The Lawfare Racket Against Trump

I attended UCLA School of Law from August 1990 to May 1993. I was chief articles editor of the UCLA Law Review and then moved on to clerk for a brilliant (I add: most brilliant) federal appeals court judge, the Hon. Danny J. Boggs of the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. I then practiced complex civil litigation for more than a decade at three of America’s most prominent powerhouse law firms, moving over to teaching law school for nearly 20 years. Yes, I am a rabbi of 40-plus years who knows Judaic law and the Bible pretty respectably by now, but I also know American law every bit as well as the pundits you see on TV. And those pundits don’t make puns.

What the Democrats and their media co-conspirators are doing to former and future President Donald Trump is beyond anything that exists in American law, and they are destroying our country. You see, here is how it works:

Nixon screwed up but did not deserve to be thrown out of office. It was not he who cooked up the bungled Watergate break-in. He probably fumed when he learned about it. He was leading in the polls at the time by 2 million points, give or take Massachusetts, and he did not need to do anything because George McGovern was campaigning for him. No one wanted McGovern. No one. Then Nixon learned that his backers broke into the Watergate Hotel, yada-yada-yada. What should he have done?

The leftist media know he should have called 9-1-1 and turned them in. But that is not realistic. What kind of jerk learns that his closest friends, on their own, tried to “do him a solid” but messed up, so he then snitches on them to the fuzz? No one does that. You cannot do that. You can call out others for failing to do that, but you never would do that yourself. If there had been a Fox News at the time, for all their flaws, Nixon’s side would have gotten a nightly airing, and he would have gotten censured but not impeached. But the Democrats smelled blood.

That day was the day that the impeachment of Bill Clinton began. No one had ever heard of him, but that didn’t matter. Sooner or later, the Republicans were going to retaliatorily impeach a Democrat. Then the Dems impeached Trump, and then the GOP impeached Alejandro Mayorkas. It never mattered whether there were enough votes in the Senate to convict Clinton, Trump, or Mayorkas. Once it started with Nixon, it had to be avenged, and then more retaliation, and then more. Nixon never should have faced impeachment. Clinton dishonored himself and deserved to be sued in civil court serially by the women he abused, but you don’t impeach a president because he lies to a lawyer in a deposition over whether he “had sex” with a female while he falsely swears to his wife at home each night that he never touched her. It is what it is. Trump’s phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky was perfectly reasonable. Of all the politicized impeachments, the only one that is legit is the present one to throw out Mayorkas. And the Democrats dismissed it before it could begin.

Let the word go forth from this time and place (my column at The American Spectator) that the Trump lawfare obscenities will unleash lawfare against the Bidens after January 2025 or whenever his time ends. If Joe is reelected and dies in office, they still will go after Hunter and all the other Bidens. Then the Democrats will go after the next Republican president like Ron DeSantis or whoever, and then the GOP will imprison the next Democrat after. Welcome to the Banana Republic. Make sure not to slip on the peels in Aisle 8 while the criminal attorneys file slips on appeal in Courtroom 8.

Each Trump case is bogus. A case of property loan fraud where all the lenders say they have no gripes and gladly would lend to him again, but the leftist prejudiced Democrat judge hits him and his team with $557 million in judgments, beginning with $355 million plus another $100 million interest? Really? Again, read the first paragraph here. I know stuff. Yes, I am for Trump, but I have devoted too many years of my life to establishing a respected name in the law to compromise it as some Trump attorneys did, to their shame, after Jan. 6. Yet I always taught my 2,000-plus law students that, exactly like the law of gravity, the law is the law.

I believe, correctly or wrongly, that Trump privately went too far with Stormy Daniels, though not “Star Trek” distance (“where no man has gone before”). As a rabbi, I know that is a terrible sin. But our lives do not end with a terrible sin. I know that also. Any competent rav (Orthodox rabbi) will focus not on the sin but on the road to redemption. Otherwise, a sinner may decide to continue his sinning the rest of his life because his soul already is lost. But, no, it is not lost. A person can redeem himself. In some cases, not all, that even can make him holier. All because you labored for 40 years on the Sabbath does not mean that you cannot turn it around with G-d by remembering and observing His Shabbat Day for the rest of your life.

Has Trump redeemed himself? I don’t know. But I do know he never did and never would get involved with any woman other than his wife while in office. I trust him there. John F. Kennedy was not that pristine while in office, though the media covered for him. LBJ walked around on airplanes with his private male organ exposed, for the media to see his, uh, johnson. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Obama were clean in this way. Clinton soiled the White House no less than he did Monica’s dress. Trump should not be on trial for hush money.

The “hush money” matter should not be actionable, and if it were, the limitations statute has passed. So Alvin Bragg ties it to a federal elections statute, claiming Trump made election payments while criminally hiding them from the public. We all know why the payments were secret. Just go to a few filthy R-rated movies that get great New York Times reviews, and watch hush money payments turned into blackmail. Yawn. Trump paid secretly to hide the story from his wife, just as Clinton tried to lie his way through a deposition taken under oath to hide from Hillary his involuntary harem. Democrats do not convict for that. Rather, they follow the news and reassess whether their own hush money payments are being transmitted securely. They make sure to keep those payments under $10,000 to avoid the Eliot Spitzer thing. They avoid becoming spectacles like Wilbur Mills.

Trump’s payments were obscene but not criminal. The statute expired. The federal elections law is irrelevant. But the Democrats conspired to have a Soros-funded D.A. bring this nonsense in a deep blue Manhattan courtroom where a deep blue jury resides. It is for this reason that Trump needs to wait for the appellate process. I am not sure he will get justice in New York’s mid-level appellate courts or in the top rung. He ultimately may need to bring a habeas corpus to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am reminded of the landmark First Amendment case of New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). Sullivan was an Alabaman, and he filed for defamation in Alabama. The Times did not have a chance in the world. The trial resulted in them being found guilty. Also the first appeal. Also the state Supreme Court. Finally, they got to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they won. They did not deserve to win outright, but they also did not deserve more than a minor penalty, but the point is that the Supreme Court exists to ensure justice when there has been manifest local prejudice all the way up.

It probably will be only then and there that Trump will emerge with the Right to Bragg.

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