GOP Senators to Judge Merchan: Don’t Sentence Trump to Prison

 

AfterMath - Home (terrellaftermath.com)

Will Judge Merchan sentence Trump to prison? (thehill.com)   "In attempting to predict the sentence Judge Juan Merchan will impose on Donald Trump, we are certain of one conclusion: If the past is prologue, the sentence will not be motivated by fairness or justice; it will be the harshest sentence Merchan can impose without risking reversal or the possibility that it will help Trump’s electoral prospects.

"Such a vindictive sentence could take many forms, excluding actual prison time. Sentencing Trump, a first-time offender, to a prison term for a minor bookkeeping crime would virtually assure a reversal and an outcry from independent voters. 

"But one possibility would be for the judge to impose a significant prison sentence — say two years — and then suspend it. A suspended sentence would send the message that the judge regarded the crime as serious and warranting imprisonment, but, because of the special circumstances of the case, making a presidential candidate actually serve time would be inappropriate.

"A harsher alternative would be to impose a prison sentence and merely delay its imposition until after the election. Since this is a state and not a federal case, even if Trump were to be elected, he could not pardon himself or commute the sentence; only New York State authorities could bring about that result.

"The third option would be to impose a steep fine and a probationary sentence that allowed Trump to remain free with certain conditions. The legality of such a sentence would depend on the conditions and their impact on the campaign." . . .

Merchan Will Jail Trump Unless SCOTUS Intervenes - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics   "If he thinks it will stop Trump from winning the election, prison seems likely".  Sadly, the rest of this post is behind a pay wall. TD

GOP senators warn judge against sentencing Trump to prison (msn.com)  "Senate Republicans are warning New York judge Juan Merchan not to sentence former President Donald Trump to prison or house arrest or take any other action that could disrupt the likely GOP nominee’s ability to campaign ahead of the November election.

"It could take months for Trump to appeal his conviction on 34 felony counts related to the falsification of business documents and legal experts don’t expect the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to help him.

"That means that Trump’s fate rests largely with Merchan, who could choose punishments ranging from prison and house arrest to probation and community service.

"Merchan, who earned favorable reviews from legal experts for his careful handling of the case, will sentence Trump on July 11, a few days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

"Republican senators acknowledge that legal experts say it would be highly unusual for Trump to receive a prison sentence for a class E felony and that he would most likely be allowed to remain free pending his appeal to higher state courts.

"But they’re nervous about what may happen because Merchan wields a lot of discretion over the terms of the sentence and they felt he tilted the trial against Trump’s team.

"Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it would be a “further abuse of power” to incarcerate Trump or sentence him to home confinement." . . .

Think of the glee from MSNBC, late-night shows (I'll not call them "comedians), and The View over the thought of Donald Trump in an orange jump suit, picking up trash along roadways!

Taking the hush money trial to the Supreme Court - American Thinker   "There is a growing call, largely led by conservative broadcaster Mark Levin, to appeal the so-called “Trump hush money trial” directly and immediately to the Supreme Court.  Normally, attorneys would follow the prolonged appeals process to the next highest court and on up the ladder.  Such appeals usually aim to reverse a verdict.  But in this case, the verdict is not the problem.  The problem is the trial itself — specifically, the un-constitutionality of the trial." . . .

The myth that Biden had nothing to do with the prosecutions of Trump

 Victor Davis Hanson (jewishworldreview.com)   

"So, it is past time for the media and Democrats to drop this ridiculous ruse of Biden's White House "neutrality." Instead, they should admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them." 

"The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

"But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice's federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump.

"Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a "convicted felon" by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

"Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden "has grumbled to aides and advisers that had (Attorney General Merrick) Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump's election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…"

"If there was any doubt about the Biden administration's effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it — even as it blamed Trump for Biden's anger at Garland: "That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team."

"Note in passing how a presidential candidate's legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent's federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as "deliberate resistance."

"Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden's anger at the pace of his DOJ's prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?

"Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.

"And why would Biden's own Attorney General, Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith? Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had previously gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia governor Bob MacDonald." . . .

Subverting democracy and the fate of the Jews

  Jonathan Tobin (jewishworldreview.com)

"Any discussion of which side is worse in this debate can be attributed to the type of "whataboutism" that involves justifying things that shouldn't be justified. But suffice it to say that when he took office in 2017, he rejected the idea of having his administration pursue criminal charges against his opponents, in particular, his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton."

"The last eight months have shaken the faith of many American Jews in the future of their community. The surge in antisemitism, especially on college campuses, has shattered any illusions we might have had about ensuring that Jew-hatred would be confined to the fever swamps of the far right and left in U.S. society. But as grievous as that threat to their safety may be — and the gravity of that peril cannot be overestimated — the Jewish community should also be pondering just how secure they can be in an America whose democratic norms and the rule of law can no longer be relied upon.

"The prosecution and now the conviction of former President Donald Trump in a New York City courtroom on dubious charges and via a judicial process that is, at best, questionable, forces us to ask that question.

Breaking norms and precedents

"To broach this topic and consider the consequences of a partisan prosecution of both a former president and the choice of the Republican Party for the 2024 election, one needn't be an admirer of Trump or even be planning to vote for him in November. Trump is a singular figure in American political history and has broken all sorts of precedents with his behavior and speech — before, during and after his presidency. But at this point, the same can be said of his opponents, who seem to believe that his allegedly unique awfulness not merely permits but obligates them to break rules and precedents in their efforts to stop him from governing while he was president, to prevent his re-election, and now, to thwart him from gaining a second term in 2024." . . .

Day 4 of Hunter Biden's Gun Trial

 "When discussing a drug dealer she dealt with in Hunter's absence, the prosecutor asked, "What kind?" She said, "Samoan." He meant what kind of drugs."

LIVE: Day 4 of Hunter Biden's Gun Trial (townhall.com)  "Wednesday was a very bad day for the Bidens.

"On Day 3 of the first son's federal gun trial, two of Hunter Biden's exes testified against him while his wife watched from the gallery, and his 73-year-old stepmother, first lady Jill Biden, saw his nudes flash across the projector screen, enlarged as trial exhibits. Thankfully, the family jewels were censored and cropped, sparing the jury.

"Many in the media mistakenly thought the ex-stripper set to testify Wednesday, identified only as Witness #2 in the trial brief, was Lunden Roberts, Hunter's baby mama with whom he fathered his 5-year-old love child, Navy Joans. Little Navy, the seventh grandchild of President Joe Biden, has been repeatedly snubbed by both her deadbeat dad and the greater Biden family.

"No, it wasn't that ex-stripper Hunter hooked up with. Hunter's other ex, Zoe Kestan, an online "cam girl" whose social media handle is "weed_slut_420," took the stand. As lovers, Kestan and Hunter starred in an amateur porn film made on his MacBook, according to former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler's non-profit, Marco Polo." . . .

The FBI just admitted in court that Hunter Biden's laptop is real.

 "Don't forget then senior campaign adviser, Antony Blinken, orchestrated the letter signed by 50 current and former intelligence officials to discredit the laptop as Russian disinformation. His election inference was richly rewarded with the Sec of State post." Charlie Kirk

The FBI just admitted in court that Hunter Biden's laptop is real.

"Here are 20 minutes of Joe Biden, U.S. intelligence officials, and the American media claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation."

"The FBI has had possession of Hunter's laptop since December 2019.

"Leading up to the 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook censored the Biden laptop story because the FBI warned them of a potential hack-and-leak operation targeting Hunter Biden.

"The FBI knew that Hunter's laptop was real the entire time.

"In October 2022, @MarcoPolo501c published a 640-page Report on the Biden Laptop that meticulously documents 459 crimes involving the Biden family and their associates.

"The report provides evidence of Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations, money laundering, and tax fraud found on Hunter's laptop.

"It also exposes how federal law enforcement agencies, influenced by politics, protect the Biden family from prosecution while targeting President Biden's primary election opponent, Donald Trump.

"Shame on all of these people for lying to the American people, rigging our elections, and destroying the integrity of our nation."

If You Could Only Watch One Video About Islam, PLEASE Let It Be This One

If You Could Only Watch One Video About Islam, PLEASE Let It Be This One... (EPIC Speech)

FINISH HIM: Byron Donalds Claps Back HARD on Hakeem Jeffries Over Jim Crow Comments

  Twitchy   "The Democrats are desperate about Joe Biden's numbers with black voters and it is REALLY starting to show. Biden can't afford to lose even a few percentage points from that demographic and win re-election. Right now, he seems to be losing WAY more than a few percentage points. 

"We won't go into all of the reasons why. You know them all. From the horrible economy to the erasure of women in favor of the gender cult, it is easy to see why black voters would be leaving Biden in droves. 

"But it is pretty hilarious to watch them try to grasp at straws to trick those voters into coming back. 

"This is where Byron Donalds and Hakeem Jeffries come in. This week, Donalds -- who may be on Trump's short list for vice president -- was campaigning for Trump at a fundraiser in Philadelphia. There, he made many observations about black families and the media latched on to one of them. 

.@RepJeffries you need to check your sources and stop lying to the American people because you and @JoeBiden are losing Black men.
I didn't say that.

This is what I said 👇🏿 https://t.co/ZE6Qaqoadz pic.twitter.com/GoPh5HnsJM

— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) June 5, 2024

. . ." The whole article from The Hill is pretty biased, as you would expect, but we do give reporter Lauren Irwin credit for providing Donalds' full quote for context: 

During the conversation, the first-term lawmaker said he is starting to see the 'reinvigoration' of Black families, adding that it is 'helping to breathe the revival of a Black middle class in America.' Donalds also claimed that the nuclear family — or one with a mother, father and children living under the same roof — and its values have been eroded by Democrats and lost among Black voters after they supported the party following the Civil Rights Movement, the outlet reported.

'You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more people voted conservatively,' Donalds said.  . . .

D-Day honored.

 

Roosevelt's prayer for our troops. Images from a number of films including "Saving Private Ryan", "Band of Brothers", "The Pacific" "Masters of the Air" and others.

Eighty Years On: June 6, 1944: D-Day-FDR Prayer – The American Catholic (the-american-catholic.com)

"Eighty years since D-Day.  The youngest soldier storming ashore that day would be 98 today.  Only slightly more than 100,000 of the gallant souls who made up the sixteen million Americans who served in uniform in the Great Crusade, in Ike’s phrase, are still with us.  Time is doing what the forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan could not do.  All too soon World War II will slip from living memory.  Very sad and very inevitable.  This fact makes it incumbent upon us to remember what they did, especially the silent victors who never came home from that War.

"They have been called the greatest generation.  I am sure that most of them would reject that title, maybe putting in a vote for the generation that won the American Revolution or the generation that fought the Civil War.  Modesty has been a hallmark of their generation." . . .

'You Can Pretty It Up All You Want To...': John Kennedy Torches Bipartisan Border Bill

 YouTube

In Portland, the Intifada Begins in Kindergarten

 Lucianne.com News Forum

"Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants.

"I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of the state teachers’ union that encourages its more than 4,500 members to “Teach Palestine!” (The union did not respond to a request for comment.)

"The lesson plans are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

"Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel." . . .

What those who accept the ‘stolen land’ myth don’t understand - JNS.org  "Woke culture demands ritual acknowledgements about Native Americans. Those, however, who think this should also apply to Palestinians don’t understand that Jews are indigenous in Israel." . . .

The Destructive Generation—Proving America’s Weakest Link ; Victor Davis Hanson

 American Greatness  A single generation has broken apart the great chain of American civilizational continuance.

Worse, the more elite the campuses, the more they became hotbeds of unapologetic anti-Semitism, gratuitous violence, and hatred for the country’s very institutions that guarantee their own freedom of action and speech. Who taught them and allowed them to think that as they illegally occupied buildings, defaced and defiled monuments, and shouted Jew hatred, they were absurdly entitled to free food deliveries and amnesties? 

Johannah King-Slutzky, a PhD student at the university, said: 'Like, could
people please have a glass of water?' 

"Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

"Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it.

"Such is the noxious epitaph of the Baby Boomer generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited.

"In contrast to them, eighty years ago this week, the Allied powers of World War II—chiefly the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—landed on five Normandy beaches to begin what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied expeditionary forces, would call the great “crusade” to liberate Western Europe from four years of brutal Nazi occupation.

"The plan was to land within a few hours and in stormy weather well over 150,000 Americans, British, and Canadians on the Atlantic Coast beaches of France, where they were to charge directly into the fire of tens of thousands of enemy troops. They were to charge uphill in the sand while being fired upon by entrenched German troops occupying the hills above. From there, the beachhead was to serve as the launching pad for two million more troops, who were to somehow drive eastward through France and into Germany to end the war and the devastation the Third Reich had inflicted on the world.

"All that was accomplished in the ensuing 11 months. That can-do American generation assumed that impoverished teenagers emerging from the Great Depression, with equipment often inferior to their seasoned German enemies, would, over the ensuing months, surely prove able to route Waffen SS veterans. Many of them were hastily transferred from the murderous Eastern Front, such as the nihilist 2nd SS Panzer Division das Reich (“The Empire”). No matter, the Americans did the impossible in less than a year—from the Normandy beaches to well across the Rhine River." . . .

. . ."All that was now characteristic of a generation that learned in the 1960s that if it did not get its way, it would wreck what it could not control. So, it was logical that it sought to pack the court, to end the filibuster, to destroy the Electoral College—and to corrupt the law to achieve political ends. Or as the Sixties generation taught us, “by any means necessary”—an arrogant affirmation of Machiavelli’s dictum that “the ends justify the means.” . . .

2 of Hunter Biden’s exes describe his years of drug abuse

 2 of Hunter Biden’s exes describe his years of drug abuse (yahoo.com)

. . ."The next witness was Zoe Kestan, a former romantic partner of Biden. She testified that she met him on Dec. 17, 2017, when she worked at a strip club in midtown Manhattan and he booked her and another woman for a private dance. Biden played the music by the indie folk band Fleet Foxes on his phone — and he smoked something she assumed was crack.

"I felt really safe around him,” she said.

"She saw him again a week later, and they stayed together for five days at the Soho Grand hotel. He typically smoked crack every 20 minutes, she testified, and he was “just so charming and so nice. At the time, I felt myself having feelings for him.”

"They remained involved over the following months, and traveled to California in the spring of 2018. He continued using crack frequently, Kestan said.

"During her testimony, prosecutors showed photos from her phone that included crack pipes. One photo showed Biden in a bathtub holding a crack pipe." . . .

. . ."Cleveland said he saw Biden fill out the entire part of the form he was required to fill, including when he checked a box answering “no” to the question about drug use or addiction. He said Biden offered his passport as the requisite identification, and that he took it to the back of the store and showed it to the shop’s owner and another salesman, since it was his first time using a passport as a buyer’s identification. The other salesperson told Cleveland that they needed identification with Biden’s address, like a vehicle registration. That salesperson, Jason Turner, then handled Biden’s background check and filled out the part of the form that the gun store is required to handle. Turner used red ink for portions of the form, Cleveland said." . . .