Posted on April 15, 2024 by John Hinderaker in 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Law

Trump Goes On Trial

Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against Donald Trump goes to trial today. It says something about the world we live in that we haven’t even bothered to mention it lately.

I summed up Bragg’s case against Trump here. In a word, it is pathetic. Trump made one or more “hush money” payments to Stormy Daniels, which was perfectly legal. The alleged crime is that his business documents reflect falsely that the payments were for legal fees and expenses. They were made to Michael Cohen, who in turn paid Daniels.

This is exactly the same dodge that Hillary Clinton’s campaign used when it camouflaged its payment for the fake Fusion GPS Trump dossier as payments to its law firm, Perkins Coie. Hillary’s case was much worse, however, as the payments were made by her campaign, not by her personally, and her false filing with the FEC was a campaign finance violation. Hillary, of course, has not been indicted.

The case against Trump is a joke because the records violation of which Trump is accused is a misdemeanor, on which the statute of limitations has run. It is only a felony if the records were falsified to cover up another crime. That is what Bragg alleges. But what crime? Bragg’s indictment doesn’t say. Presumably his theory will be that the payment to Daniels was a campaign finance violation, only it wasn’t. The payment was legal and no false filing was made with the FEC. Trump has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, any such violation.

So the case against Trump is terrible. But does it matter? The only reason Bragg brought the case (and the only reason the other prosecutions of Trump have been brought) is so that Democratic Party news outlets can say that Trump is a “convicted felon.” That is all that matters until November. Any conviction will most likely be reversed on appeal, but not until long after the election.

So the trial is really a show, with the jury in the starring role. Can Donald Trump get a fair trial in front of a Manhattan jury? No. He is reviled there. Jurors will understand the politics of what they are engaged in, and my guess is that they will play their part to the letter. Any trial lawyer will tell you that the most important thing he does in any trial is pick the jury. And here, I am afraid that is a hopeless task.

So, good luck to Trump’s lawyers. Maybe lightning will strike and the jury will include one honest man (or woman). But don’t count on it. Regardless of the weakness of the case, a conviction is highly probable, with the result that newspapers and TV networks will do their “convicted felon” shtick for the next six months. The consequences of that are unpredictable, but they can’t be good.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Biden Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel

Strategy à la Biden

When it comes to Iran’s massive missile and drone attack on Israel this past Saturday evening, President Biden has instructed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to let bygones be bygones. I don’t think he cited Sun Tzu in support of the Biden doctrine, but the White House has not released a readout of Biden’s call to Netanyahu following the attack. Rather, the White House released this statement publicly seeking to deter Israel:

I’ve just spoken with Prime Minister Netanyahu to reaffirm America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel. I told him that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks – sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel.

You have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Biden further arranged for a joint statement by the G7 to the same effect yesterday — the mighty arm of Biden diplomacy made itself felt.

Biden told Israel that the interception of nearly all of the Iranian drones and missiles used to attack it constituted a major victory, and so further retaliation might not be necessary, according to U.S. official who spoke with the New York Times. Referring to the phone call with the missing readout, the Times reports:

Mr. Biden spoke with Mr. Netanyahu on Saturday after the Iranian attack and repeated his “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security. Mr. Biden urged restraint, telling Mr. Netanyahu that it was time to “think carefully and strategically” about the risks of escalation if the Israelis respond in kind with military force, according to one senior administration official.

You have to love it in a laughter is the best medicine kind of way. Israelis really need the help of Joe Biden in thinking through the risks of conflict.

If he ever resumes retirement with a phony baloney job at the University of Pennsylvania, Biden must teach the course on strategy à la Biden. Forget about deterrence! Biden could enlist Robert Gates as his teaching assistant.

Biden would have to devote several classes to the deep meaning of “don’t.” It is an invitation to do — to do it, Biden style. According to Reuters (more here this morning), this is how “don’t” applied in this case:

Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be “within certain limits.”

The grand strategy of Joe Biden — within certain limits, you can’t make it up.

Posted on April 14, 2024 by Lloyd Billingsley in Biden Administration, Immigration, Sports

The Hoop and the Harm

Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark, who drains three-pointers with the ease of Stephen Curry, has earned an estimated $3.1 million in NIL revenue from marketing her name, image and likeness. Purdue center Zach Edey also took his team to the final, but as he told reporters, “I obviously lost out on a lot of money this year.” The towering center hails from Toronto, and under a student visa NIL earnings are off limits.

While Edey has been piling up points, the Biden Junta has allowed some eight million people to enter the country with no visas, no vaccination records, no background, and no job prospects. According to Judicial Watch, these entrants are the recipients of massive federal aid. That is profoundly unfair to taxpayers, legal immigrants, legitimate citizens, and talented visa holders such as Zach Edey, whom people will pay to see.

College athlete-students have only been able to gain NIL revenue since 2021 but they did not suddenly “gain” the right to market their name, image and likeness. They always had that right and before 2021 the NCAA took it away. The athlete-students were paid in kind by tuition while in college and NCAA bosses grabbed the cash from television rights and so forth. Imagine what Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Sue Bird, and Sheryl Swoopes, among many others, might have earned as collegians.

Change was long overdue but legal visa holders such as Zach Edey are still locked out. As “Big Maple” contends, “it needs to change for sure.” For all but the willfully blind, so does the ongoing invasion of illegals.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Loose Ends

Loose Ends (251)

• Bill Maher has gone off the reservation once again, debunking lefty talking points about the greatness of our neighbors and Scandinavia while ignoring facts:

• The late John Von Kannon, one of the founders of The American Spectator back in the 1960s, persuaded me many years ago that professional wrestling was a conservative sport, because it is a melodramatic morality play, with clear good guys and bad guys. (This was many years before Trump’s famous appearance at the WWE, where he smacked down Vince McMahon, which is a good piece of evidence in favor of the Von Kannon hypothesis.)

Well move over WWE and make way for UFC, where one of the latest winners in the ring let fly with this expletive-filled exhortation to Americans (in other words, strong language warning) that comes with some of the most remarkable recommendations. I was sure at first that this had to be come kind of AI fake, but it turns out to be authentic:

Maybe there’s more to the story of Trump winning over minority voters than we know.

(In case you want a primer on Von Mises, see this nine-minute explainer.)

• You may have heard about the deranged young lady who threatened the Bakersfield City Council, demanding on threat of murder that they call for a cease-fire resolution in Gaza. Here’s her complete speech:

Annnnnd here she is crying in court after being charged with 16 felonies and held on $1 million bail. She seems shocked that there might consequences for making violent threats on public officials. More of this please, though I hope someone will ask where she learned that this violent attitude is acceptable. Likely her college.

• John notes the story just below of the trans-athlete in Oregon who blew away the women’s field on a track and field sprint a few days ago.  Apparently someone doesn’t want the world to see the visual evidence of this travesty. Gee, I wonder why.

• Reminder: The Biden foreign policy team are idiots.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Gender Follies

Not a Race, a Mismatch

The “trans” fad continues to make waves around the Western world. In the U.K., the National Health Service commissioned pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass to investigate and report on the treatment of gender-confused children and young people in that country. Her report is long and measured, and I am still making my way through it. But it has been seen as a watershed moment in the pushback against the “trans” ideology that is going on in most countries. The United States is an outlier, here as in so many other instances, in its unthinking embrace of “trans” political ideology.

As a result of which, the circus of injustice rolls on. This is just one instance, from Oregon, where an 18 year old boy/man entered a high school women’s 200 meter race. What is striking is how he utterly destroys his female competitors:


The same thing is true in every sport. Women’s college basketball has gotten a lot of publicity in recent weeks, but if men were allowed into women’s basketball, there would be no women in that sport. Not a single one could make a “women’s” team for which men are eligible and willing to embarrass themselves.

This is an obvious fact which, for some reason, many liberals, including some who are prominent in women’s sports, refuse to acknowledge.

Which reminds me: the most prominent and effective advocate for women’s sports is Riley Gaines. She did an event for my organization last July, early in her career as an activist. She is great. If you are interested, you can watch that entire event here.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Crime, Leftism, Minnesota

The Times Finds a Prosecutor It Likes

We have written a number of times about Mary Moriarty, the leftist who now serves as County Attorney for Hennepin County, Minnesota. Moriarty is a former public defender who thinks her job as prosecutor is to take the side of criminals. When she was sworn in as county attorney, did she put her hand on the Bible or perhaps a copy of the Constitution? No: she rested it on a graphic novel about the life of Democratic Congressman John Lewis. She is known for her view that the human brain isn’t really developed until age 25, so that criminals under that age–most criminals, I would think–should not be seriously punished no matter what they do (e.g., in one case, murdering a woman in the course of a home invasion).

You can imagine what the New York Times thinks of Moriarty. Of course, they have to be delicate in how they describe her career. Many things must be omitted.

The Times seems puzzled by the fact that Moriarty has become deeply unpopular because of her soft-on-crime approach. For an explanation, they turned to Moriarty herself:

In an interview, Ms. Moriarty, 60, said she was under no illusion that the vision she campaigned on would be easy to carry out. But the intensity of the pushback she has seen has been jarring, she said.

“I actually find it hard to believe we’re in the city where George Floyd happened,” she said. “It’s very easy to scare people with crime. It’s a tactic that people have used forever and it’s starting to work again.”

But of course, there is a reason why people are scared of crime. It isn’t a right-wing plot. People don’t want to be shot, stabbed, robbed or raped. Moriarty apparently finds this odd.

The Times gives considerable space to Moriarty’s prosecution of State Trooper Ryan Londregan, which we wrote about here and here. The Times presents a sanitized version of the case, while acknowledging that public officials, including Democrats, have been critical of the prosecution. The Times also notes that Moriarty hired a use of force expert to help analyze the case, but stopped working with him when he told her that Londregan’s actions were justified. And the Times does quote Londregan’s lawyer, Chris Madel.

This is what happened: A convicted felon (a fact not mentioned by the Times) named Ricky Cobb was driving down a major highway in the Twin Cities in the middle of the night with no taillights. He was pulled over by the State Patrol, Londregan and his partner. They ran Cobb’s identity through the computer and found that there was an arrest warrant out for him. So their duty was to pick him up (a fact glossed over by the Times). They instructed Cobb to get out of his car, but he refused (a fact not mentioned by the Times). He likely refused because he had a gun in the car (a fact not mentioned by the Times) and, if arrested, would be subject to a prison term for being a felon illegally in possession of a firearm (a fact not mentioned by the Times).

Because Cobb refused to get out of his vehicle, Londregan’s partner opened the driver’s door and reached into the vehicle to unbuckle Cobb and pull him out. At the same time, Londregan opened the passenger side door and leaned into the car with his weapon drawn so he could cover his partner in case the wanted felon had a gun (he did). At that point, Cobb hit the gas and tried to flee (a fact glossed over by the Times). Both troopers were flung violently from the car, with Londregan’s partner being thrown into the right-hand lane of traffic (a fact not mentioned by the Times). It was only through luck or the grace of God–take your pick–that he was not run over and killed. Knowing that both he and his partner were in grave physical danger, as he was being thrown from the car, Londregan fired at the fleeing Cobb. No wonder the use of force expert said he did the right thing!

The Londregan case is likely to mark a turning point in attitudes toward law enforcement in the Twin Cities. It has utterly discredited Mary Moriarty and there has been an outpouring of public support for Londregan (a fact not mentioned by the Times).

The paper gives the last word to a local professor who heads a Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law:

“This is the first time we’ve ever had in our lives prosecutors that are willing to say: ‘What about all the people I’m throwing in jail?’” he said. “They’ve taken Black Lives Matter and they’ve actualized it.”

That actually sums it up fairly well. But a prosecutor’s job is to protect the public by prosecuting criminals. It is the victims of crime, not the criminals, who should be represented by the prosecutor’s office. Across the country, people who foolishly voted for far-left prosecutors are learning what it is like to live in a lawless society.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Podcasts

Podcast: The 3WHH, Letter from the Birmingham Starbucks

I hosted this crisp episode despite having a creaky voice from a springtime bug (and Lucretia is partly hobbled, too) and we cover a lot of ground, starting with a brief recap of the latest (unanimous!) property rights victory at the Supreme Court, but then moving quickly on to initial reactions to the outbreak of World War III yesterday. What to make of Iran’s attack on Israel? Many things are not clear about this impetuous scene.

Closely related, while the Biden Administration seems determined to tamp down the prospect of a wider war in the Middle East, it seems to be inviting one with Antony (Blank) Blinken saying a week ago that Ukraine should or would become a member of NATO. Are they trying to make Russia dig in, or draw the U.S. more directly into the war (which NATO membership would require)? We also ponder J.D. Vance’s very clear-headed New York Times op-ed that reviews the grim math of the Ukranian battle scene, making us wonder whether the Biden Administration has any strategy at all beyond “fight to the last Ukranian.”

Then we ponder briefly the astounding scene of the anti-Semitic protests in the back yard of Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, in which I repeat my argument that seeing this incident as a matter of the limits of free speech is woefully inadequate. (Nearby: the anti-Semitic posters placed on the Berkeley campus.)

But the bulk of the episode is devoted to analyzing the latest abortion controversies, starting with the Arizona Supreme Court decision upholding the validity of Arizona’s pre-Roe statutes, and observing as usual the way this narrow and largely technical ruling is being misreported in the media and misrepresented by the left.

The main portion of this segment, though, is devoted to Trump’s announcement that he does not support federal legislation of abortion and wants to leave the issue iup to the states. Does this make him the modern-day equivalent of Stephen Douglas, as John Davidson argues in our Article of the Week over at The Federalist? Lucretia will startle many regular listeners with her analysis of the matter, with which John and I largely agree.

In fact, it is an amazing how much agreement we had this week, but perhaps because we recorded in the morning sans-whisky, and with me and Lucretia ailing.

As usual, listen here, or over with our hosts at Ricochet when the episode goes live. (There’s always a slight delay on weekends.)