Subscribe: RSS
This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.
Transcript: ‘The Press Has a Problem Being Forthright About Trump Where the Right Has Rallied Around Him’
Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.
Transcript: ‘The Fight Doesn’t End Until We Stop It at the Source’
There are substantial reasons to regard the trial and conviction of Trump as politically motivated. This was a weak case from its start and there were no victims. “Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought it, ran for election on a ‘Get Trump’ platform in 2021. Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over it, is a Biden supporter whose daughter, Loren Merchan, heads a Democratic political consulting firm whose clients include such top Dems as Adam Schiff – the congressman who served as chief prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial and is now using the hush-money case to raise money for his bid to become the next senator from California.”
http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1494/another-step-towards-the-abyss
It wasn’t so weak as to prevent proof beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of his peers that he helped select and the victims are the voters and the election system itself: you can’t just handwave away hiding the use of campaign funds to pay hush money to mutliple mistresses. If you wanna say cheating in an election is a politically-motivated prosecution, then you’re conceding every election to whoever cheats the best– not to who the voters might actually want to vote for.
Here’s the take of the guy who runs Lawfare:
“One of the striking things about this case, having taken the time to watch the whole thing, is just how wrong a lot of the criticism that Bragg received for it since he brought it more than a year ago has turned out to be.
We were told by a great many pundits that the case was weak. This was false. The evidence was voluminous. It was powerfully corroborative. It was diverse. The case was quite strong.
We were also told by pundits that the case was trivial—merely about marital infidelity, passed over by federal prosecutors, old and stale and, critically and unforgivably, not about Jan. 6 and thus irrelevant to Trump’s greatest crimes against democracy.
Triviality is a matter of opinion, of course. But I confess that as I watched it, I did not find the case trivial. I found it nauseating, a grouping of some of the least attractive and sleaziest human beings I have ever imagined in proximity to the levers of power. And critically, these were people actively and consciously engaged in an effort to corrupt an election. I came away from the trial thinking it was actually important that Trump had to answer for this conduct, whether he was convicted of it or not.”
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/thoughts-on-donald-trump-s-conviction
It’s very disappointing that FAIR would discuss Trump & GOP reactions to the Trump verdict with Democratic communication megaphone, PAC, lawfare tool & smear agent, Media Matters. This only reduces your own credibility, besides getting it wrong.