The seven-year drive by Democratic Party bosses, prosecutors and the liberal media to bring down, ruin and imprison Donald Trump is accelerating with the coming presidential election. They finally got a conviction by a jury in New York City May 30. The 2024 presidential candidate was found guilty of falsifying business records in order to carry out an unspecified second “crime” related to interfering in the 2016 election in which he had been a candidate.
This combination allowed the prosecution to avoid the fact that the statute of limitations had expired and turn the case from a misdemeanor to a felony, with potential jail time.
The charges were brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who ran for office as the best man to pin a crime on Trump. Judge Juan Merchan, a Biden campaign donor, ran the proceedings, putting barriers in front of Trump and his lawyers to maximize the likelihood of a “guilty” verdict. This included imposing an unconstitutional gag order on the presidential candidate and dealing blows to his right to a fair trial.
This culminated in Merchan’s instructions to the jury before they met. He told them they could convict Trump of carrying out this second “crime,” saying, “You need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.” He said there were multiple possibilities each juror could consider.
But the Sixth Amendment says that the accused has the right to be “informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.” This protection from the state was fought for in blood, because without it, it’s impossible to mount a serious defense.
The methods used against Trump aren’t new. They have marked government use of the FBI and the courts against striking unionists, fighters for Black rights, opponents of Washington’s wars, the Socialist Workers Party and others for more than a century. Workers who get tangled up in the capitalist “justice” system know from their own experience that it’s rigged against the working class.
What took place in Merchan’s court was not “weaponization of the justice system,” as many Republicans claim, but the application of frame-up techniques long used against the working class.
The conviction of Trump — a capitalist politician like Biden — and his prosecution in three other cases in Georgia, Florida and Washington, D.C., are part of Democrats’ frantic efforts to drive him out of the 2024 race. They’re convinced it’s the only way Joseph Biden can win the election.
Along the way, Democrats are dealing serious blows to constitutional protections workers need and use, especially when we take steps to defend ourselves, build unions and organize independently of the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties.
Biden gave a green light for Trump’s indictment in comments leaked to the New York Times in April 2022. He complained Attorney General Merrick Garland was being too slow in charging his likely political opponent.
Two days after Trump’s Nov. 16, 2022, announcement that he’s running for president, Garland appointed former U.N. prosecutor Jack Smith as a Justice Department special counsel to go after Trump. Smith has filed two court cases against Trump, in Florida and Washington, D.C.
Deep-rooted hatred of working class
Underlying the Democrats’ vitriol toward the Republican candidate is their deeply rooted hatred toward his supporters, including tens of millions of workers who they seek to disenfranchise. That disdain is shared by broad layers in the upper middle class who ape the outlook of the capitalist rulers and increasingly fear the possibility of being driven into the working class themselves as the capitalist economy deteriorates.
Hillary Clinton infamously called Trump supporters “deplorables” in 2016. During the trial Trump held a campaign rally May 24 in the Bronx, a Democratic stronghold in New York. The state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, ridiculed the thousands who turned out to hear the candidate as “clowns.”
Merchan has set July 11 for a hearing to sentence Trump, four days before the Republican Party convention opens to formalize his nomination.
The case should never have gone to trial. The verdict should be overturned.
The judge rejected the defense’s motion to move the trial out of Manhattan, with its overwhelmingly Democratic voter registration and where party officials and most media have stoked anti-Trump hysteria for years. In this case, which even some Democrats admitted was built on questionable foundations, it took less than 24 hours for the jury to bring in a unanimous guilty verdict.
When the trial opened, prosecutors led with claims Trump had his lawyer make an “illegal payment to Stormy Daniels” in 2016. But so-called hush-money payments aren’t illegal.
The judge allowed prosecutors to repeatedly tell the jury Trump had carried out some kind of federal campaign violations. But he sharply limited what Trump’s lawyers could question former chair of the Federal Election Commission Bradley Smith about, including exactly on this matter. Smith planned to explain that a nondisclosure agreement — like the one Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen supposedly arranged on his behalf — simply doesn’t constitute a campaign expense. The judge said he wouldn’t allow Smith to testify about this because it would just set off a disagreement between “experts” — Smith and himself.
Merchan allowed prosecutors to present extensive testimony from Cohen and David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer. But he instructed the jury they must ignore the fact that in a previous case Cohen had cut a plea deal with prosecutors who were pressing him to finger Trump. The judge also told the jury to ignore the fact that Pecker got a nonprosecution agreement from prosecutors before he agreed to testify.
“If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said after the verdict May 31. In response, Biden declared, “It’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”
But there is nothing “dangerous” about a defendant, or anyone else, pointing to serious courtroom abuses that do damage to crucial constitutional protections.
The liberal press were ecstatic about the verdict. “Guilty” was the headline over all six columns of the New York Times front page May 31. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin demanded June 4 that Merchan jail Trump “for at least a year,” because problems with the Democrats three other cases against him mean they will likely be delayed until after the election.