The Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling Monday to keep former President Donald Trump on the 2024 primary ballot in Colorado – and which also ends similar efforts to remove him from ballots in Maine, Illinois, and other states – is widely seen as an enormous win not only for Trump but for the rule of law in America. But there’s more to it than meets the eye.
The fact that the decision was unanimous, which rarely happens, shows America’s voting population that even the high court’s liberal-left justices found the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to be both obviously unlawful and transparently politically motivated. That perception will undoubtedly color public perception of the rest of the legal attacks against Trump.
In fact, Monday’s legal and political victory was just the latest of many in the past week for Trump in the Democrats’ lawfare campaign against him.
Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed Trump another big win. It agreed to consider his claim of immunity from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. The justices will hear arguments in the case the week of April 22 and a decision will come sometime in June. Although it is widely expected that the court will reject Trump’s immunity claim, the Wall Street Journal’s Alex Leary noted that the delay “could buy him valuable time, and fits with an overall delay-tactic strategy in the other cases he faces.” In other words, it dashes special counsel Jack Smith’s hopes for a speedy trial before November’s election.
Meanwhile, Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee and the presiding judge in the government’s case against Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, delivered another blow to the special counsel. That trial, already postponed from its original start date of May 20, will now be delayed even further. Politico reported that “[o]n Thursday evening, Smith urged her to set a new trial date of July 8, while Trump’s lawyers renewed their longstanding position that the trial should not occur until after the election.”
Then on Friday, Cannon told the court “[a] lot of work needs to be done in the pretrial phase of this case.” She also suggested that Smith’s timeline was “unrealistic.”
Perhaps the best news for Trump last week came from Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s prosecution of Trump and 18 co-defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act looks like it’s about to implode. Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has presided over two weeks of hearings regarding whether Willis and her ex-lover Nathan Wade should be disqualified from handling the case.
Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former divorce attorney, law partner and friend took the stand last Tuesday to answer questions about when the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade started. Willis and Wade have each claimed in sworn statements and on the witness stand that their romantic relationship began after Willis hired Wade as a special prosecutor in November 2021. But in a lengthy series of text-message exchanges from September through January with Georgia attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who is representing former Trump campaign official Michael Roman, one of 19 co-defendants in the RICO case, Bradley said the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade began long ago – shortly after they met in 2019.
Yet despite his earlier cooperation with Merchant, Bradley testified that he had no personal knowledge about the relationship between Willis and Wade. When directly asked why he told Merchant in a text message that the relationship had begun before Willis hired Wade, Bradley said, “I was speculating, and I never witnessed anything. It was speculation.”
Bradley also told the court he had not spoken to Wade in two years. Unfortunately for him, a waiter who claimed to have served Bradley, Wade and Wade’s attorney in an Atlanta restaurant just five weeks ago was watching Bradley’s testimony on television. He contacted Merchant, who recorded the call. Podcaster Megyn Kelly played the recording on her Friday show. If the waiter’s information turns out to be true, then Bradley perjured himself – possibly for the second time.
Closing arguments were heard in the case on Friday afternoon and Merchant’s team did a very persuasive job. As NBC legal analyst and former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Catherine Christian told NBC News: “I just have to say, the state is going to have to bring it on. … I thought Mr. McDougald’s ending was, in many ways, one of the best as he outlined, as he said the six ways that the DA’s office and particularly DA Willis had conflicts of interest: financial, political ambition, concede and concealment, her church speech, her protective order that she’s submitted in her [Wade’s divorce case] – that’s another thing, her boyfriend. How many times has Mr. Wade been referred to as ‘the boyfriend’ as he’s sitting there in the courtroom? And it’s driving me nuts that he’s sitting there.”
Judge McAfee told the court he would decide the case within two weeks. Although he remained very neutral throughout the proceedings, and therefore difficult to read, it appears unlikely to most observers that Willis and Wade can remain on this case. And bad news for Willis and Wade would be great news for Trump.
It turns out that weaponizing the legal system against a political opponent is harder than it looks. Democrats are losing control of trial schedules, and now they can’t even be sure which Georgia district attorney’s office will prosecute their case – or even if it goes to trial. The reality for Democrats is that their lawfare campaign against Donald Trump isn’t working out quite the way they had planned.
District attorneys and prosecutors have love affairs and even perjure themselves, trials get delayed … and evidently there are still a few judges left who believe no one should be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” not even a defendant as reviled by powerful Democrats as President Donald Trump.
via wnd
