The eminent barrister (and later Lord Chancellor) F E Smith was famously asked by an irritated judge: "Are you trying to show contempt for this court, Mr Smith?" To which he replied: "No, my Lord, I am trying to conceal it."
We have all been there. Well, I certainly have - rather recently, as it happens.
There are times, however, when it is necessary not to conceal it. This week's Trump Trial of the Week is the bazillionth attempt by the ruling party to nail the leader of the opposition on ...something, anything, whatever's to hand. So naturally a certain artfulness is required. In this case, if one accepts as true the charges of corrupt prosecutor Alvin Bragg, Trump paid former crony Michael Cohen to pay off Stormy Daniels. Which would be a falsification of business records. Which is, under the "laws" of New York, a misdemeanour - albeit one in which the statute of supposed limitations has already kicked in. So Bragg is arguing that the expired misdemeanour is actually a non-expired felony, because it was used to cover up another crime.
What other crime he has not said. And, as is now familiar in the State of New York, the corrupt judge Juan Manuel Merchan has been happy to indulge him.
So we are in the quintessentially American realm of the Higher Bollocks. That means so-called conservative legal scholars fill the airwaves conceding that yes, it's an almighty stretch but, in the fullness of time (which, as I can attest after twelve years in the choked septic tank of DC justice, can be very full indeed), Judge Merchan's whims and caprices will likely be overturned on appeal.
So the system works - eventually.
By my count, this is Merchan's third Trump-related "case" in eighteen months: there was the Trump Organization in late 2022, Trump finance chief Allen Weisselberg in 2023, and now this one. A fourth "case" (Steve Bannon's) comes to trial next month. I have been before the bench in this particular courthouse myself: there are an awful lot of courtrooms, and a lot of judges. So why all the Trump cases wind up in the hands of this particular Biden donor is a mystery to me.
Well, actually it isn't: much of "American justice" is stinkingly corrupt. QED.
So the system doesn't work.
Therefore, dignifying it as a normal functioning Common Law process, as do the respected legal scholars on Fox and elsewhere, only aids in its remorseless degeneration. A land of legalisms (which is what America largely is) is not the same as a land of laws; it is merely an intermediate stage between the latter and a land of men, where the law is very crudely applied: If Trump's payment to Stormy Daniels was concealed as a "legal expense" to Michael Cohen, so too was Hillary Clinton's payment to MI6 dossier-creator Christopher Steele concealed as a legal expense to Perkins Coie. But in the fetid toilet of US "justice" only one of them gets dragged into court.
So, if you don't have contempt for Bragg and Merchan, you're part of the problem.
The particular problem this week is that New York law purports to require the presence of the defendant in court every day. I would doubt that that particular rule is, as the hilarious GOP comedians say, "constitutional". The right to sub-contract your case to learned counsel and check in on them once in a while is about as basic as it gets: earlier this year in a certain trial in the District of Columbia, Michael E Mann's lawyer made a point in his opening statement of noting that his client was an extremely prominent and important person and therefore, because of the many demands on his time, would not be able to attend court every day. And indeed he was absent the very next morning. I skipped out a couple of days myself, mainly on health grounds ...because the non-functioning thermostat in that sweatbox of a courtroom was further damaging my failing heart and in danger of upgrading my charge to a capital offence.
In this case, as in mine, the verdict is a foregone conclusion: the jury pool is almost entirely Democrats and they're trying the Republican candidate for president. But, just in case you think there are insufficient thumbs on the scales of justice, Merchan has forbidden Trump's lawyers from inquiring of jurors whether they are (like the judge) a Biden donor, or (like his daughter) a Democrat consultant whose clients have raised at least $93 million off this case:
So, given that he's going down, showing up in court every day is an unnecessary and gratuitous burden. Nevertheless, from yesterday's proceedings:
The New York judge overseeing former President Trump's hush money trial said Monday that Trump cannot attend arguments on presidential immunity at the Supreme Court next week.
It came after the judge earlier delayed a decision on allowing Trump to attend his son Barron's high school graduation in May.
That last is outrageous. And I speak as a foreigner who could hardly bear to sit through my own kids' interminable New Hampshire graduation ceremonies - even the least worst one (eighth-grade) where my older boy won an unlikely bunch of stuff and the younger one played tenor sax in the school band as they entered to "Pomp and Circumstance" and exited (for reasons not entirely clear) to the James Bond theme. But I get that it's an American rite of passage and that any kid wants his parents there. The judge is exceeding his jurisdiction in tainting the day for young Barron.
So, per F E Smith, it is necessary for Trump to demonstrate his contempt for such a pitiful hack and attend his son's graduation.
As for the Supreme Court of the United States, it is generally understood, elsewhere in the Common Law world, that a higher court takes precedence. In the Granite State, for example, if you've a civil hearing in probate court but your shoplifting trial is scheduled for criminal court, the probate date would be postponed. In my own current judicial torments, there was a danger in February that the DC Superior Court trial would overrun into my then scheduled case at the English High Court. Had that happened, there is no question that on the thirteenth I would have been in London rather than Washington, where Mann vs Steyn would proceed without my corporeal presence.
But in New York His Biden-Donating Lordship feels differently:
The decision to not allow Trump to be in Washington, D.C., on April 25, when the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on a presidential immunity claim Trump is making in his federal criminal case, came just before the New York trial adjourned Monday.
"Arguing before the Supreme Court is a big deal, and I can certainly appreciate why your client would want to be there, but a trial in New York Supreme Court ... is also a big deal," Judge Juan Merchan said to Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, rejecting his request to let the former president play hooky.
"I will see him here next week," the judge added.
Under New York state law, Trump is required to attend the entirety of his trial unless he gets special permission from the judge to skip.
New York Supreme Court (which is not "supreme" in the John Roberts sense, but merely the name of the lower-level trial court) is not at all "a big deal". Even I as a "niche Canadian" have been banged up in its dank precincts, although I came out of it rather better than Trump ever will. (A lot has happened in six years; the since retired Judge Bransten was a somewhat eccentric jurist, but not grotesquely biased like Merchan and his ilk.)
The larger problem here is that Trump is a candidate for November's election. Under the American system, only one of two men can be President of the United States: the Democrat nominee or the Republican nominee. The Trump trial is scheduled to last six-to-eight weeks. Given the glacial pace of jury selection, I would bet on the latter - for all of which Trump will be confined to a crappy courtroom in Lower Manhattan.
So, just to understand the real-world effect of this judge's "impartial justice", we are less than seven months from Election Day but for two of those months Trump will be unable to campaign. In what kind of broken-down no-account basket-case does some rinky-dink judge get to take the opposition leader out of the game for a third of the presidential campaign?
And don't answer Senegal, because right now their election integrity is looking better than yours.
At the behest of his party, Merchan is engaging in outrageous election interference that should be completely unacceptable. By playing along, the legal scholars and Conservative Inc are doing no favours to the republic they purport to revere. Nor is the Supreme Court, whose rock-ribbed "conservative majority" the Republicans have invested so much time in, to the exclusion of everything else. Deference to a fundamentally corrupt system only bolsters its corruption: Barron Trump's high-school graduation may not strike the constitution-wavers as the hill to die on, but in fact it is. An appellate bench two, three, seven years down the line cannot cure the wrong done to him.
America has been sliding off the cliff awhile now:
*Over a decade back, we had a corrupt revenue agency targeting the enemies of the ruling party, but Lois Lerner & Co paid no price.
*Nine years ago, the most powerful police agencies on earth enlisted the aid of foreign intelligence services to keep the ruling party in power, but Peter Strzok & Co paid no price.
*Now we have prosecutors and judges in multiple states preventing the ruling party's political opponent from campaigning for election. And, as is now traditional, they will pay no price.
If you have a corrupt revenue agency, corrupt law enforcement and corrupt courts, what else do you need? Much of America is institutionally evil, and so-called conservative media are just stringing along for the ride.
Whatever else this is, it isn't - not in a self-governing society - anything that can be remotely passed off as politics, and Republicans should not be pretending it is.
For one thing, given what's happened to Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis et al, how many US citizens would be willing to serve in a second Trump Administration?
~If you haven't yet read (or heard) enough of my own legal travails, Peter W Wood has a tangential connection to my DC case and has written his own account of what happened in the May edition of The American Conservative:
The Long Road to the Steyn Verdict
