Trump in 2016: “She shouldn’t be allowed to run...If she wins, it would
create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we
could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and,
ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”
https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/31/intentional-misfeasance-makes-show-trial-conviction-ripe-for-reversal-legal-experts-say/
‘One of the Craziest Things’
Constitutional law expert Hans von Spakovsky says the conviction isn’t
likely to stick, for an array of reasons. Chief among them: Merchan’s
convoluted jury instructions, in which the Biden campaign-donor judge
framed the jury’s deliberations in a way that, according to legal expert
Jonathan Turley, “seemed less like a jury deliberation than a canned
hunt.” Merchan told the jurors they didn’t have to agree on the three
possible “unlawful means” prosecutors vaguely alleged Trump had employed
to “influence” the 2016 election.
“The jurors were told that they could split on what occurred, with four
jurors accepting each of the three possible crimes in a 4-4-4 split. The
court would still consider that a unanimous verdict so long as they
agree that it was in furtherance of some crime,” Turley wrote in the
Hill before the verdict was handed down.
Accomplice media outlets running interference for Biden and his minions
— and attempting to influence the 2024 election — collectively wailed
that conservative news outlets have been misrepresenting Merchan’s jury
instructions. But there’s no denying the unusual nature of the judge’s
explanations at the end of a deeply legally flawed trial.
Von Spakovsky said Merchan’s instructions point to reversible error —
“an error in trial proceedings that affects a party’s rights so
significantly that it is grounds for reversal if the affected party
properly objected at trial,” according to the Legal Information Institute.
“This is such a mistake. … If I were the court of appeals, the moment
this case came in, I would overturn the conviction,” the former Federal
Election Commission member and Heritage Foundation fellow told me before
the verdict this week on the Simon Conway Show. “That is one of the
craziest things I have ever heard and it is a complete violation of
President Trump’s substantive due process rights.”
Von Spakovsky said the standard in like cases is that jurors come to a
unanimous agreement on each of the charges they are deliberating. He
said Merchan added an absurd twist to the proceedings after handicapping
Trump’s defense throughout the trial.
Threw the Constitution ‘Out the Window’
Defense attorney Randy Zelin told CNN that Merchan’s jury instructions
contained a “key flaw.”
“Whether you are driving in a Ford or a Ferrari, if someone gives you
bad directions, you’re going to end up lost. And those jury instructions
were just a complete, just take the Constitution, throw it out a window,
burn it, shoot it and hang it,” the attorney said on “CNN Special Report.”
Turley told Fox News that the “trial is a target rich environment for
appeal,” although he said the appeal will likely “stretch beyond the
election.”
Speaker Mike Johnson has called on the U.S. Supreme Court to quickly
take up the case because of its unprecedented constitutional
implications. The state appeals courts in line to preside over the Trump
case are lined with Democrat-appointed judges.
Von Spakovsky said the courts should act as expeditiously as the Supreme
Court did in the Colorado ballot access case in which it unanimously
overturned the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling kicking Trump off the
state presidential primary ballot.
As for Merchan, von Spakovsky said the judge is either one of the most
incompetent judges he has ever seen or his curious instructions to the
jury was “a sign of intentional misfeasance.”
“In fact, I think it’s the latter because throughout this entire case he
has acted as if he is an alternate member of the prosecution team,” the
legal expert said.