In courtroom 1530 at 100 Centre Street, the Trump criminaI trial hearing on alleged gag order vioIations, with the DA Alvin Bragg and his trial team present. Pecker’s in the afternoon.
Trump posted this after the hearing:
Want to know how badly the gag order hearing went for Trump? "Mr. Blanche, you're losing all credibility with this court," says Judge Merchan, right after Blanche argues Trump's team is trying hard to comply with the gag order.
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo told jurors on Monday morning,
All 34 felony counts against the former president charge him with falsifying business records to reimburse Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen for hush-money payments to Daniels. During two fateful phone calls, Trump and Cohen allegedly devised a complicated system of hush money and reimbursements, involving a shell company, alleged tax deceptions, and disguised monthly payments, inflating a $130,000 payoff to more than twice its size: $420,000.
Colangelo unpacked that system well into his taut opening statement, clocking in at less than one hour. However, the prosecutor laid out a long backstory of the 2016 presidential election before even mentioning Daniels’ name.
“This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up,” Colangelo told the jury. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election,” he continued. “Then, he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
www.justsecurity.org/...
1/ Today was a great day for justice and a BAD one for Donald. Read on:
In two different New York City courtrooms, Donald was forced to start grappling with the consequences of his years—and in some cases decades—long flouting of the law.
I followed both proceedings today and found TEN key updates that you should know about. Let’s dive in.
Today is the beginning of Donald’s reckoning
In one room, prosecutors exposed Donald’s alleged criminal conspiracy to interfere with the election: the hush money payments; the deal with former America Media CEO David Pecker to have The National Enquirer run positive coverage of Donald while simultaneously attacking his opponents; the sketchy accounting used to hide the truth from American voters before the 2016 election were all outlined in the prosecution’s opening statement for a jury to see.
In another room, Letitia James was fighting to reinforce Donald’s bond, a symbolic gesture that signals the end of an era of Donald’s impunity.
We’ve waited years for this moment because the wheels of justice grind slowly. But justice is catching up and today. And for that, I am grateful. It’s a day that has been a long time coming.
2/ Donald’s biggest fear is coming true: The world is seeing him as the loser he is:
As someone who has known Donald for almost six decades (oy), I can tell you that beneath the bluster, there lies a fear so profound, it consumes him. It’s not the fear of losing his wealth or power or his status — although, to be clear, he lives in terror of these things as well — it’s something more personal: It’s the fear of being seen as a loser.
Donald has spent a lifetime, with a seemingly endless stream of help from various sources, building an image of success and invincibility. He’s crafted a persona that, to people who knew him from The Apprentice, made him appear larger than life. The truth is, though, it’s all smoke and mirrors. The reality of Donald is that he is nothing of what he has claimed to be. And his greatest fear is that the rest of the world will finally find that out.
This is exactly what is unfolding in Judge Merchan’s courtroom — a place in which Donald has no power, no control, and no authority.
As David Axelrod notes:“...As Trump sits and watches the criminal trial he hoped to avoid unfold, he must know that a potential reckoning he has spent a lifetime eluding could be coming. He has been reduced to a criminal defendant in a courtroom where someone else has absolute power and the rules very definitely apply. The weariness and vulnerability captured in those courtroom images betray a growing recognition that he could wind up as the thing his old man most reviled.”
“A convicted criminal? No, worse. A loser.”
One assumes that the DA has crafted a way to deal with the continuing objections by some legal analysts that it is a bad prosecution:
Jed Handelsman Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, wrote a blistering op-ed in The New York Times Tuesday stating that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump in his hush money trial was not just a “legal embarrassment,” but a “historic mistake.” He had been critical of the indictment when it was announced a year ago, but now that prosecutors laid out their case in opening statements, Shugerman is even more skeptical about their framing of the hush money cover-up as “election interference”:
- In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed, “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.
- The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.
www.mediaite.com/...