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CNN's Elie Honig: 'Prosecutors Got Trump — But They Contorted the Law'

As many in the mockingbird media are celebrating the conviction of Donald Trump in the Manhattan trial, CNN's senior legal analyst has tossed cold water on their jubilation with a devastating analysis of how the prosecutors captured their political prey. Honig's analysis appeared on Friday in New York Magazine which was reprinted from the CAFE Brief newsletter. The title alone expresses Honig's highly critical view of the prosecution: "Prosecutors Got Trump — But They Contorted the Law." First Honig notes the absurd lengths the prosecution went to win by any means necessary: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later. And now he lays down the Honig hammer on the more than obvious malfeasance in the case. The following are all undeniable facts. The judge donated money — a tiny amount, $35, but in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind — to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the judge earmarked for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to “Re-elect Donald Trump, MAGA forever!”? Absolutely not. District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office in an overwhelmingly Democratic county by touting his Trump-hunting prowess. He bizarrely (and falsely) boasted on the campaign trail, “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times.” (Disclosure: Both Bragg and Trump’s lead counsel, Todd Blanche, are friends and former colleagues of mine at the Southern District of New York.) Most importantly, the DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process. That’s not on the jury. That’s on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did. When you charge a former President and current likely presidential nominee with a crime you would want the case to be rock solid. However, as Honig points out, the case was based on an outside the statute of limitations misdemeanors federal case which was converted to a felony state case in which the underlying crimes were not even mentioned: But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge. Standing alone, falsification charges would have been mere misdemeanors under New York law, which posed two problems for the DA. First, nobody cares about a misdemeanor, and it would be laughable to bring the first-ever charge against a former president for a trifling offense that falls within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega. Second, the statute of limitations on a misdemeanor — two years — likely has long expired on Trump’s conduct, which dates to 2016 and 2017. So, to inflate the charges up to the lowest-level felony (Class E, on a scale of Class A through E) — and to electroshock them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations — the DA alleged that the falsification of business records was committed “with intent to commit another crime.” Here, according to prosecutors, the “another crime” is a New York State election-law violation, which in turn incorporates three separate “unlawful means”: federal campaign crimes, tax crimes, and falsification of still more documents. Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. So much for the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.) In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else. Honig also pointed out the absurdity of the prosecution declining to reveal the supposed underlining crimes in this case to a very uncomfortable CNN Panel. NEW: Alvin Bragg's former colleague and current CNN legal analyst is calling out the rigged Trump case, even accusing Judge Juan Merchan of violating the law. Elie Honig says the trial "blew his mind" as he called it an "unjustified mess." "The judge donated money - a… pic.twitter.com/nCUhMRutxe — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 1, 2024

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NOW He's Partisan! Politico Touts 'Alvin Bragg Sealed His Place in Democratic Lore'

As we've noted for months, the Democrat-allied media energetically present Trump's prosecutors as nonpartisans enforcing a "rule of law." They couldn't possibly be prosecuting Trump to advance their career among Democrats.  Just about five hours after the guilty verdicts were announced on Thursday, Politico published "Will Trump’s guilty verdict hurt him?" by Adam Wren and Lisa Kashinsky. About halfway into the story is a section that can be best described as blatant Alvin Bragg adulation, "Alvin Bragg sealed his place in Democratic lore," in which the authors conceded that their beloved Bragg ran on a "Get Trump" platform thus revealing that his case was extremely political, especially since it was delayed to serve as election interference. When he walked into the courtroom at 100 Centre Street on Thursday, showing his face there for the first time, the first-term top prosecutor in Manhattan had not talked about the case for months. “I only talk about that matter in court filings and in the court. That’s what we do,” Bragg told POLITICO before the trial began. But Bragg had campaigned on the promise to take on Trump. That was enough to win a competitive primary three years ago, before he took criticism from some fellow Democrats — and a former prosecutor, for his handling of probes into Trump. His vindication came on Thursday, with Bragg becoming the first-ever prosecutor to take on a former president, and likely cementing his status as a Democratic folk hero. Bragg, who is Black, has been called by Trump “a degenerate psychopath that truely [sic] hates the USA!” and an “animal.” Wow! "...Bragg had campaigned on the promise to take on Trump. That was enough to win a competitive primary three years ago..." Thank you for that amazing admission that most of the rest of us already knew about Bragg. Here is more of Politico's Bragg adulation in which they predict a bright POLITICAL future for him. Mayor Bragg? Governor Bragg? Now, Bragg can write his own political ticket, having won his case on all 34 counts. At a press conference following the verdict, Bragg struck the pose of a steely, above-the-fray prosecutor. Of course no mention by Politico of the man who did the big heavy lifting in the case, Matthew Colangelo formerly the #3 person at the Biden DOJ, who provided the prosecution's opening statement at the trial. Don't be too surprised if Trump's attorneys enter Politico's admission about Bragg into their evidence file when they appeal the case by citing Politico to prove that Bragg acted in an utterly political matter in taking up the Trump case. In fact he ran for office based on going after Trump which Politico has admitted, now that the Democrat mission is accomplished.

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MAGA-Phobia: Politico Q&A with Totalitarianism Expert Focuses on Trump

"News" outlets are engaged in feverish speculation about just how dystopian Donald Trump's second term might be. Their fervent imaginations overrule the reality of Trump's first term, which never devolved into dictatorship.  On Sunday, Politico's Joanna Weiss conducted a Q&A with liberal Samantha Rose Hill, a scholar of totalitarianism and the author Hannah Arendt. The headline was "‘A Truer Reality Beyond Reality’: Hannah Arendt’s Warning About How Totalitarianism Takes Root." Although Stalinism and Nazism are touched upon (barely), the main focus was Orange Man Bad. Weiss somehow manages to go two paragraphs of the interview before latching on to Trump:  Samantha Rose Hill is a professor at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a leading interpreter of Arendt’s thinking, particularly as it relates to loneliness. She notes that The Origins of Totalitarianism became a bestseller in 2016 because it helped explain an aspect of Donald Trump’s election: how economic and social conditions create feelings of loneliness and rootlessness and lead people to seek out belonging and meaning in political movements. Today, Hill says, Arendt might have connected loneliness not just to the rise of Trump, but also the actions of groups like Moms for Liberty on the right and the fervor of identity politics on the left. Arendt died almost 50 years ago, but Hill can somehow conjure up her spirit to tell us how she would have thought about Trump? How very, very convenient. Oh, and would it be too much to expect the interviewer to ask the interpreter of Arendt's thinking what Arendt might have thought about the state employing partisan lawfare to suppress and interfere with their opponents in an election year? And here we have "evidence" for the authoritarian cult of Trump based on weather reports:  Ideology teaches people that there is a truer reality beyond reality. Think of QAnon, Pizzagate and the many Americans who believe Donald Trump won the last presidential election. Another example that comes to mind is Trump’s inauguration. It was very clearly raining. You could see the rain. People were holding umbrellas. And yet, Trump said, “It isn’t raining.” Many people affirmed his statement, because the point of the statement wasn’t to reflect upon the experience as it was, but to assert his ideology of dominance. Hey Politico! How's this for an alternate reality? The CIA narrative fed to you that you enthusiastically recited in 2020, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." But wait! The rain! The rain! Finally they speculate about Trump being merely being in the authoritarian stage before he finally achieves true totalitarianism. Weiss asks: When people object to Trump or a politician like him, it seems what they’re often concerned about is authoritarianism, as opposed to totalitarianism. What’s the relationship between the two? Does totalitarianism lead to authoritarianism? Or is it the other way around? To which self-styled Arendt thought interpreter Hill answers: In Arendt’s account, it would be the other way around. She distinguishes between authoritarianism, fascism, tyranny and totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, she argued, depended upon the radical atomization of the whole, the absolute elimination of all spontaneity. One lived in absolute fear all the time, even those in the party, and the aim of totalitarianism was total world domination. Within an authoritarian system, you still have limited political freedom. There isn’t a totalizing state of fear, but there is domination: domination that aims at political control within a state, without the means of persuasion. So if we were to think of Trump trying to overturn the election results of 2020, that I think we can read as a kind of authoritarian grab. Sniff! You mean Donald Trump still has not quite reached totalitarian level yet? So how would Hannah Arendt as conjured up by her 2024 thought interpreter regard the massive governmental lawfare being used against Trump? Politico thinks you can never suggest Democrats might engage in authoritarian behavior as they claim they're just "safeguarding democracy."

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EU Warns Media Platforms Can Be Fined for Slovakian PM Shooting 'Disinformation'

Are you posting about the shocking assassination attempt on Wednesday upon the Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico? Well, a warning. You and the Big Tech platform you are posting on can be punished for spreading "disinformation' if the European Commission, the increasingly authoritarian cabinet government of the European Union, has its way. On Thursday, Bloomberg published the warning of impending EU censorship on this topic in an article by Peter Chapman and Samuel Stolton in "EU Monitoring ‘Spread of Disinformation’ on Fico Shooting." The story subtitles also provide these ominous censorship warnings: "Regulators can punish platforms that fail to stem fake news" "EU’s new Digital Services Act imposes tough rules on Big Tech" And please be warned that the European Commission could be actively "monitoring" YOU: The European Commission said it’s “actively monitoring” the spread of fake news about Wednesday’s shooting Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and warned it can slap Big Tech platforms with fines for failing to tackle disinformation. Fake news aka disinformation is information that the mainstream media and censors in various countries do not want you to see. Do you remember when suggesting that there might have been a Wuhan lab leak was considered to be "disinformation?" Ditto the Hunter Biden laptop. The regulator “is equipped with wide-ranging investigatory and supervisory powers, including the power to impose sanctions and remedies,” it said in an emailed statement....Violations could be punished under the European Union’s tough new Digital Services Act, which forces online platforms to put into place measures to tackle illegal content and disinformation, uphold user rights, and protect user’s health and wellbeing. Oh please, please protect our health and wellbeing from dangerous Thoughtcrimes! Under the Digital Services Act, the bloc has singled out multiple online platforms and search engines last year as large entities worthy of scrutiny. That includes X, Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc. and others with more than 45 million monthly active users in Europe. Which of the Big Tech platforms will abide by the dictates of the Orwellian Digital Services Act? Looking at you, YouTube! Russian state media has claimed that the political motivation behind the shooting was Fico’s criticism of pro-Ukrainian aid. The alleged perp was recorded loudly protesting Fico's criticism of Ukraine aid, so does that mean the platforms carrying that video will be fined or otherwise punished by the self-styled arbiters of "truth?"

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BBC Runs Hit Piece on Slovakian Prime Minister Hours After He's SHOT in Assassination Attempt

There is a time and place to be critical of a political leader if you are a news organization. However, the time to be critical of such a person is most definitely NOT just hours after an assassination attempt in which such a person lies in a hospital in critical condition from multiple bullet wounds. And yet the BBC, with the soul of a ghoul, went ahead on Wednesday and did just that hours after the Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico was shot multiple times. BBC Prague correspondent Rob Cameron somehow thought the very day of Fico being the gravely wounded victim of an assassination attempt would be a good time to write up this hit piece, "How Robert Fico rose to dominate Slovak politics." First came the smear in Cameron's story followed by a medical description of the one he just smeared just a sentence earlier. Robert Fico's ability to reinvent himself has kept him at the top of Slovakia’s politics despite repeated scandals. Now surgeons are battling to save his life after an assassination attempt that followed a government meeting in a small town. Class act, Rob. And true to form, Cameron reverted immediately to smear mode the very sentence after revealing his life threatening situation in the hospital. His most recent fall from grace was in 2018, when mass protests forced his resignation in the wake of the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée. What followed in the rest of the article was a cascade of slams directed at Fico fighting for his life in the hospital: During the six months he has been in office this time, he and his coalition allies have taken a sledgehammer to Slovakia’s institutions. Reform of the criminal justice system included abolition of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, set up 20 years ago to investigation serious crime and corruption. ...The national broadcaster – RTVS – is to be shut down in June and replaced with a new body with a new director. Mr Fico says RTVS cannot be objective as it is in permanent conflict with his government, and this ‘unsustainable’ situation can only be rectified by replacing it. Observers – including the opposition, the European Commission and the European Broadcasting Union – have warned the move would be a blow to media freedom in Slovakia. "Public broadcasters" don't object when European governments dismantle "far-right public media," as NPR lauded Poland for well, "taking a sledgehammer" to the critical public broadcaster there.  ...However if 59-year-old political veteran Mr Fico pulls through, he will likely draw new strength from this attempt on his life. Amid the calls for calm and an end to the hateful rhetoric, his closest political allies are already laying the blame squarely on the liberal opposition and the media. One coalition ally – deputy prime minister Andrej Danko – said the country was heading for "political war". The political temperature has certainly risen in Slovakia since he formed what is his fourth administration in October. Okay, BBC, we get that you have a great deal of antipathy towards Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, who doesn't want to aid Ukraine. But on the very day of an assassination attempt upon him which left him critically wounded in a hospital, is it too much to expect you to give your hate a rest?