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A lesser man staring down a criminal conviction, even on utterly bogus charges, might break under the stress of the event, or succumb to doubt and despair. But Donald Trump, as the saying goes, is made of sterner stuff. This stuff was readily on display Thursday morning in Midtown when he was greeted to a hero’s welcome before a litany of construction workers, representing the Steamfitters Union 638. Close to a thousand union workers, many of them still registered Democrats, arrived at the crack of dawn – before the President’s scheduled court proceeding – to serenade the President with a traditional New York homecoming.
What was especially remarkable about the event, which was spearheaded by the New York Young Republican Club, was not so much the enthusiasm among this traditionally Left-leaning voter bloc. Nor even was the fact that legions of them braved unseasonably chilly temperatures to come out at the crack of dawn, deep in the belly of the beast of liberal Manhattan, to showcase their support for President Trump (of note: their leader, Bob Bartels, said that “President Trump is leading Joe Biden three to one” of their 9,000-member union).
Nay, what was truly remarkable about the largely impromptu meetup was how organic it felt, and how strong President Trump’s support remains, even as he is hamstrung by an illegitimate court proceeding that in large part is preventing him from campaigning in this crucial election year in more important battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Nevertheless, only Donald Trump can make a tour de force out of what was really just a cobbled together side act for a campaign that has been slowed down by a weaponized justice system. Even so, the turnout, media presence, and optics of the union workers event would be envied by many other presidential campaigns (especially Joe Biden) — which would consider an event of this notoriety a main act.
Indeed, since his criminal trial began in New York City, President Trump has utilized the opportunity to experiment with more grassroots-style campaigning methods – making lemonade out of lemons. Last week he strode into a Bodega in Spanish Harlem, to tremendous acclaim, in a neighborhood that was mostly Hispanic and Democratic-leaning. This week he met with Union Workers in the heart of Manhattan. In the coming weeks, he has teased rallies in the South Bronx and Madison Square Garden (and perhaps other locations in New York, too), and will also be campaigning in neighboring New Jersey, where he is already scheduled to appear for a May 11th rally in Wildwood. New Jersey, much like New York, is another deep blue state. And yet, several reputable polls have placed him within a 5-point reach of Biden there, which is even closer than New York, where the President has also significantly narrowed the gap to within single digits in recent months.
In fact, President Trump has been so successful with these less structured campaign events that some pundits have characterized them as more powerful, and effective, methods of outreach than even his now world-famous rallies, which have become a staple of the 45th President’s political brand. However, by taking his message directly to the people, particularly in areas that have suffered true blight at the hand of the Biden regime’s destructive policies – whether through their unwillingness to crack down on crime, or their refusal to manage the border crisis, or their stripping away Americans’ right to defend themselves with a firearm – the message has been a powerful one, activating voter blocs in the process that would otherwise not normally vote for a Republican presidential candidate.
The bottom line is that virtually all Americans are worse – far worse – now than they were four years ago when President Trump was still in office, even during the height of covid. Our economy has been brought to a crawl, weighed down by lingering inflation (which has almost completely eroded the value of the dollar), stagnant wages, enervated supply chains, mediocre growth, crushing debt, and offshoring of industry.
Our border crisis has reached a catastrophic level: illegals flood cities like New York like never before, and government officials are clueless about how to handle it, afraid of being politically incorrect and doing what is necessary – a wholesale deportation – to undo the great damage wrought to our society by the Biden Regime’s suicidal policies.
Our system of justice has been weaponized beyond repair – and Americans feel these effects viscerally, not just vicariously through the political persecution of Donald Trump. Faithful Catholics are being added to FBI lists, while parents who dare so criticize woke public school curricula are treated as domestic terrorists by the Biden Regime’s Department of Injustice — and imposed heavy-handed legal penalties.
Legions of January 6th defendants, whom President Trump rightly terms “political hostages” — are being held in detention, so many of their due process rights denied without even being charged with a crime. Countless more face lengthy prison sentences, all for committing at worst a misdemeanor. They languish in solitary confinement, at the directive of our government, for sometimes months on end in inhumane conditions that we would be ashamed to keep ISIS terrorists or MS-13 gang members, whose crimes cannot even be placed in the same universe as those Americans who peacefully demonstrated at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
For these reasons, and many more, once insurmountable Democratic havens like New York and New Jersey are beginning to show cracks. The blue wall that President Trump pierced in the Midwest in 2016 is beginning to trickle over to the northeast, and the west, and other regions of the country that Democrats in the not-too-distant past once retained a formidable grip on. President Trump’s gains are bolstered by his uncanny appeal to working class people, legacy Americans who do not want their fundamental liberties and rights denied by their government – or their way of life outsourced to China, South America, or the Middle East.
The invasion at our southern border is emblematic of a much larger invasion – and subversion – to our national identity, being carried out with impunity by a political elite that includes members of both party establishments, which remains utterly and dogmatically committed to selling America out to the world. President Trump offers the only antidote to preserve our time-honored traditions, those things that made America special and unique for over two centuries, but now is on the precipice of being lost forever – notwithstanding a dramatic course correction.
That course correction can only be accomplished through the movement President Trump first launched in 2016, when he descended the fateful Trump Tower escalator. Make America Great Again gave the President two electoral victories in 2016 and 2020 and will do so again – with even more zeal this time around – because the stakes are that much higher, and millions more Americans have been awakened — and galvanized — to these harsh realities, which affect each and every one of us – regardless of race, religion, creed, or ideology.
It is for this reason, ultimately, that best explains why President Trump has catapulted in the polls and will carry this momentum all the way to victory come November, so long as we the people do our part to help get him there.
The post New York Is Trump Country appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Between judicially disqualifying conflicts of interests to overbroad gag orders that outrageously violate President Trump’s First Amendment rights as a criminal defendant, the President’s lawyers have multiple grounds on which to appeal this present show trial, which makes a mockery of the rule of law currently underway in lower Manhattan. One would have to scour the annals of American legal history to find another case quite like the one brought by Alvin Bragg and aided and abetted by Matthew Colangelo, a former top-level official of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, and prosecuted with inglorious vengeance by the highly conflicted Judge Merchan. The fact that Bragg’s kangaroo show trial is being prosecuted against Donald Trump at all, shamelessly denying him the respect and decorum the office of the President deserves, even in the courtroom, is bad enough. But that it is being waged against the leading candidate, by most leading polls, to become the 47th President of the United States, and leader of the free world, is many steps beyond the pale. Worse yet, that leading candidate has been so unceremoniously stripped of the traditional formalities of the presidential office – a laundry list of indiscretions that includes proper respect in the courtroom, protection of his fundamental due process rights, the right to speak and protest the trial proceeding where necessary. These indiscretions collectively prove that Judge Merchan condemned President Trump before his trial has even really commenced, depriving him of the most important pillar of the Anglo-American legal system: the presumption of innocence.
On these grounds, President Trump’s attorneys must request intervention by a higher tribunal, to either stay the proceeding, or better yet, put an end to this sham kangaroo trial that epitomizes what so many Americans realize as clear as day: a flagrant case of election interference.
The judicial system fortunately provides the defendant tools to appeal an utterly conflicted and corrupt proceeding. All President Trump’s attorneys would need to do is file a motion with the court requesting the judge recuse himself. If the judge refuses to recuse himself, despite being so troublingly conflicted, President Trump’s attorneys will then have the option to appeal the order the court must thereupon issue.
There are several ways to appeal a court order of this kind. The first, more conservative approach, would be a kind of collateral attack on the proceeding – which challenges the case on grounds other than the underlying merits of the claim – through what is called an Article 78 filing under New York law. In New York, lawyers have the option to appeal via an Article 78 proceeding to challenge the conduct of judges, including state criminal court judges whose offices are created by statute. There are two reasons why an Article 78 appeal might be easier, and more advisable, than a direct interlocutory appeal to federal court. The first reason is that Article 78 appeals would help streamline the process, given that President Trump’s case was brought in state court already, where such appeals are commonplace. It is much more complicated to appeal a criminal case, especially one implicating the thorny and often confused legal issues controlling the proceeding here, to federal court than by way of an Article 78 proceeding, which arises under state law and is thereby governed by much similar rules and principles than those which govern federal court.
The second, perhaps even more compelling, reason favoring an Article 78 appeal, rather than an appeal to federal court, is that under the New York State Constitution, parties have even more expansive First Amendment rights than those that would typically arise under the First Amendment. In the seminal 1988 decision, O’Neill v Oakgrove Construction, the Second Appellate Division of New York held that the “protection afforded by the guarantees of free press and speech in the New York State Constitution is often broader than the minimum required by [the Federal Constitution].” Thus, if the gag order serves as the basis for the Article 78 collateral attack, at least on paper, President Trump has reason to be optimistic because of how speech rights are traditionally protected in New York State, which heavily disfavors any infringements whatever on speech – more so than what would give rise to a valid challenge under First Amendment grounds alone.
Accordingly, President Trump’s lawyers have strong grounds to make an Article 78 appeal on the basis of the unconstitutional scope of the gag order that Judge Merchan arbitrarily imposed upon him, which fails to meet normal strict scrutiny analysis under federal law, as I have previously detailed at length. Therefore, if the gag order fails to pass muster under the Supreme Court’s own precedent from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which governs when courts may prohibit speech in exceptional cases, surely the gag order here would likewise fail to meet the even more rigorous standard for speech prohibitions that arise under New York State’s Constitution.
Another issue that might be included in an Article 78 appeal is the issue of judicial misconduct: in other words, the conflict of interest serving as the basis for the appeal. Again, New York law is arguably more rigorous than federal law on this issue. Under New York law, “[a] judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned…”. An important ground for dismissal is when “the judge knows that the judge or the judge’s spouse, or a person known by the judge to be within the sixth degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person … has an interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.”
One such interest that can be substantially affected by the proceeding is an economic interest. Namely, the economic interest of Loren Merchan, Judge Merchan’s daughter, who happens to fall “within the sixth degree of relationship” stipulated under the rule. As exhaustively discussed elsewhere, Loren Merchan works as a senior officer and fundraiser for a political consulting firm, Authentic Campaigns, whose “featured clients” include none other than the Biden-Harris campaign and various far-left lawmakers, including Adam Schiff and Kathy Hochul, with interests that would, to say the least, create a strong impression of impropriety that severely undermines Judge Merchan’s ability to rule fairly and impartially. Moreover, as also reported previously, Judge Merchan’s own wife allegedly works for Attorney General Letitia James’ office, who campaigned on “getting” President Trump and whose office put strong political pressures on both Merchan and Bragg to prosecute the 45th President in this criminal trial – to say nothing of presiding over President Trump’s concurrent civil cases taking place in New York State. Furthermore, reputable sources have reported that Loren Merchan’s firm profited, to the tune of at least $93 million, off the political persecution of Donald Trump happening in lower Manhattan.
Under the federal canons of judicial conduct, a judge must recuse himself whenever the judge, his spouse, or a relative “within the third degree of relationship” of the judge is “a person who has more than a de minimis interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.” Reading these two rules together, it is notable, first, that the state ethics code encompasses relatives to “the sixth degree of relationship,” giving strong reason to believe that, much like speech law, the standard for impropriety under New York State laws governing judicial misconduct is even more rigorous than federal law.
Second, a daughter presiding over a business that raises tens of millions of dollars for political candidates and campaigns, and stands to – with very good reason – earn a windfall if her father happens to prosecute and convict the man poised to be her firm’s client’s political opponent in the upcoming presidential race, would, I conjecture, qualify as an example (if not textbook example) of “more than a de minimis interest in the case.” Ditto too is Judge Merchan’s wife, Lara Merchan, if the reports alleging an employment connection, as special assistant to Letitia James, between her and Letitia James’ office prove true, given how much James’ political career rests on “getting” President Trump, which she irrefutably made the central issue of her statewide race for Attorney General, and short-lived race for Governor.
Beyond these damning revelations, the fact that Judge Merchan himself is a noted and long-term donor – directly via donations, and indirectly via PAC monetary contributions – and friend of Joe Biden should, even if the facts brought about the daughter and wife did not come to light, alone be sufficient grounds for a recusal. In a case involving a presidential candidate taking place just months before Election Day, politics are necessarily all-controlling. There is no getting around it. Hence, to any reasonable observer, the courtroom drama in lower Manhattan cannot be understood other than as a brazen act of election interference by the incumbent president in Biden against his likeliest successor in Trump.
Otherwise, what else explains the seven-plus years of delays in which this case was kicked down the road from the DOJ to the FEC to Bragg’s office, not once, but twice, only to finally be prosecuted at a politically convenient hour: the moment when Donald Trump became, for the third time in as many cycles, the presumptive Republican nominee. There were also various changes in the law (all of which in hindsight look like strategic meddling by Democrats in the New York state legislature making preparations to jury-rig the legal system in advance to prosecute Donald Trump) made over the years. These include a change in the statute of limitations that allowed Bragg to prosecute this case well beyond the original limitations period. In addition, there was a 2018 change in tax law that made hush money write-offs for sexual indiscretions unlawful.
To date, not one of Merchan, Bragg, Colangelo, James, or Biden’s DOJ could explain why it is imperative to commence a six-week trial right here and now, rather than postpone it – for just another seven months – until after election day. To channel our eloquent Commander-in-Chief: For God’s sake it’s been seven years already, what the hell is another seven months going to make a difference! The choice to prosecute President Trump now, perhaps at the summit of his political clout, where most reputable polls have him trouncing Biden in the upcoming general election, just reeks of improprieties – and indeed, election interference – of the worst possible variety.
Separately from the Article 78 proceeding, President Trump’s lawyers also have the option of making an interlocutory appeal directly to federal court – either to the Second Circuit or, better, Supreme Court. Under well-settled federal law, the Supreme Court has permitted interlocutory appeals from state to federal court, in the decision Lauro Lines S.R.L. v. Chasser (1989), if the appeal satisfies the three-prong test of what the High Court called “the collateral order doctrine.”
The collateral order doctrine says that appeals are permitted as long as the following elements are met:
1. The outcome of the case would be conclusively determined by the issue;
2. The matter appealed was collateral on the merits;
3. The matter was effectively unreviewable if immediate appeal were not allowed.
In President Trump’s criminal proceeding, all three elements are easily met. The matter appealed – the recusal order – would conclusively determine the outcome of the case because if the Judge is found conflicted under New York or ABA canons regulating judicial ethics, there would be strong grounds for a mistrial. Even if President Trump’s attorneys appealed just on the gag order issue, that still would likely satisfy the collateral order doctrine – because President Trump’s ability to speak about, and expose, the conflicts of interest implicating Judge Merchan and his family would reveal a disqualifying economic interest in the case that goes directly to the reason why it was brought in the first place. If it can be shown that Judge Merchan had a judicially disqualifying economic stake in the case, which should be easy here because he incontestably does, the entire case would have to be dismissed on grounds of unfair prejudice to the defendant and his constitutional rights. Indeed, there is strong reason to believe that there would be no case without Judge Merchan – in other words, a recusal alone would not mitigate the prejudice to President Trump here, because that prejudice runs to the heart of the proceeding itself, regardless of the identity of the judge presiding over the case.
At the bare minimum, however, the judge’s myriad conflicts of interest serve as more than sufficient grounds for an order for recusal – there is absolutely no way President Trump’s due process rights can be guaranteed so long as Judge Merchan remains on the case. If a recusal order is successfully appealed, given how damaging Judge Merchan’s conflict was in the case at bar, the court will likely have to stay this proceeding until after the election, in order to avoid a repeat of the same dangers here that severely harmed President Trump’s fundamental rights – which stand as a grievous indictment of New York’s judicial system.
The other two elements are also easily met. The matter appealed, whether on the gag order or recusal issue, is collateral to the merits of the underlying legal claim: which involves an alleged fraudulent business records scheme. What is more, if Judge Merchan is not recused, the matter cannot be reviewed unless on appeal. Put differently, the only way President Trump can request relief here is by appealing any ruling Judge Merchan might issue on a recusal order. Given the probability that Judge Merchan will deny any order filed by his attorneys for his recusal, there will be a basis for an interlocutory appeal to either state or federal court.
Why else might a direct interlocutory appeal to federal court, rather than to state court via the aforementioned Article 78 proceeding, be more desirable? Well, for one thing: the legal basis for it should not be that hard given that federal questions run amok all throughout this case. Whether dealing with President Trump’s First Amendment rights, or denial of his due process rights – or even the alleged FEC violations at issue here – there are more than sufficient grounds, as a matter of procedure, to kick this case into federal court for appeal. Of course, federal crimes require federal jurisdiction: but there are likely jurisprudential grounds, not the least of which has to do with the issues controlling here, especially with the FEC, that implicate the interstate commerce clause, that would create the nexus to make the underlying issue a federal question.
I mean, this is the President of the United States, we are talking about, who also happens to be an out-of-state resident! So, the question to be raised: why is this a state court matter at all seems so obvious – and yet has bizarrely not been talked about enough, despite being a central and unaddressed issue, either by the legal pundits or the prosecution.
Bragg has hidden the ball so much with regard to his theory of criminal liability here, which can only be attributed to one of two reasons: 1) he has no basis for bringing this case in state court because has no idea what on earth he is doing, or 2) he realizes that to the extent a crime is ascertainable at all amid Bragg’s legal muddying of the waters, it is emphatically one that warrants prosecution in federal court, not state court, ergo explaining the lack of transparency on his end. Given the fact that Bragg is so heavily relying on a federal prosecutor from Biden’s DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, to help him contrive a theory of criminal liability here, is all the more reason to believe that this matter belongs in federal court, not state court.
That being said, I discussed advantages for collaterally attacking this matter via an Article 78 proceeding rather than making a direct interlocutory appeal to federal court. The first reason is that Article 78 proceedings might be easier: similar rules and legal principles would apply for both the criminal proceeding and Article 78 appeal. The second reason is that New York State Law, at least in theory, is even more protective of both President Trump’s speech rights and offers an even more rigorous standard for judicial ethics than what is observed by the ABA.
But the advantages to a state court proceeding should be placed alongside the advantages of a direct interlocutory appeal to federal court. These advantages may be described as follows: 1) even though state law is supposed to apply more generous speech protections, considering the current cast of characters in charge of New York’s law enforcement – from Hochul to James to Bragg to Merchan – it is improbable that President Trump’s state constitutional rights would be adequately protected. It would thus be incumbent upon federal actors, either judges or prosecutors, to apply New York law faithfully – or, in the alternative, use the federal standard to exonerate President Trump from the endless indignities of New York’s corrupted judicial system. 2) The second reason favoring federal appeal is that federal courts – and the Supreme Court, above all – has the greatest means to establish a national standard for the ongoing criminal (and potential other) proceedings against President Trump.
Now that Donald Trump is officially the presumptive Republican nominee, it would be much easier for the Supreme Court to simply issue a stay on all proceedings against him until after November 5th. That, the Highest Court of the Land has the power to do – and should do, if it truly cares about the rule of law, the protection of individual rights, and safeguarding the republic from nefarious and gratuitous political prosecutions, particularly during a hotly contested election year. An emergency interlocutory appeal to the Supreme Court would be the best way to preserve our democracy from the subversive forces, acting at the behest of Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice, working actively to expel President Trump from the political arena. Granted, it may be a difficult feat to pull off, given all the time constraints and political hurdles, but President Trump’s attorneys should treat the persecution against him as a serious act of legal warfare, one that must be responded to in kind – using every tool in the arsenal – or risk defeat by our enemies, hellbent on bringing down the remaining morsels of the American republic for all time.
The post Alvin Bragg’s Legal Assault On President Trump Is Lawfare Of The Worst Kind: Strategizing A Legal Counterattack appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The current House Speaker is cut from the same cloth as Mike Pence: a tergiversating weakling who always fails to stand for America First when push comes to shove.
Mike Johnson is at a crossroads: continue to appease the RINOs and Democrats in the House, thus maybe preserving his House seat through the November election, at which point it seems increasingly likely, regardless of the lower chamber’s composition, that he will be replaced with someone else.
Or he can stand with the American people and Donald Trump by denying Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan an endless stream of blank checks and instead focus on the two most pressing matters at hand: securing the border and securing our election system to ensure President Trump’s victory.
Unfortunately, given the results of the past week, which observed the House pass yet another nearly $100 billion package for the Ukraine, adding to the billion dollars plus spent on all foreign expenditures that was part of the resolution, Johnson appears to be following Kevin McCarthy’s footsteps in siding with the Uniparty over MAGA.
Johnson is hardly the paradigm of a strong man, but last week’s decision – in which reports expressed that he was kowtowed by none other than Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, “to do the right thing” clearly shows that the current Speaker is cut from the same cloth as Mike Pence: a weakling who cannot stand on principle.
The outrageous display of House Democrats brandishing the Ukrainian flag, amid chants of “Slava Ukraini,” where Johnson only meekly responded with “we should wave only one flag on the … House floor” struck the pathetic image of a man in dire straits.
Perhaps resigned to his fate as a lame duck Speaker in this dismal interim period of American history, as the country waits in almost a catatonic state for the next administration, Johnson appeared worn out, exhausted, helpless — terrible descriptors for the supposed leader of the opposition party.
Johnson has received threats from members to his right to be ousted from office. This past week, in response to his signing off on the Ukrainian aid bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who first threatened to vacate the Speaker’s chair a few weeks ago, was joined by other House members, including Paul Gosar and Thomas Massie.
All three of them perceive in Johnson a leader who, as soon as he was given the Speaker’s gavel, quickly rolled over and capitulated to the Uniparty – including, worst of all, the Democrats, who now pretend to be his buddy as members from his own Party, frustrated by his performance, agitate for his removal.
Johnson of course in choosing to side with the Uniparty on foreign spending not only bucked the right flank of his party in the halls of Congress, but also the urgings of Donald Trump, who is currently going through a criminal trial in New York City, forcing him off the campaign trail, on groundless charges brought forth by Joe Biden’s weaponized justice system. President Trump made known his position on the Ukrainian package, asking why Europe was not footing the bill for Ukraine, rather than us.
President Trump made known his position on the Ukrainian package, asking why Europe was not footing the bill for Ukraine, rather than us.
Everyday Americans are still reeling from the decades-high inflation rates that have made the cost of living unmanageable, especially for a middle class that has already been largely offshored to China and other places by Washington’s Uniparty consensus.
Thus, Johnson, knowing how badly hundreds of millions of his fellow countrymen are suffering, should never have ratified more spending on a foreign conflict taking place in a country most Americans — and probably even most lawmakers — cannot even identify on a map.
This would be true in any time, but especially now, when an estimated seven million foreign invaders, at least, will cross the border under the four years of Joe Biden’s term: a literal invasion, in every sense of the word, which will have devastating effects on our economy, culture, and demographics, for potentially decades to come.
Moreover, as Johnson obsesses about what is already a losing battle thousands of miles away, the current presidential frontrunner has been forced off the campaign trail and into a dank courtroom, his constitutional rights brazenly stripped in the process by a rogue judge, district attorney, and attorney general, at the behest of a weaponized Department of Justice.
This should be Johnson’s foremost priority – every day he should be asking himself the question: what can I be doing to fight against the relentless lawfare of Biden’s DOJ? And yet, so far, there have been crickets.
Rather than allocate another six hundred million dollars (at least) to the FBI to build a fancy new building, Johnson should be mobilizing House Republicans to defund these agencies – or at the bare minimum, begin the preliminary talks for a game plan that will help Donald Trump’s next administration hit the ground running from day one.
There are ample opportunities at this juncture, none of which have been pursued yet, to mitigate at least some of the worst excesses of Biden Regime-orchestrated lawfare against President Trump and his supporters.
The first and most obvious solution would be to release the remaining J6 footage to help further debunk the “insurrection” narrative that was propagated by the illegitimate January 6th House Select Committee for years on end.
The second item on the agenda would be to issue congressional subpoenas for Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, Letitia James, and Fani Willis. Make these prosecutors appear before a House Committee and answer for what they are doing to President Trump on television the American people.
There is no reason on earth why these prosecutors should be allowed to hijack an election year – by whisking President Trump off the campaign trail for weeks on end – without accountability. This is the clearest example of election interference in American history, and nothing else comes even close. This is something that every Republican lawmaker, who cares about the needs of their constituents, should not simply agree to, but make their number one priority.
If Johnson is so concerned about appeasing Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries, he should have no problem at all subpoenaing Bragg and Willis, given how distasteful these characters are to the vast majority of Republicans.
Additionally, there is no reason on earth why Johnson should not pursue articles of impeachment against Biden, for pay to play schemes involving his son, Hunter, that have become an object of scandal — and national humiliation — over the course of the nearly four years he has served in office.
Finally – and perhaps most importantly – Johnson must do everything in his power to prevent the continued bloodletting of Republican House members, through resignations and early retirements, that have only further eroded the Republican Party’s already razor thin majority.
This is the ultimate test because if Johnson is unwilling or incapable of stopping the bleeding now, it will not matter whether there is a motion to vacate or not.
The House will have turned over control to the Democrats before Election Day, likely sabotaging President Trump’s hopes of re-election because it would mean that Democrats would have full control of the legislative process, and could then pass a bill that might remove him from the ballot, however unconstitutional that might otherwise be, with virtual impunity.
It is incumbent upon Johnson to present a clear path forward – or else be vacated from his post for someone more competent, capable, and loyal to President Trump and his voters.
Johnson has already displayed an unnerving propensity to make pacts with the devil; if he should continue down that route, he will have sold out his countrymen for the Biblical equivalent of thirty pieces of silver – and no amount of sanctimonious excuses to his Christian faith as the putative reason for why he did so will ever convince the American public that he is anything but a weak and feckless traitor, who should never have taken up the awesome post he now occupies, for having shown himself utterly incapable of wielding power like a true statesman.
The post Mike Johnson’s Faustian Bargain appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Judge Merchan’s emotionally deranged and irresponsibly overbroad gag order, issued in two separate installments, the second building off the first, is both dangerous and unprecedented for its sweeping scope. It severely infringes on President Trump’s fundamental rights protected under the First Amendment to speak, and, wherever appropriate, criticize the trial proceeding as he sees fit. It is well-settled law that prior restraints on speech, of which gag orders are the textbook example, are – in the overwhelming majority of cases – unconstitutional as a form of government censorship.
Only in the rarest of cases has the Supreme Court upheld prior restraints on speech. In the few cases where the Court has upheld gag orders, a form of prior restraint, the order was necessary to achieve a compelling state interest. In other words, the Supreme Court has only permitted gag orders that satisfied the extremely high burden of strict scrutiny analysis. Where gag orders are at issue, strict scrutiny compels courts to limit the scope of the order to an articulable set of facts – the facts encompassing the order must be extremely particularized and limited in scope, and only considered as a final option if and when all other alternatives to help ensure a fair trial have been totally exhausted.
Thus, gag orders are only ever to be used as a last resort option, and only in the most exceptional cases when the right to a fair trial would otherwise be severely jeopardized without it. In the rare cases where a gag order would be appropriate, again the court must take great pains to ensure that it is structured in such a way as to be particularized to a highly limited set of facts that have a direct bearing on the integrity of the proceeding – and go no further. The gag order should always be temporary, with a definitive start time and expiration date, terminating whenever the danger that resulted in its issuance in the first place subsides, or immediately once alternative, less constraining methods that would ensure a fair proceeding become available, whichever comes first.
Regrettably, Judge Merchan has run roughshod over those fundamental principles that would otherwise prevent gag orders from unduly violating the speech rights of the defendant, Donald Trump. To reiterate, gag orders are the archetypal example of a prior restraint on speech. The general rule is that prior restraints on speech are presumptively unconstitutional. Courts only uphold them in the rarest of cases where all other options are unavailable to ensure a fair trial, and only after assurances that the order has been narrowly tailored in its scope — and necessary to achieve — a compelling state interest – that is to say, an interest of monumental urgency that would imperil the proceeding without it.
In a criminal proceeding involving a President of the United States, the normal checks that create a presumption against issuance of a gag order should receive heightened scrutiny. Indeed, because of the political notoriety of the defendant, in addition to the well-established list of factors that create a reasonable presumption against Judge Merchan’s trial being anything but fair, the normal strict scrutiny analysis applicable should be counterbalanced by the overriding public interests at play here that strongly disfavor any sort of infringement on speech and press rights whatsoever.
These precautions should even be observed if strict scrutiny analysis would, under normal circumstances, dictate permitting a limited gag order. This is because the case involves the leading presidential candidate, just months before what many pundits believe will be one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in American history, where the stakes of the election could not possibly be higher. Moreover, no fair-minded observer would say that Donald Trump could possibly get a fair trial in lower Manhattan, before a Democratic judge, wherein a jury pool was drawn from a borough of which nearly 90% of residents voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020.
Accordingly, based on an objective assessment of all the facts here, if the court is to consider issuing any encroachments on anybody’s First Amendment rights, the operative principle must be that such limitations be subject to the highest possible scrutiny. Normal strict scrutiny analysis should set the floor, and really, the court should be held to a theoretically higher level of scrutiny for imposing any limitations in light of additional factors at play here that make this proceeding extraordinary: 1) the defendant is the frontrunner to be the next president; 2) the public has a strong political interest in the outcome of the case because a criminal conviction would deny tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans their voting rights; and 3) the trial itself is already compromised by the myriad conflicts of interest, detailed throughout this article, and the lack of transparency in the process – both of which facially pose serious due process problems.
In a normal criminal trial, typically the defendant receives certain constitutional protections, including an implicit right to anonymity, that mitigate against creating unfair prejudices in the minds of jurors. These guardrails, which are patently missing in President Trump’s case, are of critical importance to preserving the integrity and fairness of a proper criminal proceeding overall.
In a criminal trial especially, courts have traditionally taken great pains to ensure the jury pool does not bring their preconceived biases about the defendant that could prejudicially color the ultimate verdict. Usually if a juror even knows anything about a criminal defendant – good, bad, or indifferent – before the trial, that juror is struck. This is especially true for a highly publicized trial because those preconceived biases are rightly seen as compromising to the defendant’s presumption of innocence. No matter how impartial a juror might insist he or she is, as a practical matter it is virtually impossible to set aside the impressions one might already have about the defendant from one’s judgment about the defendant’s guilt or innocence.
In a case involving Donald Trump, arguably the most famous individual in the world, of which nearly all Americans have an opinion, the baked-in protections that generally help foster a presumption of innocence for ordinary criminal defendants are entirely absent here. The court, in short, cannot pretend to be agnostic to the stark political realities of this case, which necessarily redound to – and are inextricably linked with – the defendant’s identity. There is no possible way to divorce the defendant from the political passions of the jury pool – to pretend otherwise, as Alvin Bragg and Judge Merchan do, poses a grave injustice to both Donald Trump’s rights and to the public interest.
This injustice encompasses President Trump’s tens (if not hundreds) of millions of would-be voters, who are also deeply affected – both politically and emotionally – by this criminal proceeding and have an indispensable interest in its outcome. The public has an overriding interest in this case – and the public interest necessarily entails maximum transparency on part of the court. Furthermore, because cameras are not permitted in Judge Merchan’s courtroom, the judge has an additional responsibility to ensure that both the defendant and the public’s constitutional rights and interests are not anymore unduly limited via issuance of unconstitutional prior constraints like gag orders, or anything of that sort, over the course of the proceeding.
Alas, the public has great cause for concern to believe that Judge Merchan has so far ignored their interest (to say nothing of brazenly ignoring President Trump’s constitutional rights), completely disregarding constitutional considerations of the highest importance in the process. For one, the fact that Merchan issued a first gag order on March 26th, with no stated end date, and with only sporadic citations to law, was bad enough. Even worse, however, was that Merchan went so far as to issue a second order, fewer than one week later, on April 1st, expanding the already overbroad March 26th gag order to also capture any speech by the defendant directed at the family of Judge Merchan or Alvin Bragg, is multiple bridges too far.
Judge Merchan’s second gag order reads like a child throwing a temper tantrum, an emotionally charged rant that somehow manages to insult President Trump, his supporters, and the entire public, in the process. At its most histrionic point, Judge Merchan’s emotively rages “It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. The threat is very real. Admonitions are not enough, nor is reliance on self-restraint. The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well.” [Emphasis in the original.]
Judge Merchan’s theatrical diatribe – notably heavy on emotion, light on substance – was so clearly issued as a desperate, last-ditch act to prevent President Trump from exposing the very grave conflicts of interest implicating the judge and his immediate family members, including Merchan’s own daughter and wife, that make virtually impossible a fair trial from the start.
Judge Merchan is a known Democratic donor. For years, he has been a serial contributor to Democratic politicians, including, as recently as 2020, a direct contributor to Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s likely opponent in the 2020 general election. He has also made contributions through various political action committees that support Democratic politicians in general. Maybe even more damning, Judge Merchan’s daughter, Loren, serves as President of a political advocacy group, Authentic, whose clients include none other than the Biden-Harris campaign, Adam Schiff, Kathy Hochul, Gavin Newsom, Ilhan Omar, and many other high-profile, far left progressive Democratic politicians. Finally, Judge Merchan’s own wife reportedly works directly for New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who made the central point of her campaign for AG to “get” Donald Trump. Of course, when she was on the campaign trail James could not cite any legitimate legal rationale to “get” her biggest political adversary in Trump, other than being obviously driven by envy and spite, the ugly sentiments that seem to animate her entire career in public office.
Judge Merchan’s claim that issuance of the gag order was necessary to prevent “attacks” on his family are utterly groundless. President Trump never “attacked” Judge Merchan or any of his relatives. The definition of attack is to take “an aggressive and violent action against a person or place.” Under the law, attacks are equivalent to threats. In First Amendment jurisprudence, under the well-settled precedent from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech may be prohibited only if it is (1) “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” and (2) such speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.” The classic example: a party that raises his fist and says, “I’m going to punch you in the nose” will likely have engaged in punishable speech under Brandenburg; a party that says, “I am going to punch you in the nose the next time I see you,” has not.
A party that says, “You should be recused because your daughter has, as a client to her firm, the man I am going to likely face in the upcoming presidential election,” is neither inciting nor threatening nor imminent nor lawless. That is constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment; not an “attack,” as Judge Merchan complains, and surely, not grounds for a gag order – which, here, applying this analysis, renders it as an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.
Even if President Trump had called upon his supporters – which, let me be emphatically clear, he never did nor would do – to verbally harass Loren Merchan, Judge Merchan’s daughter, via a phone call or letter or email-writing campaign, that speech would still pass muster as constitutionally protected under a faithful application of the Brandenburg precedent, which establishes the rule for lawfully prohibiting speech. What President Trump did, via his Truth Social platform, comes nowhere close to even the latter hypothetical. Thus, the Judge’s knee jerk reaction to impede the President’s First Amendment right to criticize the unfairness of his trial, and point out what many legal commentators, experienced political experts, and observers have called a judicially disqualifying conflict of interest – under both New York’s Rules Governing Judicial Conflict as well as the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct – flagrantly violates the Constitution, makes a mockery of the rule of law, and should not stand.
Under no circumstances should this trial be allowed to carry on without, at the bare, bare minimum, Judge Merchan’s recusal. President Trump’s lawyers have every right in the world to call for a mistrial. Any court worth its salt – and committed to the Constitution – would grant a mistrial without second thought because there is no possible way President Trump’s fundamental rights can be preserved, as a criminal defendant, in Judge Merchan’s proceeding, where conflicts, venue, and grievous First Amendment rights violations, in addition to a litany of other factors, have already prejudiced this trial beyond repair.
The post Judge Merchan’s Gag Order Against President Trump Is The Textbook Case Of An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint On His First Amendment Rights: A Legal Commentary On Why It Must Be Removed appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The weaponization of the rule of law has reached a point beyond repair in New York State, with the ongoing trial being waged by District Attorney Alvin Bragg against President Donald Trump. Even at this late hour, the State has failed to prove 1) how President Trump falsified business records; 2) how the alleged falsification of the business records scheme was criminal; and 3) why that alleged crime should be prosecuted as a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, which is the typical charge for falsification schemes under New York State Law.
Given that President Trump’s alleged wrongdoing is being treated as criminal misconduct, the burden of proof is for the State to prove that Donald Trump is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt for every single element of the asserted crime. The legal burden of proof of “beyond a reasonable doubt” means that the prosecution must convince the jury that “there is no other reasonable explanation that can come from the evidence presented at trial.” That incredibly high evidentiary threshold must be established for every single element of the crime alleged. What is more, criminal trials require unanimity on part of the jury; a hung jury will result in a mistrial, ultimately pushing the case back until after the November election, which is not what Bragg wants.
Obviously, the goal of Alvin Bragg and Letitia James is to prosecute – and put President Trump behind bars – as soon as possible (before election day ideally) to sabotage his chances of winning re-election. President Trump’s re-election appears increasingly like a foregone conclusion with the latest polls consistently putting him in a significant lead over Joe Biden.
President Trump is currently being tried under New York Penal Law 175.05. The law ordinarily makes it a misdemeanor, not a felony, to falsify business records with “intent to defraud.” The law permits, however, the District Attorney to upgrade what ordinarily would be considered a misdemeanor to a Class E felony if the intent to defraud is combined with an intent to commit another crime.
Of course, the State has a heavy burden of proof to show that President Trump intended to defraud in the first place, let alone defraud with an intent to commit some other yet undefinable crime. Paying off an adult film actress, if that even occurred, is not a crime under New York law. The idea, then, that a fraud was intended, let alone committed, by what is widely recognized to be, at worst, a mere “clerical error” in how the President’s accountant reported the alleged payment to the tax collector, is absurd.
Nobody seems to be asking who was lied to in this case – was it the public? The IRS? The FEC? Moreover, even if a reporting error constitutes a lie, the lie must have been done with the requisite intent to be considered a fraud under law. Errors in and of themselves hardly make a lie, let alone impute criminal fraud upon the one making the error.
If the State is attempting to argue, for instance, that President Trump’s accountant, lawyer, or (so the State’s theory goes) whoever intentionally misrepresented the hush money payment to defraud the public, the onus is still on Bragg and his team (which conveniently includes the Biden-DOJ political appointee, Matthew Colangelo) to show on what basis the injured party — here, “the people,” or public — would have relied on such fraud, resulting in a specified damage to them.
Under New York law, in order to prove fraud, the State must show, by clear and convincing evidence, each and every one of the following elements:
(1) a material misrepresentation or omission of fact;
(2) made by defendant with knowledge of its falsity;
(3) and intent to defraud;
(4) reasonable reliance on the part of the plaintiff; and
(5) resulting damage to the plaintiff.
The underlying assumption that appears to be working in the background and driving Bragg’s bogus fraud theory is that the public somehow would be damaged by the allegations of an extramarital affair implicating Donald Trump. But it is difficult to see just exactly what those damages are. Sure, one could, I suppose, entertain the view that a portion of President Trump’s voter base might have been alienated from voting for him if revelations of an affair came to light, but that is a rather incredulous sell. Moreover, a scandalized portion of President Trump’s voter base would only be indirectly related to this case, which, again, is not based on a hush money payment, but an alleged falsified business records scheme implicating a hush money payment that, on its own terms, has no legal significance, much less something that could impute criminality (let alone a felony) upon the perpetrator.
This is especially so, given how much we already know about President Trump’s personal life, his marriages, divorces, etc., etc., etc., which are thoroughly documented, and have long been part of the national conversation – and in the public record – decades before President Trump ever thought of descending that escalator and stepping foot into the political arena.
There is no such thing, really, in criminal law as “moral” damages – or damages afflicting one’s conscience because of moral scandal resulting from an illicit affair. But to the extent any damages at all stemming from the fraud perpetrated here exist, that would be it (what else could there possibly be?). The State cannot prosecute President Trump on economic damages resulting from the State being denied taxable money because of how the law was structured before the 2018 change in the law. At the time of President Trump’s tax filing, it was perfectly legal to write-off hush money payments for an affair – trying him now, on a theory of damages, based on the changed law encounters serious ex post facto and double jeopardy problems, both of which are obviously unconstitutional.
Should the State try to contend that moral damages resulted from the cover up, that argument would be even more ridiculous than believing that portions of President Trump’s voting base would not have supported him but for revelations of the fraud. The law already permits hush money payments for the type of conduct alleged in this case. Thus, the law patently does not track moral improprieties arising from extramarital affairs.
But let us assume, to play devil’s advocate, that the law did indict such misconduct. That would necessarily trigger at least two thorny, and as yet unresolved, legal questions – on what grounds do those alleged improprieties rise to the level of criminality? (A derivative of that first question is: does our society want to impute criminality – and potentially felonious criminality – upon extramarital sexual acts?)
The second question raised: what moral system is animating the asserted improprieties on which the criminality imputed in the law is based? If the moral system is deemed antiquated or no longer relevant in the eyes of public opinion, should not the law be considered illegitimate, and hence no longer operative?
In layman’s terms, it would be quite a riot to see Alvin Bragg condemn as criminal, and indeed a felony, extramarital conduct under the law. If so, Bragg would be acting with all the moral fervor of a pope during the Middle Ages!
Such self-righteous behavior is made even more laughable when placed against what is now happening to Bragg’s good buddies in Georgia, with Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, who were sleeping with one another, raising a massive and disqualifying conflict of interest, all the while their own prosecution against President Trump was taking place!
If what President Trump did regarding an alleged hush money payment is criminal conduct, under Bragg’s revanchist and morally hard-charged legal theory, then both Willis and her special counsel, Nathan Wade – and indeed, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, by extension – should all be similarly prosecuted under Bragg’s construction for their own, far graver, moral transgressions and many sexual improprieties committed!
Another salient legal issue that Bragg appears to have just blithely swept under the rug with this case is why, exactly, should President Trump be held vicariously criminally liable for an alleged clerical error committed by his accountant or his attorney, Michael Cohen, or whoever might have been overseeing his tax filings at the time the write-off was made? If, as President Trump has said, that it was Michael Cohen, not him, who decided pay off Stormy Daniels, Bragg should be investigating Cohen and forcing him into court, not President Trump.
Bragg has also failed to establish how the alleged fraud rises to a felony. The District Attorney claims that President Trump somehow committed a felony – again, despite not having committed a fraud in the first place, for one, and not being the one to file his tax returns, for two – even though the black letter law (again, §175.05) incontrovertibly treats the alleged misconduct here as a misdemeanor, not a felony!
Under the relevant law, crimes brought under Penal Law 175.05 may arise to a felony if and only if the District Attorney can prove that the alleged misdemeanor occurred to perpetuate or cover up another crime. Bragg plainly states that another crime was committed concomitantly with the clerical error that he is calling a misdemeanor here. But what crime, pray tell, he interestingly, incredulously, does not say!
The reason he does not state the crime is that he is relying, ultimately, on the sensationalized aspect of a hush money payment to engender the public perception that adulterous activity, though immoral, constitutes a felony under the law, even though that is patently not the case! The idea is to exploit and manipulate public opinion, naturally recalcitrant (though perhaps less so nowadays than in years past) to the concept of extramarital affairs — and then conflate those received public biases and strong emotions with tangled legal theories of criminality, distorting the law and sowing both legal and moral confusion in the process.
If it were truly the case that extramarital conduct should be imputed with legal significance, then hush money payments, which necessarily run downstream from such misconduct, would likewise be treated as unlawful. But hush money payments are permissible under law, and have been permissible for ages. Because hush money payments are lawful, Bragg’s legal theory is dead in the water.
But, for Bragg, et al., it does not matter what the law actually says. For Bragg, all he has to rely upon is how the public feels about certain allegations – which he is hoping will be enough of a foundation to prosecute the President’s alleged misdemeanor as a felony, and therefore put him behind bars, even though there is absolutely no basis for any of his hogwash theory whatsoever in either fact or law!
I hate to be the bearer of bad news to Mr. Bragg, but public sentiment — good, bad, or indifferent — is rarely ever a barometer for whether the law should treat a particular act as criminal. Here, public sentiment has no bearing on the legality of any of the facts alleged. The problem for New York’s embattled District Attorney is that he is both logically inconsistent, to an egregious degree, and morally hypocritical in his selective use (ah! one might call, ‘weaponization’) of the law, as a sword, against President Trump.
This ultimately is reason why a critical percentage of the public, including many Independents and Democrats, see Bragg’s prosecution for what it is: an out-and-out persecution against his greatest political adversary.
There is no rhyme or reason to Bragg’s theory of the case, he is merely operating as a political apparatchik for the Biden Regime where he must get off on roleplaying as a tin-pot dictator to bring down Orange Hitler.
The whole thing is a sham, a farce, a scam, and a political scandal of an order of magnitude never seen before in American history. The case should be tossed out, and the public should treat Bragg, James, Judge Merchan, and the entire charade backing President Trump’s latest political persecution for the clown show it is – a flagrant abuse of the rule of law. A case that one never, ever should take seriously, because those bad-faith actors currently executing the Regime’s marching orders are every bit as bad and makeshift as the phony legal theories they espouse, certain in no time to be relegated to at most a forgotten footnote in this dark, dreary, dismal chapter of American history.
The post Ingrassia: Alvin Bragg’s Case Against President Trump Is A Total Scam With No Basis In Law, Fact, Or Reality appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This week, President Trump faces a political prosecution in New York State, forcing him into the courtroom and off the campaign trail. Every single day President Trump, who now leads in most state polls as the frontrunner for the 2024 general election, is hamstrung from campaigning is another day Biden and his regime apparatchiks get an unfair advantage. The strategy of what President Trump’s enemies are doing is readily on display: Biden has deliberately rigged the playing field to give his team, which languishes in countless self-inflicted crises, every opportunity it could get to make up lost ground.
The Biden Regime, of course, already has allies in the administrative (or deep) state, the mainstream media, Big Tech, the judicial system, and hundreds of lawmakers working on both sides of the aisle that carry out the marching orders of the Uniparty with abandon. Thus, to achieve yet another advantage, in abusing the levers of power to attack his foremost political opponent, would seem almost wantonly gratuitous.
And yet, Biden and his henchmen get away with such brazen abuses of power time and again. In large part, this is because they have internalized a timeless lesson of politics: when you have power, use it to benefit friends and punish enemies. This, Biden and the Uniparty that backs him does with impunity.
Many Republicans remain controlled opposition. Many more are simply kowtowed into staying silent to carry out the policies of the regnant political class in Washington DC – open borders, corrupted elections, millions of dollars of aid wasted on Ukraine, Israel, and China – all of which harm hundreds of millions of Americans.
Indeed, many Americans have died, literally, as a result of the Biden Regime’s suicidal policies. The border policy, being perhaps the most destructive, has unleashed upwards of 7.2 million illegals upon the homeland, a catastrophe that will permanently rupture the cultural and economic fabric of this country, save mass deportations of a historic scale, to rectify the crisis. Many Americans have been killed by illegal aliens – either the victims of homicide from dangerous gangs like MS-13, or casualties of a drunk driver – who may or may not have a license depending on how sadistic the Governor of the state in which the DUI-caused homicide occurred is. (The latter issue memorably achieved national prominence in President Trump’s first term when he personally highlighted the tragic stories of “Angel Moms” at rallies and other public events, an advocacy group composed of mothers and relatives of Americans dedicated to raising awareness of the now unmanageable illegal alien crisis.)
Countless other Americans have suffered from the devastating indirect effects of an open border. Upwards of a quarter million Americans have died from Fentanyl overdoses since 2018. Fentanyl is a highly lethal Schedule II controlled substance that is widely accessible on the black market. Fentanyl dealers obtain the lethal drug from countries like Mexico and China, two of the most prominent beneficiaries of our reckless, open border policies — and two of our greatest adversaries.
And yet, as the United States is being driven to the ground by open borders policies that shake every aspect of our society – culturally, economically, linguistically – Republican lawmakers largely remain indifferent to or downright afraid of challenging the status quo.
Perhaps no one better embodies this pitiful state of affairs than current House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was disgraced former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s replacement. McCarthy, who served as Speaker for just eight months, had arguably the most turbulent and ineffective Speakership in all of American history. His Speakership was contested from the moment he announced his candidacy for the office, having nearly gone down in defeat before it began — but for a highly contested, multi-day vote last January that culminated in an eleventh hour switch on the part of some holdouts, landing the Californian the vaunted position on the fifteenth ballot. That drawn out vote nevertheless set the tone for the next eight months, a period marred by unkept promises and myriad disappointments, as McCarthy repeatedly failed to make good on several key promises – such as the disclosure of exonerating J6 footage – that resulted in the motion to vacate his chair, initiated by Congressman Gaetz, putting the nail in the coffin to his political career.
Johnson, who stepped into McCarthy’s shoes as the next House Speaker, had a perfect model of what not to do in that office. One was to leave in play the omnibus spending bills that funded agencies like the FBI and IRS, which have now been weaponized against political dissidents of the Biden Regime — and stop giving more aid to faraway places like the Ukraine and Middle East, which, in peacetime, offer few if any geopolitical benefits at all to the United States.
In deranged, war-spiraling times like ours — defined by a weaponized DOJ, crumbling infrastructure, and wide-open borders – it gives every reason on earth to shift our priorities inward, refocusing attention on cleaning up our own house before searching abroad for monsters to destroy. Thus, continuation of those reckless policies can only be chalked up to a ruling class-wide suicide pact for the country. Short of that explanation, pursuing those same failed policies is simply inexplicable.
And yet, the current Speaker still fails to grasp the magnitude of these calamities. On his recent visit to Mar-a-Lago, he only begrudgingly spoke of systemic voter fraud – all byproducts of the Biden Regime – when directly confronted with the issue by none other than President Trump himself, who unsurprisingly minced no words in discussing the lingering problem.
Ditto also the FISA court issue – and the reauthorization and expansion of our spying laws in general. Of course, these illegitimate “courts” should not be given another penny, given the appalling rights violations they have committed, over decades, against the American public. The fact that FISA court-spending, rather than, say, securing the border or holding those rogue district attorneys presently waging lawfare against President Trump and his supporters accountable, was an important agenda item for Johnson, again, exemplifies a rank failure of leadership of the highest possible order.
Johnson has a major crisis on his hands – and the more strident members of his caucus, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, detect his weakness. That is why they recently proposed a second motion to vacate the Speaker’s Chair – in large part owing to Johnson’s own failures to display strength, rather than lead from behind, a plague that affected every single one of his recent Republican predecessors. One would think, given just how bad the examples of his predecessors were, that Johnson would have every incentive to take a dramatic course correction – for he has at his immediate disposal the playbook of exactly what not to do.
And yet, alas, Johnson appears afflicted by that same curse – incredulously reverting to the tired policies that made McCarthy, and before him, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, so woefully unpopular — including continuation of the omnibus bills to avoid a government shutdown, which many conservatives would more than welcome – particularly among the grassroots and MAGA base of the party.
Of all the challenges Johnson currently faces, however, perhaps none is more pressing — and sure to determine Johnson’s political fate — than his ability to retain his quickly dwindling House majority through the November presidential election. If Johnson somehow loses his majority, a problem that becomes more urgent by the day with the slew of Republicans who have recently announced early retirements, like Mike Gallagher, he will be toast.
The Gallagher example is particularly illustrative: Gallagher announced that he will be stepping down later this month, adding to a mounting list of House departures. This vacancy will now last through November’s election, because Gallagher decided to hold off retirement until after Wisconsin Election Law’s special election deadline. The deadline set under Wisconsin law “requires a special election to fill a vacancy if it occurs before the first Tuesday in April of an election year.” Johnson had the ability, as House Speaker, to exert political pressure on Gallagher to get him to step down early, before the deadline, allowing for a special election that could have potentially stopped the bloodletting – allowing a Republican to replace Gallagher, padding their razor thin majority from getting more slim. Instead, he fumbled and remained silent – or simply failed to come up with a counter-strategy to force Gallagher’s early leave, for reasons unbeknownst to the public. Johnson had a prime opportunity to expose Gallagher in his tracks — and yet he dropped the ball. Now the clock has run out, and Johnson will have to deal with an even slimmer House majority as a result of his inaction.
Even if, as conventional wisdom in DC would hold, that Johnson or those groups who exert pressure on him are being artificially handcuffed by deterrents, including potentially blackmail, that still is no excuse for inaction. If it is scandal Johnson fears, at this point most of the public has been desensitized to it. The country is on life support. The greatest scandal that Congressional Republicans could thus commit at this late hour is not doing enough to salvage their majority, back President Trump, and do everything they can to make his pathway back to the Oval Office all the more easy in November.
Despite the fecklessness he has thus far exhibited, Speaker Johnson, for better or worse, remains in a powerful office – third in line to the presidency. He is the most powerful elected Republican officeholder in the country. He has political capital – and a bully pulpit to boot – to exert strong pressures on his party to do more on behalf of the broader MAGA movement.
An issue that really should be front and center for him, which Johnson could easily advocate for, is subpoenaing Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and other rogue prosecutors, district attorneys, and attorneys general throughout the country, who have weaponized the Department of Justice to try to sabotage the 2024 race and imperil the American people in the process. Even easier: encourage the Republicans that have still not endorsed President Trump to do so, or face sanctions.
The Constitution of this country hangs by a thread; our rights and liberties are being viciously attacked by a Regime and its various apparatchiks that seek to put asunder what remnants of the Founding Fathers’ original handiwork still exists, for all time.
The stakes are in fact that high. Yet, Johnson continues to waffle and waver. Disclosure of the remaining J6 tapes should not even be a point of discussion – it should have been done already without a second thought.
Nor should the gratuitous spending on Eastern European and Middle Eastern conflicts, all products of the Military Industrial Complex, operating at the behest of the Biden Regime, and paid for by the American taxpayer. Johnson and his colleagues in leadership positions in the House, particularly those on the House Judiciary Committee, must realize that governing involves both hard and soft powers – official powers are offset, more today than ever, by unofficial ones, including shaping narratives and mobilizing public opinions through various media.
That Johnson does not go on Fox News – or any media outlet – day in and day out, encouraging his colleagues to join him in filing ethics complaints, drafting legal motions in pursuit of a counter-lawfare strategy, and, indeed, waging all-out lawfare themselves on the Biden Regime’s weaponized Department of (in)Justice is an affront to every law-abiding American so despondent over the destruction of the rule of law happening in real time.
All it requires is some collective action on part of Congressional leadership. Johnson, being House Speaker, is in prime position to take the lead.
As I have said from the beginning, so much of the Left’s egregious, unprecedented, and shameless abuse of our justice system to persecute their political opponents is the result of Republican incompetence. No cosmic law exists in the universe that dictates Republicans not take action, or at the bare minimum, at least speak publicly about what needs to be done in order to mitigate the excesses of a rogue and tyrannical government that has persecuted, so far with impunity, everyone from the leading candidate to be the next president, all the way down to Bible-reading grandmas who just so happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time, on January 6th, 2021.
The corruption of the Biden Regime must be put to an end. There is no second option. Time is of the essence. President Trump has his hands tied with groundless lawsuit after lawsuit. Johnson, as the most powerful Republican officeholder in the United States, has a prerogative — constitutionally and morally — to take dramatic actions to keep his slim House majority, mitigate the weaponized justice system’s assaults, and pave the way for President Trump’s reelection come November.
That should be his chief priority, and he should work around the clock from now until at least November to do everything possible to make that happen.
So far, the man some pundits used to jokingly refer to as “MAGA Mike” has not displayed a capacity to do what is necessary. If that is truly the case, the second motion should indeed be exercised. And Johnson, like his three Republican predecessors, must be ousted for someone more worthy of the office, willing to do the critical job to offset the diabolical programs of Biden, before it really is too late.
The post Ingrassia: Mike Johnson Must Exhibit Stronger Leadership Over The House As President Trump Endures Political Persecution appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
President Trump is being whisked into Judge Merchan’s courthouse, beginning early Monday morning, before what is sure to be an unfair and biased proceeding implicating the presidential frontrunner.
First, the venue – perhaps behind only Washington, DC — New York City boasts one of the most hostile jury pools in the nation to conservatives in general, and Trump supporters in particular.
If we were operating under a normal system of justice that upheld traditional standards of judicial ethics, no jury would be allowed to draw its members from Manhattan, the most left-wing of the five boroughs in which over three in four residents voted for Biden over Trump in 2020.
If preserving the integrity of New York’s now deeply tarnished judicial system were an actual concern, Donald Trump’s counsel would have the ability to transfer venue to a district, such as upstate New York or Long Island (or out of state altogether), that would select from a more ideologically diverse pool of jurors – allowing him at least a fighting shot to convince them of his innocence in court.
(Of course, if integrity were truly the driving consideration, this case would have been dead on arrival.) This would be preferable to being damned by a system overseen by bad-faith, Soros-funded actors, like Letitia James and Alvin Bragg, who predetermined the 45th President’s guilty before he ever stepped foot in the courtroom.
Second, the judge. Judge Merchan is conflicted beyond repair. In a case that rivals, maybe even surpasses, the improprieties of the Fani Willis debacle, Judge Merchan, through his immediate family connections, has proven himself incapable of presiding over a fair trial – even if he tried – because of the conflict of interest that exists between him, his court, and the Biden Regime.
For one, Biden’s Justice Department tapped Matthew Colangelo, a senior level political appointee, to work closely alongside far-left District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, to investigate Michael Cohen’s alleged payment to Stormy Daniels, the basis for the underlying indictment.
Colangelo’s insertion into the investigation reeks of banana republic justice – and not just because of his direct ties to the Biden Regime, which is bad enough.
But, worse, his appointment came years after a series of district attorneys (including Bragg’s immediate predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr.), special counsels, government agencies, and justice department officials evaluated the case, determined there was nothing to prosecute, and passed it over.
Stormy Daniels is not a new face – the public is already keenly aware of who she is, and all the major players (Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti) involved. News of the alleged hush money payment is ancient history.
Both Cohen and Avenatti have been proven time and again to be fraudsters: Cohen was sentenced to federal prison for lying to Congress, and Avenatti is currently serving a ten-plus year federal prison sentence for extortion.
In 2018, Daniels penned a letter which stated, “each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006, 2011, 2016, 2017, and now again in 2018,” and that “I am denying this affair because it never happened.”
Only once Biden came to power and his goons were ordered to encourage the far-left Bragg, who himself was even long diffident about prosecuting the case – even going so far as to place the case on hold after telling the New York Times that “he had doubts about moving forward with a case” against President Trump, did the case get a lifeline.
This prompted the two radical far-left prosecutors in Bragg’s office: Cary Dunne and Mark Pomerantz (who also is permanently conflicted with major ties to Hillary Clinton), to resign in protest.
Though a leftwing commie himself, Bragg has clearly been getting additional pressure from Clinton and Biden proxies to move forward with this prosecution – as bald-faced a political prosecution as there is, which has ratcheted up in recent weeks especially now that President Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee with poll numbers that consistently eclipse Biden’s in a general election matchup.
Then, there is the scandal involving Merchan’s daughter. As brilliantly exposed by Laura Loomer, Merchan’s impartiality has been irreparably muddied by reports that his daughter, Loren, serves as President of an organization called “Authentic,” which describes itself as a “digital agency” that “partner[s] with clients to build award-winning programs for progressive causes and campaigns.”
The organization proudly boasts Kamala Harris and Adam Schiff, who pushed the debunked Steele dossier claiming Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as two of its most valued clients.
Other clients featured on the organization’s website are the Biden Harris Campaign, Governor Gavin Newsom, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, among countless other far-left progressive Democrats.
To occupy such a high leadership role in a group whose client is, incredulously, the “Biden Harris campaign” is the paradigmatic example of a conflict of interest. And not that further evidence to support a conflict would be needed, but Loomer’s research also uncovered that, per FEC public filings, Loren donated thousands of dollars directly to Democratic politicians.
Thus, there is no chance that impartiality could be established for Judge Merchan’s courtroom – even the appearance of impropriety is sufficient, under the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, to disqualify a Judge because of a conflict.
Clients of the Far Left activist group, Authentic, on which Judge Merchan’s daughter, Loren, based on myriad reports, serves as a Senior Executive.
Judge Merchan should be forced to recuse himself. The venue situation alone would otherwise qualify as sufficient grounds, in conformance with the letter and spirit of the canons governing proper ethical behavior for judges.
The fact that Judge Merchan’s own personal and familial biases is compounded by his own daughter’s direct ties to a group supporting the Biden campaign, puts this conflict in a league of its own, without precedent for how grave it is. Again, even the appearance of impropriety is sufficient grounds to disqualify judges from taking on cases.
Judge Merchan shatters that standard by leaps and bounds. His so-called “case” against President Trump is as blatant an act of election interference as one could possibly get. He is teeing up a potentially 6–8-week trial smack dab in the middle of a critical election year, forcing President Trump to remain in a (relatively speaking) nonimportant state, just as the campaign season really shifts into high gear.
The fact pattern on which Merchan’s prosecution is based has long been known to the public – its major purveyors, like Avenatti and Cohen — have been long discredited and prosecuted – and served prison time – for fraud, perjury, and all sorts of ethical and criminal breaches.
Furthermore, Merchan’s criminal case comes on the heels of two ludicrous civil cases, all based out of New York State, all attempts to bring down President Trump by weaponizing the levers of judicial power – in which President Trump has been handed the corporate death knell for run-of-the-mill business practices originally upwards of half a billion dollars.
Along the way, President Trump has been ignominiously stripped of foundational constitutional rights, as here with Merchan’s latest gag order, which denied him of his First Amendment rights to speak and criticize a deeply rigged judicial process.
President Trump would not otherwise have to plead his case so vigorously in the court of public opinion if he were given his constitutional right to a fair trial. However, the judicial actors that have predatorily targeted him denied him that opportunity from the get-go.
Thus, the need to plead his case to the public, which is the only “court” that allows him something of a fair hearing, becomes even more necessary.
The gag order lodged against President Trump by Merchan epitomizes the recurrent breaches of judicial propriety – and longstanding norms — that have dogged President Trump in every criminal and civil case, since he was unceremoniously ousted from office.
Its scope is arbitrarily large and unduly burdensome – further depriving the 45th President fundamental due process rights. Moreover, that a President of the United States, someone who should be accorded a baseline level of respect for the office he occupied, is being subject to such grave indignities flouts every single custom and precedent for judicial conduct.
President Trump did not, as the court duplicitously alleged, “attack” the members of Judge Merchan’s family – merely expose them for their biases that raises an extremely problematic conflict from a member of the Judge’s immediate family and President Trump’s likeliest opponent in the election being held a few short months down the line.
President Trump’s ability to speak freely about Judge Merchan’s daughter’s conflict is a very important distinction from an “attack,” a ridiculous assertion.
Furthermore, it bespeaks an unfortunate reality as well that President Trump must be his own advocate, for the mainstream media – including conservative media – is too often derelict in carrying out the kind of investigative reporting necessary to portray the proceeding in a fair and impartial light, one that is favorable to President Trump’s case, or at the bare minimum, does not needlessly impugn his case with preconceived biases, political narratives, propaganda, or gaslighting.
The bottom line is that President Trump, yet again, is being thrust into a New York courtroom – when he should be on the campaign trail, like any presidential candidate (let alone the frontrunner) pleading his case to the American people.
These tragic circumstances more deeply reflect a society in thrall to forces that would unwind the great handiwork of the Anglo-American legal system, one that once exalted the rule of law, due process, judicial impartiality, and the presumption of innocence — and destroy all that remains of the possibility of freedom in its wake.
Even in the most likely scenario that President Trump prevails in the courthouse, doubtlessly guided by the hand of Providence, his trials will have been a massive distraction from focus on more productive, constructive policies.
Whereas focus at this juncture should be on putting together an administration of high quality, loyal, and competent staffers, who are prepared to tackle the gargantuan challenges, that seeming worsen by the day, instead our society’s attention is preoccupied by a senseless trial that is a colossal waste of time, energy, and resources.
The latter fact is an egregious disservice to the American people, who deserve competent governance, rather the kind of government we now face – childish, dumb, and petty – a government that prefers to attack political opponents instead of proposing and resolving the mounting crises at hand.
From the border to inflation to a degenerating international order, the current Regime has engineered crisis upon crisis – all dangers that can and will bring down this republic for good if not swiftly put to rest with a dramatic course correction by a second Trump presidency.
Those, simply put, are the uber high stakes of this election. The responsibility to prevent further damage falls upon each and every one of us, to come together and expose the corruption and shine a light on the truth, or else, we face a grave risk of most assuredly, hanging separately – the same risk our Founding Fathers faced on the eve of the Revolution.
ATTENTION: I will be covering President Trump’s trial in lower Manhattan all day, and all throughout the week, on the Pro America Report with Ed Martin on Rumble. I will feature in my live reporting highlights from the scene and key interviews with major Trump surrogates from the ground. Join me all week long on the live Rumble broadcast at: https://rumble.com/c/ProAmericaReport.
The post Paul Ingrassia: Justice On Trial – Trump Will Be Whisked into Merchan’s Courthouse This Morning For What Is Sure to be an Unfair and Biased Proceeding appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Laura Loomer, Paul Ingrassia, Cara Castronuova and fellow trump supporters outside NYC courthouse on Monday.
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As we head closer to November, more Americans will jump on the Trump Train – because it really is the last, best hope for saving this once great and mighty nation.
A tale of two presidents: Donald Trump’s recent fundraiser at the home of John Paulson, raked in over $50 million of cash to add more fuel to a campaign that many have already called one of the best in modern presidential history in terms of management (even compared to President Trump’s presidential bids in 2016 and 2020) – and which has been described as a “well-oiled machine.” The staggering figure is notable for several reasons: it outflanked Biden’s paltry-by-comparison (reportedly) $25 million that he raised a little over a week before in New York. However, unlike Biden, who had to shut down half of Manhattan, and fly in three former presidents and legions of celebrity entertainers just to reach less than half of President Trump’s benchmark, President Trump’s fundraiser was a far less glitzy ordeal – he did not need all the pomp and circumstance that Biden, who cuts the public image of a dementia patient, required; it was hosted at a private home in Palm Beach, a relatively quiet locale compared to Biden’s Radio City Midtown venue. And yet, even considering those factors, President Trump more than doubled Biden’s reported figure, which only speaks to the formidable power of his overall campaign operation.
President Trump’s recent success is also a telltale that Americans are absolutely fed up with the current program, and demand a radical course correction. The economy has slowed to a halt; hordes of barbarians are literally storming the gate from the third world; and, on the international front, the world, quite literally, teeters on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Even though Biden has gone to great lengths to depict the economic situation as improving, Americans everywhere understand that real wages remain depressed — and lags the pace of inflation, underlying GDP languishes, while inflation continues to be sticky and remaining around forty-year highs – especially compared to the purchasing power of the dollar just three years ago, as Americans palpably realize whenever they struggle to buy eggs and milk at the grocery store.
But even if the economy was as rosy as Biden and his lackeys say, the border crisis alone is enough to send Independents and even many Democrats running for the MAGA hills. President Trump recently shared a graphic on Truth Social that visually broke down just how bad Biden’s border crisis has been: since the 45th President left office; illegal immigration has skyrocketed – to levels unseen at any point, ever, in American history. More illegals from Latin America and South America have crossed the Southern border over the last four years alone than the previous two hundred thirty-three years of American history! Tens of thousands of illegals cross the wide-open, US-Mexico border every single month: many of these illegals belong to dangerous criminal organizations and drug cartels, or traffic children into sex slavery. All of them, in crossing the border, have committed a crime. Many are repeat felons.
Since President Trump’s unceremonious ouster from the Oval Office, the sheer number of illegals who have crossed the southern border each month has shot up exponentially. Compared to when President Trump left office, which bottomed out at a record-low 30,000, more than 300,000 have been counted entering the country per month under Biden – a staggering tenfold increase. This will be sure to have devastating cultural, demographic, economic, and national security ramifications for generations to come. The damage, so drastic, may be permanent. The cultural fabric of the American nation has been upended, and nothing short of the dramatic actions that President Trump and his advisers have proposed – like mass deportations of all illegals – will undo the catastrophe.
None of these illegals are being assimilated; rather, they are forcing native-born Americans out of schools in cities like New York, which do not have enough space to house them or resources to feed them. Illegals do not culturally assimilate into American life (indeed, everything from the Biden Regime would incentivize them not to), having at best a rudimentary understanding of the English language – and little to no economically practical skills. Instead, they loot, rob, and steal what diminishing portion of the American Dream remains for working American citizens, whose quality of life has, in turn, deteriorated, and quite rapidly – as legacy Americans are forced to shoulder a heavier and heavier tax burden of medical, education, and housing expenses — a problem which disproportionately falls on older retirees and younger Americans, just entering the workforce, who are already laden with astronomical college debt in many cases.
Meanwhile, Democrats like Governors Newsom and Hochul in states like California and New York, respectively, have given illegals drivers licenses, social security numbers, free healthcare, and increasingly, access to the franchise. With no voter ID laws and extremely lenient rules for voting in federal elections generally, the ballot box is more than ever at risk of being susceptible to illegal votes, from all types of people, foreign and domestic, come November. The Great Replacement is a type of foreign election interference far more serious than any damage that could possibly be wrought by Russia and China — which the mainstream media totally ignores. Any discussion at all of this kind of election interference the Uniparty deems verboten, for it upsets their narrative because they depend entirely on illegals for cheap labor and more votes: indeed, that is the core demographic, and key, to stay in power.
Biden put New York on lockdown for his fundraiser, forcing Manhattanites to be held hostage in their apartments and workplaces – many for hours on end – which was eerily reminiscent of the draconian lockdowns during covid, and typical of the sort of agenda sponsored by Biden’s friends at the World Economic Forum and Davos, that would have all Americans living in pods, jobless, and permanent renters by 2030. Perhaps even more shameful is the fact that as Biden was attempting to raise money for his failing presidential effort, a police officer, slain in the line of duty as a result of the reckless anti-law enforcement, anarchic policies espoused by Biden and his party, was being laid to rest just over the bridge, on nearby Long Island, a flesh-and-blood casualty of the Biden Regime.
While Biden was being feted by an abominable cast of characters that included Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Stephen Colbert, and “Lizzo,” President Trump acted like a true statesman by paying his respects to the family at the wake of the fallen officer. At the same time, Biden managed to beclown himself – and insult the city in the process. President Trump appropriately dignified Officer Jonathan Diller and his family – not in a showy or obnoxious way, but in a cordial, understated, and statesmanlike fashion that conveyed appropriate solemnity for the tragedy that had just occurred. His appearance also reflected an unspoken empathy for how Officer Diller’s death was directly traceable to the Left’s broader effort to stigmatize, defang, and demean law enforcement ever since the George Floyd riots of the summer of 2020.
Whereas Biden’s fundraiser was a display of narcissistic indulgence, the product of his paid off supporters who behind closed doors grow wearier and wearier of him by the day, President Trump was in the city purely to boost morale – and inspire hope for the place he once proudly called home, now ravaged by utterly insane policies that will spell certain doom for New York, and the nation, if not stopped in their tracks with an aggressive counteroffensive.
In 2016, the mantra was to Make America Great Again. In 2024, Americans demand not just to be made great again, but a complete and total restoration of the country, rule of law, due process, and our sacred constitutional rights and freedoms. They hope to be relieved of the scourge of Leftist insanity that has grown more militant, more parasitical, and more deadly, with each passing year – achieving fruition in the Biden Regime that has unleashed invaders to decimate what remnants exist of the spacious skies and amber waves of grain of the once glorious republic.
The Regime does this while at the same time clamps down on its most patriotic citizens, those without ever having so much as a petty misdemeanor on their records, far too many now locked away – for years, decades even – merely for peacefully showing up at the nation’s capital on January 6th. From septuagenerian Vietnam war veterans to praying great-grandmothers to 5’1 social media starlets, true Americans of all stripes are being locked away ruthlessly, while violent and dangerous criminals, some worse than the type that murdered Officer Diller in the line-of-duty, are allowed to flood the streets of every major city with impunity. And warlords who head dangerous gangs invade the country with reckless abandon, exploiting a porous border and destroying many more innocent American lives along the way – either directly, or indirectly via human trafficking and broadening an already uncontrollable Fentanyl and opioid-epidemic – to previously unthinkable levels.
As we head closer to November, more Americans will jump on the Trump Train – because it really is the last, best hope for saving this once great and mighty nation, rendered into an enervated picture of its former self — personified by none other than Joe Biden himself. America will cease to exist without President Trump’s return to the Oval Office; even with his return, the prospects for a national renewal will be difficult, but his movement remains the only viable path – the final chance – for salvaging our ancestral legacy, now at risk of being lost forever.
The post Trump’s Historic Fundraising Haul Demonstrates Americans Want Him Back More Than Ever! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Former President Donald Trump speaks about the murder of NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller on Thursday in New York. (C-SPAN screen shot)
If the Biden Regime can be summarized by a single word, it would be: injustice. No presidential administration in the history of the United States ever observed such an egregious assault on civil liberties and the rule of law, especially constitutional due process and the presumption of innocence, than what is now occurring under Biden and his weaponized Department of Justice today. Donald Trump is, of course, Political Hostage Numero Uno of the weaponized justice system – and his white martyrdom at the hand of a deeply subverted justice system in this country has galvanized his base, and his countrymen, to levels that surpass anytime since he first entered politics in 2015.
Americans recognize the grave injustice of what is now unfolding in courtrooms across the country. But of course, the casualties of America’s weaponized justice system span well beyond President Trump, extending to lawyers who represented him during that most trying period for the republic, between November of 2020 and January of 2021, when the Constitution was put on the chopping block. The few lawyers who did rise up to defend President Trump channeled the brave spirit of the Founding Fathers in doing so, putting literally everything on the line – their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor – when virtually nobody else in the profession (and that is without exaggeration) would do the same.
Two such lawyers, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, entered the storm as many of their peers turned a blind eye — or actively turned against them. That most turbulent period in the days and weeks following the 2020 election put strains on our constitutional form of government to a degree not seen in generations, at least spanning back to the Civil War era. But it is during periods of trials and tribulations, not of peace and tranquility, that the Constitution’s durability is put to the ultimate test. In order to keep a republic amid great adversity, exceptional men of character must rise up – and go against the grain, to preserve the time-honored traditions and sacred way of life incubated and passed down from one generation to the next.
Eastman and Clark were two such men of exceptional character who rose to the occasion and heeded the call, of not just their President (and client, for which there are important attorney-client privileges attached), who asked them to make sound and reasonable enquiries into widespread allegations of election fraud affecting the 2020 race, but the rich heritage of their forefathers – who also sacrificed a great deal when faced with long odds, to preserve the cause of freedom. Prior to their involvement in the 2020 election, Eastman and Clark were two of the most eminent lawyers in the country. They each boasted impressive resumes: Eastman was a graduate of the University of Chicago, who later clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and worked as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the most prestigious law firms anywhere. Clark also matriculated from one of this country’s top law schools: Georgetown, which, coupled with his Harvard degree in economics and history, helped land him a prestigious clerkship on the Sixth Circuit, followed by a position also at Kirkland & Ellis, where he made partner and worked for over two decades – interrupted only by two stints in the Department of Justice under George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. Never once had either man’s character, ethics, judgment, or qualifications been doubted at any point in time prior to January of 2021, never mind been accused of having committed a breach of professional ethics, let alone indicted for a crime.
Eastman and Clark supplemented their encyclopedic knowledge of American law with deep studies in political philosophy, theory, and history. Eastman was a student of Harry V. Jaffa, one of America’s foremost natural law theorists, who, continuing a venerable intellectual tradition that began with his own professor, Leo Strauss, famously made explicit America’s natural law-based constitutional underpinnings in works such as A House Divided.
Clark, likewise, is a student of history, possessing an enviable grasp of Soviet history, in particular – and, pertinently, through his deep studies of the persecutions that occurred against political dissidents under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, as viscerally recounted in the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom he frequently invokes, with uncanny germaneness, when given the opportunity to do so in public speeches.
It is in part due to their scholarly backgrounds that Eastman and Clark understand, certainly better than most of their colleagues, the high stakes of not upholding the Constitution – as well as the tyranny that inevitably flows from inaction. That tyranny they both are experiencing firsthand, in real time, with the disbarments they face – Eastman received news last Wednesday, midway through Holy Week for practicing Catholics (a faith to which both men belong), that he was being disbarred by the State Bar of California. His crime? Standing with President Trump and educating the President about Executive actions he could take, as Commander-in-Chief, to remedy perceived electoral fraud throughout the system. Eastman now-famously advised Vice President Pence that he had the power, under the Constitution (which the Congress later amended in 2022, defanging the Vice President’s role in overseeing elections to a purely ‘ministerial’ duty), to return slates of electors back to states – particularly states, like Georgia and Arizona, subject to accusations, and evidence, of widespread fraud, last-minute rule changes, and irregularities of all sorts.
Nothing of what Eastman advised the former Vice President to do was unconstitutional, much less unreasonable. He offered a valid interpretation of the document, consistent with the text and longstanding history of election law, from the authority of a legal scholar well steeped in these issues, at the behest of a President of the United States, as the nation was teetering on the brink of outright constitutional crisis. For these maneuvers, none of which impute criminal or civil liability under any statute, nor are equipped with the sufficient intent to establish liability by the requisite evidentiary legal standard (“clear and convincing evidence”) in the first place, Eastman is being penalized by the heavy hand of the State.
In a Substack article and press release published the day the California State Bar recommended he be disbarred, Eastman said that he would appeal the decision — all the way to the Supreme Court, if need be:
We will appeal the decision, of course, and hopefully the California Bar Review Court, the California Supreme Court, or the U.S. Supreme Court will step in to put a stop to this “lawfare” that has become a serious threat to the First Amendment, the right of controversial clients and causes to legal representation, and more broadly to our adversarial system of justice. Also attached below is the statement put out by my attorneys earlier this evening
Eastman’s willingness to appeal the sham disbarment ruling all the way to the Supreme Court is admirable, and something he should do. The Supreme Court, and particularly Trump-appointed judges and justices across the judiciary, should get ahead of the curve by either fast-tracking Eastman and Clark’s case through the federal court system, so that they can receive a fair hearing and not be subject to the indignities of Leftist lawfare via hostile judges, juries, and venues. Or, at the very least, issue a strong and emphatic public statement denouncing this sort of penalty against two of the bravest men in the profession. If Justice Thomas, for whom Eastman formerly clerked, for instance (or any justice of the Supreme Court for that matter), were to issue a public statement to rally judicial sentiment on behalf of this most important cause, that would go a long way towards increasing morale and sending a signal that this kind of lawfare against anyone, but especially lawyers who faithfully adhere to the original construction of the Constitution, is not to be tolerated.
Jeff Clark was serving as Acting United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice when he was summoned by President Trump to inquire into allegations of election fraud in the state of Georgia, among other places. Clark has faced criminal charges for making honest inquiries into election fraud affecting the 2020 results, particularly in the Peach State, where the evidence overwhelmingly proves was riven with fraud, for which he was indicted, and forced to take a mugshot, alongside both Eastman and President Trump, last summer.
It is an affront to the rule of law when professional lawyers are subject to criminal prosecution for simply upholding election procedures to a rigorous standard – which would appear more important than ever in an age where narratives of election fraud, conspiracy and subversion seem to consume at least half the news cycle, from both sides of the political aisle, twenty four hours of the day, seven days a week. Jeff Clark did ask the tough questions, and, for making simple inquiries about election procedures in Georgia, he is now being prosecuted for shining a light upon the incompetence of Georgia’s Uniparty, of whom both Kemp and Willis are kindred spirits.
For exposing them, Clark, Eastman, Trump, Giuliani, et al. have had to pay a considerable price – to their lives, reputations, even health (the agonies of going through spiritually crushing litigation day-in-and-day-out have a lasting physical toll), as much as a mental and spiritual one. It makes perfect sense, however, that in our DEI-regime, where all standards (and, especially, the standards for competence, integrity, honesty) are regularly demeaned and denigrated to no end – nay, to even propose objective standards for truth, morality, and competence in our day and age is considered an egregious assault on the egalitarian values of the Regime, certainly exposing oneself to being blanket-labeled a dirty racist and Nazi! That lawyers like Clark, who have tried to hold the legal profession to some form of accountability, is now being treated like a villain.
And yet, as we all know (too, too well!) from the Fani Willis affair, Georgia’s Uniparty is the epitome of incompetence; and, as time would show, their broken election procedures – which included late night ballot drop offs, arbitrary rule changes that amplify the risk of allowing dead voters and illegals to cast votes via absentee ballots, a complete and total lack of transparency – or impartiality – in election counting procedures – only scratched the surface.
The illegitimacy of Georgia’s regnant political class is being exposed, in real time, with the corrupt show trial taking place there, presided over by District Attorney, Fani Willis, and her special prosecutor and, infamously, ex(?)-paramour, Nathan Wade, who was patently unqualified to take on the most important criminal case in the country, a hatchet job against a President of the United States – having never so much as prosecuted petty misdemeanors before in his former post as a glorified municipal traffic court judge, before being tapped (pegged?) by Fani for the job that would immortalize him to the history books. The egregious conflict of interest between Willis and Wade violated virtually every canon of legal and judicial ethics, every rule of professional responsibility, in the books – in any other time, both Wade and Willis would have not only been forced to recuse themselves but have been disbarred from practicing law for abusing and profiting off their public offices, at the expense of Georgia citizens. Of course, Republican Governor – and known Trump-hater and regular Davos attendee – Brian Kemp, could immediately put an end to this charade, by requesting that his Attorney General, Chris Carr, take over the case from Willis and Wade, pursuant to Georgia State Constitution, Article V, Section III, Paragraph IV. That he still has not bespeaks to his character, and true allegiances, to the Uniparty over the values of the Republican Party, now in thrall to MAGA, to which he publicly professes.
Of course, the debacle that unraveled with Fani Willis’ office scratches just the tip of the iceberg of corruption within Georgia’s justice department. As readily observed by anyone paying even the slightest attention to Clark’s ongoing Washington, D.C. disbarment proceeding, the D.C. Bar attorney for the prosecution has been reportedly very hostile to Clark’s own witnesses. These are witnesses who were tasked with overseeing Georgia’s election procedures during the 2020 general election. Witnesses have testified to cases of blatant fraud: one said there were more voters on the active rolls than eligible voters. Another testified that Fulton County election officials failed to do any electronic signature verification for absentee ballots. Others noted significant disparities between ballots counted by hand, and those which were counted by machine – with no explanation or resolution for those disparities. Each and every one of these allegations, on their own, would unquestionably lend any reasonable observer into asking follow-up questions, and potentially opening up an investigation into allegations of fraud, if such fraud was deemed a systemic concern or insufficient reasons were given for the allegations, which did occur. This, Jeff Clark did – and for simply doing what any reasonable person would have done under the circumstances (let alone someone in an official capacity as head of not one, but two divisions at the Justice Department), he is being persecuted – because the Left cannot stand Donald Trump, the Constitution, or the right to speak and think outside their extremely closed and narrow worldview.
As conservative so-called “legal professionals,” those belonging to organizations once considered esteemed such as The Federalist Society, by and large tergiversate on inconsequential trivialities, the Left has mastered the art of legal warfare – and punishes its perceived enemies, like Trump, Eastman, and Clark — with shameless abandon. Members of John Eastman’s family have witheringly detailed Left-wing lawfare methods and tactics, conducted with inhumane callousness, by groups such as “The 65 Project,” which has, you guessed it, ties to George Soros.
In a recent piece published on The Gatestone Institute, Elizabeth Eastman, John’s wife, discussed the disgraceful methods of Leftist lawfare groups like The 65 Project:
The group targets lawyers who litigated 2020 election irregularities or represented President Donald Trump. It does this by filing complaints against them in state bar associations, contending not only that the lawsuits were meritless but that anyone involved in them should be sanctioned — up to and including disbarment.
Further down in that same article, Elizabeth Eastman describes how the The 65 Project’s aim is to marginalize and stigmatize conservative voices out of representing controversial clients or standing for unpopular causes:
The head of the group has admitted that their goal is “to deter right-wing talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts” to challenge elections, not only by bringing bar complaints but to “shame them and make them toxic in their communities and their firms.”
In a similar piece, Eastman’s children – Christina and Benjamin – writing for The Blaze, called upon conservative and right-leaning judges, lawyers, and legal academics to speak out against the Left’s weaponization of the justice system to persecute and silence political opponents, before it is too late. In a bitingly powerful call to action, Eastman’s children demanded that more of their colleagues and friends stand up against the forces in this country that have ruthlessly targeted their father for the past three-plus years – including death threats, property damage, millions of dollars in legal fees, injuries to his professional reputation that he built up over decades, and other untold personal costs.
Their demands to, as they phrased it, “the conservative legal nonprofit apparatus,” was especially poignant. It is utterly appalling that very few other conservative lawyers, district attorneys, attorneys general, judges, law firms, legal nonprofits, and other legal (and non-legal, “constitutional”) professionals have done hardly anything to – forget about challenging the Left with offensive lawfare – but even so much as failed to offer, at the bare minimum, supporting words for their own friends, like Eastman and Clark, who have made enormous sacrifices standing up for what is right from the very beginning:
To the conservative legal nonprofit apparatus: There is no shortage of options to pursue an offensive or defensive lawfare strategy. Pick one and get into the fight. File bar complaints against rogue prosecutors. Refer corrupt judges to state judicial qualifications commissions. Campaign for the impeachment of partisan judges. Become involved with bar associations to ensure a more evenly balanced disciplinary process. Provide counsel or legal defense funds to lawyers weathering this storm on your behalf — because Eastman won’t be the last.
Their demands on the legal profession generally are equally harrowing, and important, given the incredibly high stakes involved for America and her future:
To lawyers on both sides of the political aisle: The integrity of your profession is hanging by a thread. Implore your state bars to keep political interests out of their work.
The whole piece is well worth a read, because it grounds Eastman’s ongoing fight in the broader context of what it means for the legal profession in particular, and civil liberties and due process rights for all Americans, in general.
Eastman and Clark — who also faced pretty much the same challenges Eastman experienced in terms of injury to his professional reputation, to say nothing of untold millions of dollars of legal fees he has (and continues to) racked up — may be two of the most prominent names leading the vanguard of this battle. But if the Left is permitted to carry out its political prosecution against them with impunity, their fates will portend the collective fates of every single last American, who still, at this late stage, remains fearfully silent in the face of unspeakable evil. In any other age, given their pedigrees, Eastman and Clark both would be at the top of every list to be considered for the next Supreme Court opening, or Attorney General post, or for White House Counsel (and, if God’s will prevails, they still might). But, given Leftist lawfare, which has tarnished the good names of both men, they are instead using their valuable gifts entirely towards defending themselves – which is a tremendous waste of time, energy, and resources, that does a colossal disservice to not just these men and their families, nor even just the conservative movement, but to the country at large, because all of us are being deprived the fruits of their immense offerings.
Call To Action:
Thus, if you can find it in your heart to donate to both these men – given the sacrifices they have endured on behalf of the cause of freedom, and the implications of their cases for the rest of us, they and their families would most appreciate your generosity.
John Eastman’s legal defense fund, which includes the latest updates from his disbarment proceeding, can be found here: https://www.givesendgo.com/Eastman
Jeff Clark’s legal defense fund, which also includes the latest updates from his still-ongoing disbarment proceeding in Washington, D.C., can be found here: https://www.givesendgo.com/jeffclark
Thank you, and, on behalf of both men, God bless and please continue to keep them, their families, and the United States of America – for which they believed the political crisis was great enough to put basically everything on the line for – in your prayers.
The post The Lawfare Against John Eastman and Jeff Clark Portend The Fate of Every Right-Leaning Attorney Who Fails To Stand Up For Their Persecuted Colleagues appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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ATTENTION READERS: BE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE ALL-IMPORTANT CALL TO ACTION INCLUDED AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS ARTICLE.
On Monday, Cara Castronuova, an investigative journalist for Newsmax and writer for The Gateway Pundit who is currently running as a Republican for the Senate in New York, filed a lawsuit in New York State Federal Court that seeks to change New York’s notoriously draconian and anti-democratic ballot eligibility laws. Under current law, candidates running for public office who are not chosen by the Ed Cox-led state party apparatus, like Cara Castronuova, who hopes to secure the Republican Party nomination for Senate, must collect 15,000 pen ink original signatures over 37 calendar days in order to qualify.
As recounted at length previously here, State Party Chairman, Ed Cox, has operated as effective gatekeeper for a trenchant New York State Republican Party that refuses to change with the times, particularly with regard to selecting candidates who are stridently and unapologetically pro-Trump and pro-America First, much like Cara Castronuova. As evidence: the State Party’s last two candidates for major electoral offices – Mike Sapraicone, whom the Party handpicked in a closed door convention in February for Senate, is a well-known Trump hater who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats over the years. As recently as 2022, Sapraicone made contributions to Trump-hating District Attorney Letitia James, who is spearheading the ongoing political prosecution against President Trump in New York State, including overseeing his criminal trial set to begin in Manhattan, later this month.
Their previous, hand-selected candidate, Mazi Pilip, who the Party chose to run for former Congressman George Santos’ vacated seat in New York’s 3rd Congressional District also was Ed Cox’s ideal candidate. She was still, reportedly, a registered Democrat at the time she ran in the special election against Democrat Tom Suozzi, who easily defeated her and reclaimed his seat, reducing the Republican House Majority to a precariously thin 218 to 213 margin. The Santos expulsion effort was led by Ed Cox-lackeys, as part of the RINO State Delegation: Nick Lalota (who held out on endorsing President Trump until Jan. 20 of this year) Mike Lawler (who still has not endorsed Trump), Andrew Garbarino (who also still has not endorsed Trump) and Anthony D’Esposito (who waited until Feb. 26 of this year to finally endorse the presidential frontrunner), all of whom – at best –only recently issued eleventh hour endorsements of Donald Trump, according to 538’s endorsement tracker, showcasing their true loyalties to Ed Cox and his Uniparty agenda. (For reference, Trump loyalist Elise Stefanik (NY-21) endorsed President Trump way back in November of 2022). As the saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
This anti-Trump coalition ousted George Santos, as part of a deliberate sabotage masterminded by Ed Cox and his Uniparty cronies to not only expel the most conservative and Trump-supporting Congressperson from the Republican delegation, but, even worse, reduce the Republican Majority’s already razor thin majority in the House further still – potentially setting the stage for Democrats to retake control outright before November’s presidential election. This would put Democrats in a position to ram-through eleventh hour legislation to remove President Trump from the presidential ballot on groundless Insurrection charges, under sections 3 and 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Thus, if the House of Representatives should fall to Democratic hands before November’s election – Republicans in New York State, all of whom answer to Ed Cox, are directly to blame.
This is why Castronuova’s lawsuit, which comes during the most important election year in this country’s history, is absolutely pivotal towards moving the needle of the State Party in the MAGA direction.
Castronuova is not filing a frivolous lawsuit, either. She abided by all the rules as someone who did not make the ballot as the Party’s handpicked candidate at the Convention, and amassed over 15,000 petitions — exceeding the onerous requirement per New York’s rules. At the time of this article’s release, she – and her co-plaintiff listed in the lawsuit, John Tabacco, an aggrieved Staten Island Republican voter, who is being deprived of his right, like millions of other New Yorkers, from casting their vote for their chosen candidate — are on their way up now to Albany to deliver their signatures to the Board of Elections.
There is a third candidate in the race as well: Josh Eisen – who is backed by the New York Young Republican Club, and finished in third place (with over 6% of the Convention vote) behind Castronuova (over 8% of the vote) and Sapraicone at the closed-door convention in Binghamton back in February. Eisen, much like Castronuova, also faces an uphill battle in collecting petitions based on New York State’s anti-democratic and notoriously draconian ballot access laws.
Castronuova raises several very important points in her Complaint, which was filed with the District Court for the Eastern District, that are worth highlighting.
First, as the law currently stands, the signature requirement is a flagrant Equal Protection violation, and the court should grant injunctive relief on that basis alone. The onerous, arbitrary, and downright arcane ballot requirement rules are bad enough. But the fact that both Republicans and Democrats alike are held to the same 15,000 signature requirement standard – in a State where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1 — is an egregious affront to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment (to say nothing of myriad other due process, privileges and immunities, and constitutional breaches the current law exploits).
Castronuova bases her Complaint in well-founded precedent. In 2000, when John McCain was running in his first bid for President in the Republican Primary, he too challenged New York State on the basis of its arbitrary and unduly burdensome signature requirement laws. A judge at the time found McCain, a major presidential candidate with national name recognition and enormous resources behind him, to have a valid constitutional claim against New York State’s onerous so-called “petition gathering scheme.” Steve Forbes too, another billionaire candidate with significant financial resources to expend on paid “volunteer walkers,” was also found by New York courts to have a valid legal claim because of the undue burden imposed by New York’s onerous election rules – Forbes and McCain’s cases (on the books as Molinari v. Powers) were cited as controlling authorities by Castronuova in her lawsuit.
If courts found that New York’s ballot scheme imposed undue burdens on national candidates of McCain and Forbes’ caliber, then a faithful court should easily find a significant undue burden in Castronuova’s case. Unlike McCain and Forbes, Castruonova’s campaign is being waged on a shoestring budget. Not only does she not have the financial backing of Republican State leaders, she has been totally foreclosed of the opportunity to use State Party resources – which should be made available to all prospective candidates, regardless of whether or not they are the preferred candidate of the State Party – such as names of registered Republicans and lists of volunteers, which the Party apparatus has access to. All these factors only increase the undue burden on Castronuova, thus enhancing her constitutional claim.
The undue burden extends not just to the arbitrary and onerous 15,000 signature requirement – a bad enough figure in and of itself. However, in actual practice, the figure is actually much closer to 30,000 signatures, double the stated requirement, in order to qualify a candidate for the ballot. This is because the State Party apparatus actively works to strike “invalid” signatures, by applying the law to an unduly exacting standard, all for the sole purpose of disqualifying would-be challengers to the chosen Party nominee — even those rare few, like Steve Forbes, wealthy enough to amass 30,000 signatures on their own.
One particularly egregious part of the signature requirement, which is written into New York State law, is the notorious town/city “trap for the unwary” stipulation, a necessary requirement for every signature to be valid. In New York, many towns are actually divided into discrete villages – that residents more familiarly identify with and conflate as being their township. So, for instance, a Montauk resident might designate his Town as Montauk – but that signature would be stricken, under current New York rules, because, technically speaking, the proper town would really be East Hampton, which includes the village of Montauk, which is technically not a “town” for the purposes of New York State election law. Sound confusing?
The town/city trap is one such example of why the signature requirement is unduly burdensome: particularly given that signers are already required to list their address in full – and so the purpose of listing one’s township is a mere redundancy, serving no purpose whatsoever other than to disqualify otherwise valid signatures!
The lawsuit outlines myriad other problems with current election rules that only further support Castronuova’s arguments about the fundamental unfairness of the current process.
In her affidavit, submitted with the lawsuit, Castronuova detailed how it was physically impossible to collect the necessary signatures within the stated 37-day timeframe, which, in reality, due to religious holidays and record-breaking inclement weather, was more like 30 days, or less.
But perhaps Castronuova’s most valid point of all, as stated in both her lawsuit and affidavit, was that all these arbitrary and onerous rules – which State Party leaders admitted, behind closed doors, were in place to prevent a competitive, fair, and open Primary from taking place, which would culminate on June 25, 2024 – had absolutely no bearing on “a candidate’s viability and ability to serve effectively in office.”
Nor should the amount of donations a candidate receives – and particularly wasted funds used to recruit volunteers to amass arbitrarily high signature thresholds, which make no sense other than to exclude otherwise viable candidates – like Castronuova and Eisen – from the ballot.
What should qualify a candidate are the sacrifices and principles they uphold, especially during periods of great adversity. Castronuova, as viscerally recounted in her affidavit, has gone through untold hardship just for challenging New York State law. She has been vilified by the Republican State Party apparatus. She has lost friends and onetime supporters, who are afraid to join Castronuova in fear of being ostracized by Party leaders from jobs and other opportunities. As a devout Catholic, Castronuova spent Holy Week, the most important week in the liturgical calendar for most Christians, writing a 16-page affidavit, rather than attending religious services and spending time with family – because she believes this cause is worth “dying on a hill for.”
Despite paying major personal, professional, and indeed, even physical, costs for going against New York State’s obstinate establishment, Castronuova remains unwavering in her conviction to see this cause all the way to the end.
She is not merely a disgruntled candidate, needlessly complaining about a process because she was unwilling to do the essential legwork to get on the ballot. That she has done, and in spades — even with all the factors going against her. She put her career on hold, as both a reporter and investigative journalist, and went into the trenches, summoning volunteers, who devoted precious time, in most cases free of charge, to help Castronuova in her efforts.
Castronuova amassed the 15,000 signatures and is on her way to Albany right now to drop them off to the Board of Elections.
The purpose of her lawsuit is to right a serious wrong, an injustice that deprives not only Republican candidates, but candidates of all political stripes, their constitutional right to bring their message to New York voters, who are denied in turn – by these same rules – the fundamental right to choose better quality candidates through a truly free, fair, and democratic process.
Castronuova, unquestionably, is the America First candidate in this race. She has supported President Trump, unlike Sapraicone, since the day he made that fateful escalator ride at Trump Tower in 2015.
She has stood by him every step of the way – even when fair-weather supporters jumped ship when it became politically expedient to do so. When New York State was under the draconian Cuomo lockdowns at the height of covid, she advocated boldly and publicly for medical freedom. She has raised millions of dollars for January 6th demonstrators, and – while Sapraicone and Cox were remaining silent – entered the firestorm and covered the egregious political persecutions, in her capacity as an investigative journalist against the political hostages of the Biden Regime, consoling the families of J6 victims, who have faced unfathomable hardships for merely exercising their God-given natural rights.
Castronuova is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-borders, and pro-God. She deserves to bring her message to New Yorkers, who are absolutely suffering — and leaving the state by the thousands every month — by the neglectful and incompetent political leadership of both Republicans and Democrats. This State Uniparty has nearly run the once great Empire State to ruin — a ruin that will be inevitable so long as the Republican Party remains a “controlled opposition,” presided over by leaders like Ed Cox and do-nothing, feckless lapdog candidates like Mike Sapraicone.
***ALL IMPORTANT CALL TO ACTION***
READERS: If you are OUTRAGED by what Ed Cox and the New York State Uniparty is doing by denying quality candidates, like Cara Castronuova and Josh Eisen, from their constitutional right to ballot access – while stripping regular New Yorkers of their rights in turn, CALL Ed Cox’s office and TELL him to allow an OPEN PRIMARY by PUTTING CASTRONUOVA and EISEN on the BALLOT.
PHONE: (518) 462-2601. FAX: (518) 449-7443.
ALSO, PLEASE COPY & PASTE THE FOLLOWING EMAIL, AND SEND IT TO ED COX AND THE NY STATE GOP APPARATUS, DEMANDING THAT THEY ALLOW OTHER CANDIDATES, LIKE CASTRONUOVA AND EISEN, TO BE INCLUDED IN THE PRIMARY IN A HEAD-TO-HEAD MATCHUP AGAINST THEIR HANDPICKED, ANTI-TRUMP RINO CANDIDATE IN MIKE SAPRAICONE:
EMAIL: FRONTDESK@NYGOP.ORG
SUBJECT: ALLOW CASTRONUOVA AND EISEN BALLOT ACCESS
HELLO,
I AM AN OUTRAGED, AMERICAN PATRIOT, TRUMP SUPPORTER, AND NEW YORK VOTER WHO DEMANDS THAT YOU INCLUDE CARA CASTRONUOVA AND JOSH EISEN ON THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY BALLOT – AND NOT CONTINUE TO DENY NEW YORKERS THEIR FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO CHOOSE THEIR DESIRED CANDIDATE.
IN ADDITION, PLEASE GET RID OF THE COMPLETELY ARBITRARY AND ONEROUS “PETITION GATHERING SCHEME,” WHICH UNCONSTITUTIONALLY EXCLUDES OTHERWISE BETTER QUALITY AND ELIGIBLE CANDIDATES FROM BALLOT ACCESS BASED ON THE ARCANE RULES SET BY PARTY LEADERS THAT STRIP THE RIGHT TO VOTE FOR TRUE AMERICA FIRST CANDIDATES FROM WE THE PEOPLE!
SINCERELY,
OUTRAGED NEW YORK RESIDENT/AMERICAN CITIZEN
The post CALL TO ACTION: MAGA Senate Candidate and RINO Hunter Cara Castronuova Files Explosive Lawsuit Against New York Republican Committee! RINOS Accused Of UNCONSTITUTIONALLY Blocking Pro-Trump Candidates appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Cara Castronuova with President Donald Trump
Rebecca Lavrenz, 72, a God-fearing grandmother from Colorado, is standing trial right now in DC – yet another victim of the Biden regime’s weaponized Department of Injustice – for merely peacefully demonstrating alongside thousands of her fellow countrymen at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Rebecca faces four misdemeanor charges for being waved into the Capitol building by police and other agents on site that day. All four charges are federal misdemeanors which could carry up to $210,000 in fines and one year in prison.
** Please help out Rebecca Lavrenz this Good Friday.
Her legal bills have been mounting because of her many federal court appearances – the first of which took place in Denver, Colorado, in which she initially received news of her criminal charges and declined to take the prosecution’s plea offer, just days before Christmas. In addition to her legal fees, which are upwards of potentially $100,000, Rebecca faces tremendous fines and countless other expenditures for being subject to this indignity.
Rebecca is a God-fearing woman with no criminal record. She has four children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She runs a Bed & Breakfast on five acres in Colorado and loves America. She has even taken classes to become a Constitutional Coach in order to help other American citizens learn how to most effectively stand up for their God-given rights.
Rebecca firmly believes this country is at an inflection point – facing the risk of losing everything if people do not educate themselves about and stand up for their God-given rights that are enshrined in our founding documents. She regularly likes to quote the famous eighteenth-century English statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, who famously said “All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.”
Rebecca is currently being represented by John Pierce, chairman of the National Constitutional Law Union. The NCLU’s mission statement “is to preserve and protect the United States Constitution and the American way of life by providing legal support and funding to individuals whose Constitutional rights, civil liberties, and similar rights are being violated or in jeopardy.”
Rebecca will be courageously testifying in her own defense this week, and her legal team are fighting every day and night on her behalf. She can use some help from sympathetic readers of The Gateway Pundit to help cover the costs of fighting Joe Biden and his weaponized DOJ, and the FBI.
** For more information about Rebecca and to donate, please visit her GiveSendGo page and help out this woman in need.
Rebecca and her family thank you in advance for your generosity. God bless.
The post On This Good Friday – Praying Grandmother Is in Need of Financial Support for January 6th Related Expenses appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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J6 defendant Rebecca Lavernz, a patriotic God-fearing grandmother is the latest target of the tyrannical government.
The Uniparty is quietly scheming (again) to rig the system and prevent President Trump from ever becoming President. This scheme involves a two-part strategy: using a combination of strategically planned retirements of Republican House members, coupled with the passage of carefully tailored legislation to remove President Trump from the ballot on bogus Insurrection grounds that would likely pass muster with moderate justices on the Supreme Court, like John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, who prefer to avoid deciding on “controversial” legal questions and risk being seen in a bad light by their liberal peers.
The fact that over a dozen House Republicans have recently announced their early retirement, or their intention to not seek re-election, should raise alarm bells for everyone, because these decisions are not by happenstance. They are coordinated and serve the specific purpose to keep President Trump off the ballot. As their attempts at lawfare appear to be falling apart one-by-one, from the debacle in Georgia involving Fani Willis’s rendezvous with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade, to the kangaroo show trials in NYC, with petty judges and prosecutors such as Letitia James, Arthur Engoron, and Juan Merchan, being exposed for the radical, far-left operators they are – President Trump’s political enemies are getting increasingly desperate, and as a result of that desperation, are strategizing to now switch control of the House of Representatives before election day. If they manage to pull off that feat, which is becoming increasingly likely with a diminishing House Republican majority, the product of intra-party squabbling and general incompetence of Republican leadership, and Democrats retake control, President Trump’s enemies will be able to more easily pass legislation that would disqualify him from the ballot. This is because if the House flips to Democrat hands and Speaker Hakeem Jeffries takes the reins, he will be able to coordinate with Chuck Schumer in the Senate more easily, who already controls a majority in the upper chamber. At least up until the November election, there will be no divided government: Democrats will have majorities in both congressional chambers, plus the White House. Thus, the House, Senate, and White House can collude to pass legislation that would exclude President Trump from the ballot because, according to their absurd construction, Section 3 and Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment allows them to do so.
This is why the early-announced retirements of House members like Mike Gallagher (WI) and Ken Buck (CO), and the forced ouster of former Congressman George Santos (NY), have received (rightful) criticism from the MAGA movement, including some of the most stridently pro-Trump congresspersons, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. The Mike Gallagher case is particularly illustrative of RINO subversion – and MTG was no-holds-barred in her criticism of the move. Gallagher, rather than step down immediately, announced that he would delay his retirement until April 19th. Under Wisconsin law, special elections to fill seat vacancies can only occur up until the second Tuesday in April – after which point, the law requires the seat remain vacant through the November election. Thus, if Gallagher postpones his retirement until the 19th, after the second Tuesday in April, there will be no special election: Republicans will simply have to accept losing another House seat. Democrats will be one seat closer to reclaiming majority control. Gallagher’s refusal to step down before the second Tuesday in April makes no sense whatsoever: it can only be explained as an act of deliberate sabotage. MTG took notice. On March 23rd, she posted that Gallagher “should be expelled if he refuses to leave immediately,” recognizing how his delay could ultimately cost Republicans the House majority.
It is no coincidence that the same forces so deeply critical of George Santos’ ouster late last year are the ones most vocal about the news of these early retirements. They observe the writing on the wall: the desire is to keep President Trump off the ballot – and out of office. Providing further support for this theory is the fact that of the 14 or so members that have announced early retirements, at least six of them have received significant funds from notorious anti-Trump megadonor, Paul Singer: Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Patrick McHenry, Drew Ferguson, Kay Granger, Blaine Luetkemeyer, and Greg Pence. Singer, as smartly reported by investigative journalist Troy Smith, and veteran political operative, Roger Stone, also donated a whopping $5,000,000 to Nikki Haley’s failed presidential bid – which marked another attempt by the deep state to derail President Trump in his tracks.
Singer’s support for anti-Trump, RINO candidates has a well-documented and extensive history. The billionaire has been unsuccessfully trying to thwart the President ever since he descended the Trump Tower escalator: in 2016, Singer poured over $2.5 million into Marco Rubio’s failed presidential campaign. Singer also supported research into the universally discredited, bogus Steele Dossier after Trump was elected to the presidency, and has been actively trying to stop the 45th President in his tracks ever since.
What Singer and his RINO allies – and other anti-Trump interest groups in the DC Swamp – are attempting to accomplish is quite blatant: push enough Republicans into early retirement so as to give Democrats control of the House before the November election. The timing is critical: the reason Democrats need to retake control before November is to ensure enough Supreme Court justices will rubber stamp any legislation that might prevent President Trump from getting on the ballot on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.
But, you might be thinking, did not the Supreme Court already rule, in a unanimous (per curiam in Court-speak) judgment, that Colorado’s Secretary of State could not do exactly that in the recent decision, Trump v. Anderson? Not exactly.
One must pick apart the decision with a fine-tooth comb, but the attentive reader will find the language of the Court rather worrisome. This is particularly true for the three liberal justices: Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, who wrote a separate concurrence – agreeing with the Court’s majority “only in the judgment.” Adding further worry is the separate concurrence of Justice Barrett, who also wrote her own 1-page judgment, agreeing with the majority for “Parts I and II-B” of the opinion, while also stating her belief that the five justices who fully signed onto the majority went too far.
In simple terms, the Court was only unanimous on the threshold issue – that Colorado’s Secretary of State could not have the power to unilaterally remove President Trump from the ballot. But agreement ends there. Should the House switch hands, and a Democrat-controlled Congress passes enforcement legislation, pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to remove President Trump from the ballot, it is very likely that at least 3 justices will uphold that legislation. And, based on the language of her decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett would be a tossup – meaning she can potentially side with her liberal colleagues. If she winds up siding with the Court’s three liberals, it will only require one other justice – like John Roberts or Brett Kavanaugh, who have been known to be soft on politically hot-button issues, to jump ship. The fact that none of the judges were willing to rule on whether President Trump actually engaged in Insurrection on January 6th, 2021, is also troubling – because it suggests that the Court would rather remain “above politics,” rather than risking embroiling itself in a hugely important political controversy, providing clarity in the law, even if it meant alienating radical Leftists, who frequently resort to fear mongering, bullying, and even violent threats to get what they want out of squishy justices.
While it is true that the Court paid some consideration to the prospect of the House switching hands before the election and passing legislation to exclude President Trump from the ballot, it did not go far enough. Sure, the Court took off the table the idea that Congress could pass legislation between Election Day and Inauguration Day, when the result of the 2024 election is presumably already known, to prevent the duly elected president from taking office. This language clearly has President Trump in mind and is effectively stating that if Democrats have control of Congress – and if President Trump is re-elected – they cannot attempt to ram through last-minute legislation to prevent him from taking office on alleged Fourteenth Amendment grounds, in a last-ditch attempt to block him out of the presidency.
Although that appears sensible on its face, already four justices – the three liberals and Justice Barrett – clearly signaled that they would not, at least at this point, be comfortable taking that option off the table. In short, four justices have suggested that they might uphold a last-minute legislative effort by a Democrat-controlled Congress to oust President Trump even after he had already been re-elected. If that is true, then certainly the four would support enforcement legislation to remove President Trump from the ballot while he was still Candidate Trump. They would likely do this despite the safety measures included in the majority’s opinion to prevent congressional legislation from going too far – such as the language from the opinion that stipulates for “‘congruence and proportionality’ between preventing or remedying [the alleged misconduct] ‘and the means adopted to that end.’”
How President Trump Might Stop RINO Attempts To Knock Him Off The Ballot Before It’s Too Late
So, what now?
Well, the first – and likely most important step – in planning a counter-strategy, is to be aware of the problem. This piece goes a long way towards spelling out a potential issue; by highlighting Republican chicaneries in the House – and calling it out in its tracks, such as what MTG did with Gallagher, that could well go a long way towards subduing something that has the potential to blossom into a 5-alarm fire.
If President Trump, for example, calls out Mike Gallagher’s antics in their path – that might force him to step down early, and not wait until beyond the deadline to give Democrats another seat. Putting a national spotlight on the issue, by way of President Trump and his campaign, might also prevent other would-be House RINO turncoat members from pulling off a similar trick – and might also put pressure on House Speaker Mike Johnson to reprimand, or potentially even expel, members that do not fall in lockstep. (And if Mike Johnson proves incapable of stopping this plot in its tracks, then another motion to vacate – of the kind MTG proposed just recently – might be just what the doctor ordered.)
As a matter of policy, if, God forbid, House Republican antics continue, and they wind up losing control over the lower chamber to the Democrats, President Trump can and should coordinate with 41 Senators, the number needed to prevent cloture of a filibuster, to ensure blockage of any would-be Insurrection legislation that gets passed. This can be done, but it will involve strategic planning with sympathetic Republican ears in the Senate – currently, Democrats hold onto a slim 51-49 seat majority in the Senate and are poised to lose control of the upper chamber in this November’s election cycle due to a highly favorable Republican map.
Accordingly, if President Trump and his team can coordinate with enough Republicans to block cloture – they can prevent any Insurrection legislation from being passed. Current rules require 60 votes to end a filibuster, so Republicans can afford to lose eight of their members, and still prevent any such legislation from going to Joe Biden’s desk. And while it is true that if ever such legislation were passed, the Supreme Court would almost certainly automatically review it for its constitutionality, given how high-pressure the situation will be – and other factors that are outside anyone’s control, such as the circumstances in which such legislation is passed – it is best to prevent such a dire scenario from occurring ahead of time, in its tracks, rather than leave it up to the Supreme Court, a wildcard, to decide when it might already be too late.
The post Revenge Of The Swamp: DC RINOs Attempt to Sabotage President Trump’s Re-Election With Retirements, Insurrection Legislation – President Trump Must Work On Counter-Strategy Before It’s Too Late appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Kevin McCarthy
Vaunce News 