Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Party Of Lawn Order

“Let me ask MTG before I tell you what I think.” Party of Law 'n' Order! Waaaahhh!!!! 😭 (Tl;dr: the whole trial was part of a Democratic conspiracy!) No, it’s related.

“Judge Kaplan Officiated The Wedding Of Ms. Carroll’s Attorney, Ms. Crowley”

A quote from the statement above. I don’t think that’s going to be part of the record on appeal. Unless it’s a joke appeal. I also think the question of who paid for the case is irrelevant, and excluding that at trial was not reversible error. Could Trump be forced to reveal the donors who paid into his legal defense funds? Would that matter?

That’s also the closest that statement comes to making even a colorable argument on appeal. It doesn’t address the fact that Trump didn’t put on any evidence in defense; it only argues the jury should have seen things his way. Most losing parties feel that way.
Well, when you’re the victim of such a vast and complex conspiracy…(it’s gonna take a whole lotta effort to maintain that one).

Not satisfied with a lengthy and pointless statement, Trump had to post 3 videos, apparently inspired by the news Tucker Carlson is taking his show to Twitter.
This was a very unfair trial," Trump said in the first video. "That's all you have to say. This was a very unfair trial." 
"I have absolutely no idea who this woman is," Trump continued in a second video. "The verdict is a disgrace and continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time. Absolutely a shame!" 
In the much longer third video, Trump directed his rage directly at Judge Kaplan. "What else can you expect from a Trump-hating, Clinton-appointed judge who went out of his way to make sure that the result of this trial was as negative as it could possibly be," said Trump. "Speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area, which is probably the worst place in the United States for me to get a fair trial." (Actually, at least one of the jurors was an avid consumer of right-wing media.) 
“We'll be appealing this decision," Trump continued. "It's a disgrace. I don't even know who this woman is. I have no idea who she is, where she came from. This is another scam, it's a political witch hunt. And somehow we're going to have to fight this stuff. We cannot let our country go into this abyss. This is disgraceful. You have somebody running for office, you have a woman that's financed and lied about it, she totally lied about it, by Democrat operatives like just about the biggest one there is, and she said that wasn't true! They found that she lied about it, and the judge wasn't even, I guess, letting it be put in as evidence! The whole thing is a scam, and it's a shame, and it's a disgrace to our country."
Again: he had the opportunity to say this at trial. He didn’t, so the jury couldn’t consider it. (I’m wondering now if he even said it during his deposition. I can’t believe Carroll’s lawyer didn’t establish that Trump knew who she was. You can’t afford to be blindsided by that argument in court if you took his deposition.) The bottom line is: Trump didn’t put on any evidence. He can’t complain now that the jury didn’t consider evidence he didn’t even try to present.

And yes, that’s going to make it very hard to show the court committed reversible error. The judge didn’t block Trump from putting on evidence (except about who paid Ms. Carroll’s legal fees). It’s going to be hard to argue the trial would have gone differently when Trump didn’t give the jury an alternative. Trump’s major argument is that the jury didn’t see things his way. That’s not grounds for appeal at all. That’s what makes jury trials.
Other things that are not grounds for an appeal. As Tacopina said to the judge in court, “You know what I’m dealing with here.”
The jury is a joke. The whole case is a joke," Rubio said according to The Washington Post's Aaron Blake. 
"Rubio," Igor Bobic of The Huffington Post noted, also "dismissed Trump being found liable of defamation: 'If someone accuses me of raping them and I didn't do it, and you're innocent, of course you're going to say something about it…it was a joke."
Graham and Rubio have pretty much discarded themselves by discarding one of the bedrocks of our democracy and our legal system: trial by a jury of our peers.

I’m almost going to enjoy watching the GOP defend this guy as fit for public office office, especially as the trials pile up. One down, up to five to go. I don’t see Trump’s appeal getting stronger; or broader.

And then there’s the case of George Santos:
Yeah, the GOP has a deep bench all the way down.
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