Trump court cases

How ironic that Trump who falsely claims hoaxes all of the time posted an apparent hoax about the judge's daughter.

www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/nyregion/trump-social-media-attack.html

Trump Spreads Apparent Hoax in Attacking Judge’s Daughter
Donald Trump said a photo of him behind bars on Loren Merchan’s X account meant he could not get a fair trial, but a court official said someone had appropriated the account.

It was an explosive claim from Donald J. Trump, just weeks before his Manhattan criminal trial is set to begin: He assailed the judge’s daughter on Wednesday, saying she had used an image of the former president behind bars as a social media profile picture.

The photo made it “completely impossible for me to get a fair trial,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. He demanded that the judge, Juan M. Merchan, recuse himself.

But there was a problem with his claim: The New York State Court system says the account on X is bogus.

Although the handle once belonged to the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, she deleted it about a year ago, a court spokesman said. Someone else — it is unclear who — has since taken it over. Its profile picture is now a childhood portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The X, formerly Twitter, account being attributed to Judge Merchan’s daughter no longer belongs to her,” said Al Baker, the spokesman for the state’s Office of Court Administration. “It is not linked to her email address, nor has she posted under that screen name since she deleted the account. Rather, it represents the reconstitution, last April, and manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned.”

It is hardly the only online hoax that Mr. Trump has promoted over the years, but unleashing apparently false claims concerning the judge’s daughter just weeks before the trial begins represents an escalation on his part.

It came a day after Justice Merchan imposed a gag order on Mr. Trump, barring him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors, jurors and court staff. Notably, the judge and his family are not included in the gag order.

And Mr. Trump wasted no time attacking the judge, who is a Democrat, and his family: “If the Biased and Conflicted Judge is allowed to stay on this Sham ‘Case,’ it will be another sad example of our Country becoming a Banana Republic,” Mr. Trump wrote in the social media post on Wednesday.

Neither a spokesman for the Trump campaign nor Ms. Merchan immediately returned request for comments on Wednesday evening.

Ms. Merchan has worked as an executive at Authentic, a digital marketing agency that works with Democratic candidates. Mr. Trump’s lawyers last year argued that Justice Merchan should recuse himself, claiming that his daughter stood to benefit financially from his decisions. The judge declined, citing a state advisory committee on judicial ethics, which determined that his impartiality could not “reasonably be questioned.”

The trial, which will begin on April 15, will focus on what prosecutors say was Mr. Trump’s effort to cover up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

On Monday, Justice Merchan seemingly swept away the last obstacles to an April trial, dismissing an attempt by the defense to delay or even dismiss the case. Mr. Trump would be the first former American president to face trial on criminal charges.

Ms. Merchan is just the latest woman to feel the sting of Mr. Trump’s invective. In his civil fraud trial last year, Mr. Trump took aim at the judge’s principal law clerk, claiming falsely that she was Senator Chuck Schumer’s “girlfriend.”

The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, instituted a limited gag order on Mr. Trump, preventing him from commenting on court staff.

Mr. Trump twice violated the order, resulting in $15,000 in fines.

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-27-2024


he news that NBC News reconsidered its invitation to former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to become a paid contributor has buried the recent news about some of the other participants in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Yesterday a judge in Minnesota ruled in favor of a warehouse owner who sought to evict MyPillow after it failed to pay more than $200,000 in rent. MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell has complained that his company has been “decimated” by his support for Trump. His insistence—without evidence—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has entangled him in expensive defamation lawsuits filed by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.

Lindell cannot pay his lawyers and claims to have “lost hundreds of millions of dollars,” but insists he is being persecuted “because you want me to shut up about [the] security of our elections.”

Also yesterday, Trump loyalist Kari Lake, who has pushed the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, ran for Arizona governor in 2022, and is now running for the U.S. Senate, admitted she defamed Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer and that she acted with actual malice when she claimed he “sabotaged” the 2022 election. The request to admit to defamation came on the day that discovery, the process of sharing information about a case with each side, was to begin, suggesting that she preferred to admit wrongdoing rather than let anyone see what might be in her emails, texts, and recordings.

Arizona journalist Howard Fischer reported in the Arizona Daily Star that in a video statement, Lake said her admission did not mean she agreed she did anything wrong, although that is expressly stipulated in the court papers. She said she conceded because Richer’s lawsuit was keeping her off the campaign trail. “It’s called lawfare: weaponizing the legal system to punish, impoverish and destroy political opponents,’’ Lake said. “We’ve all seen how they’re doing it to President Trump. And here in Arizona, they’re doing the exact same thing to me.’’

One of Lake’s senior advisors said: “Kari Lake maintains she has always been truthful.”

Also yesterday, a three-member panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility began a disciplinary hearing for former Department of Justice environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who was so key to Trump’s plan to get state legislatures to overturn the results of the 2020 election that Trump tried to make him attorney general.

Clark joins Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who led the media blitz to argue—falsely—that the election had been stolen. Giuliani’s New York and Washington, D.C., law licenses were suspended in June 2021 after a court found that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public at large.” He is now facing disbarment.

Earlier this month, he said on his podcast that he expected to be disbarred because “[t]he Bar Association is going to crucify me no matter what. I will be disbarred in New York. I will be disbarred in Washington. It will have nothing to do with anything I did wrong.”

Today, after a long trial, attorney discipline judge Yvette Roland recommended that John Eastman, the lawyer who came up with the justification for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election, be disbarred. Eastman will immediately lose his license to practice law. The California Supreme Court will decide whether to disbar Eastman.

Eastman’s lawyer said it was unfair to take Eastman’s law license because he needs to make money to fight the criminal charges against him in Georgia, where he has been indicted for his part in the effort to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election there. For his part, Eastman maintains he did nothing wrong.

In her recommendation, Judge Roland compared Eastman’s case to that of Donald Segretti, the lawyer whose efforts to guarantee President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection included, as Roland’s recommendation noted, distributing letters that made false accusations against Nixon’s rivals (including a forged letter attributing a slur against French-Canadians to Maine senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Edmund Muskie). At the time, the court noted that Segretti was only 30, thought he was acting for Nixon, and did not act in his capacity as a lawyer. The court also emphasized that Segretti “recognized the wrongfulness of his acts, expressed regret, and cooperated with the investigating agencies.”

In contrast, Roland wrote, “[t]he scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses” Segretti’s misconduct. Segretti acted outside his role as an attorney, while “Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump campaign.” Roland also noted that while Segretti expressed remorse and recognized his wrongdoing, Eastman has shown “an apparent inability to accept responsibility. This lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.”

One by one, those who worked with Trump to overturn the election are being held to account by our legal system. But still, they refuse to admit any wrongdoing.

In that, they are following Trump.

Despite Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order, Trump continued today to attack both Merchan and his daughter. On his social media site, Trump posted that Merchan was trying to deprive him of his “First Amendment right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!” Trump posted in great detail about the judge’s daughter, accusing her of making money by “working to ‘Get Trump,’” based on images shared by an old social media account of hers that had been hacked.

It was President Nixon who perfected the refusal to admit wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence. Even after tapes recorded in the Oval Office revealed that he had plotted with an aide to block investigations of the break-in at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel by invoking national security and Republican Party leaders told him he needed to resign, he refused to admit wrongdoing. Instead, he told the American people he was stepping down because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed his fall on the press, saying its “leaks and accusations and innuendo” were designed to destroy him.

Gerald R. Ford, the president who replaced Nixon, inadvertently put a rubber stamp on Nixon’s refusal to accept responsibility. Believing it was better for the country to move past the divisions of the Watergate era, Ford issued a preemptive pardon for any crimes the former president might have committed against the United States while in office. Ford maintained that the acceptance of a pardon was an admission of guilt.

But Ford’s pardon meant Nixon never faced legal accountability for his actions. That escape allowed him to argue that a president is above the law. In a 1977 interview with British journalist David Frost, Nixon told Frost that “when the president does it…that means that it is not illegal,” by definition.

As Nixon did, Trump has watched those who participated in his schemes pay dearly for their support, but he appears angry and confused at the idea that he himself could be held legally accountable for his behavior.

But without accountability, as Judge Roland noted, there is no incentive to stop dangerous behavior. Josh Dawsey reported last night in the Washington Post that since Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee and purged it of former employees, those interviewing for jobs are being asked if they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Other questions, Dawsey reported, include “what applicants believe should be done on ‘election integrity’ in 2024.