, Alito recalled the fear that pro-abortion forces heaped on America’s highest tribunal.
“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito said. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”
Indeed, would-be assassin Nicholas Roske, 26, was arrested on Kavanaugh’s front lawn on June 22, 2022. “With him, according to accusations filed in federal court, were a suitcase and backpack that contained lock-picking and burglary tools, a Glock pistol, 37 rounds of ammunition, an aiming laser, and a pair of boots with padded outer soles that could allow stealth movement,” the Washington Post reported. Citing court records, the paper added that Roske also possessed “a black mask, duct tape, hard-knuckled gloves, and a ‘black tactical chest rig with pepper spray and black Gerber knife.’”
While Roske went too far, leftists who assaulted court officers, terrorized Supreme Court justices, and tried to torch a courthouse faced few consequences for these and other evil deeds.
Meanwhile, just for raising questions about Judge Merchan’s fairness, Trump is being denied his freedom of speech to discuss the objectivity of the man who holds the former president’s fate in his hands.
“I want my VOICE back,” Trump said Monday morning via Truth Social. “This Crooked Judge has GAGGED me. Unconstitutional! The other side can talk about me, but I am not allowed to talk about them!”
One of Trump’s loudest critics concurs.
“We can’t be hypocrites when it comes to the 1st Amendment,” pornographist Stormy Daniels’ former attorney, Michael Avenatti, wrote via X on April 2. “It is outrageous that Cohen and Daniels can do countless TV interviews, post on social, & make $$ on bogus documentaries — all by talking shit about Trump — but he’s gagged and threatened with jail if he responds.”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
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