Donald Trump, as you have certainly heard by now, has been convicted.
The verdict is in. Guilty — guilty on all 34 felony counts of running for re-election.
That, after all, is the actual crime that Trump committed. It’s the one and only reason that this case was ever brought. They prosecuted him for trying to be president again. That’s the actual reality. That’s the real crime — which isn’t a crime. But, you might still be wondering, on paper, what crime was Trump just convicted of? Somehow, a day after the guilty verdict was read, the actual crime he was guilty of is still very hard to say.
One possible theory is that the government of New York really doesn’t like it when people overpay their taxes. They’re the first government in the history of the universe that actively punishes its citizens for handing over too much cash. It drives Alvin Bragg absolutely crazy whenever this happens. If New Yorkers pay the government too much cash in April, then the full weight of New York’s criminal justice system will come crashing down on them. A jury will convict them in a day, and they’ll face several years in prison. This is how desperately New York doesn’t want money from its citizens.
That’s what you have to believe if, for some reason, you’re still pretending that there was any legitimacy to the show trial of Donald Trump that concluded yesterday in Manhattan. I’ve been thinking of the best way to illustrate just how unprecedented and disgraceful the trial was. There’s so many possibilities to choose from. But I keep coming back to this one point, because no one else is really talking about it. And it puts this whole debacle into perspective.
As I outlined last week, in order to convict Donald Trump, it wasn’t enough to show that he had supposedly falsified a business record. The government also had to show that Trump had falsified those records in furtherance of some other crime. But what was that other crime? When I covered the trial last week, I had no idea because the prosecution hadn’t suggested anything. We had made it all the way to closing arguments, and still the prosecution had never explained what the crime was that the defendant had supposedly committed.
But during those closing arguments this week, a prosecutor named Joshua Steinglass finally offered a theory. He said that Donald Trump had falsified the business records in order to violate a different New York state law that prohibits the use of “unlawful means” to promote any candidate for office. But that still leaves a key question unanswered: What were those “unlawful means” that Trump engaged in? You keep peeling the onion back to find what the hell crime Trump is supposed to have committed, and you continue to come up empty.
So Steinglass didn’t say, definitely, what the unlawful means were. But he did mention a few possibilities. One of these possibilities was that Trump had violated New York tax law. Now, when you hear that, you might think they’re alleging that Trump is engaging in tax evasion. But they’re actually alleging the opposite. They’re accusing Trump of not evading taxes.
Specifically, Steinglass argued that Trump’s 1099 form was inaccurate because the payment to Michael Cohen was actually a reimbursement, not compensation (as the Trump Organization had reported it). But if that were the case, then the government — under its own theory of how Trump’s team should have filed the paperwork — would be getting less money out of the deal because they’re not owed income tax on reimbursements. They’re only owed income tax on compensation.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
I went through the transcripts and found the quote from the prosecutor, because when I heard about it I couldn’t believe it was real. But it is. Here’s what he told the jury:
It’s true that the result of this improper accounting is that the taxes would have to be paid that weren’t owed. You don’t have to pay taxes on a reimbursement. … So the result of reporting them as income is more taxes are getting paid than are owed. But, as the Judge will tell you, it’s a crime to prepare false tax documents, regardless, even when doing so does not result in the underpayment of taxes.
Here’s that last line once again:
It’s a crime to prepare false tax documents, regardless, even when doing so does not result in the underpayment of taxes.
Translation: It’s very possible that the jury just convicted Donald Trump for falsifying business records in order to cover up the fact that he overpaid on his taxes. That’s one of three possible “grand conspiracies” that were alleged here: a dastardly scheme to funnel too much money to the government. This is the villainous behavior that we’re supposed to believe is a threat to democracy. That’s what justifies potentially imprisoning the man who is leading every major poll to become the next president of the United States. That’s what supposedly necessitated doing something that has never been done before in American history, by charging a former president with a crime.
Just for good measure, if the jury didn’t buy that theory, the government and the judge gave them a whole menu of other options they could choose from. One of them related to covering up violations of campaign finance law, while the other was covering up violations of business records laws.
In other words, as Tablet magazine put it, the jury could have found that:
Trump falsified business records to conspire to steal the election by falsifying business records.
Which circular, incoherent conspiracy did the jury buy? Who knows. The judge didn’t require them to make that decision unanimously. Each juror could have picked a different crime to convict Trump of committing. We may never know.
To restate: The upshot is that a former president — and the leading presidential candidate — was just convicted of 34 felony charges by a jury of his political opponents during an election year based on a novel legal theory where the underlying alleged crime was never clearly explained and might not even make sense. And on top of that, the jury didn’t even have to reach a unanimous conclusion about it. 12 members of the jury are walking out of this trial with, potentially, 12 different and opposing ideas about what crime they just convicted a former president of committing.
All that’s to say, there aren’t enough words in the English language to describe what a travesty of justice this case was. Trials like this are what define the third world. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” as the saying goes. With this trial, Alvin Bragg — who ran for office on the platform of going after Donald Trump — managed to come up with a Frankenstein fake crime for the sole purpose of fulfilling that campaign promise. And it wasn’t just a promise to New Yorkers that Bragg fulfilled. It was a promise to Washington.
If you don’t believe that Biden’s DOJ had anything to do with this case, I’d refer you to the video of Alvin Bragg gloating at a press conference yesterday, after the verdict was announced. Watch:
The man to Alvin Bragg’s right in that video is named Matthew Colangelo. He happens to be a former high-ranking Biden DOJ official who left that job in December of 2022 to work as a senior counsel with Alvin Bragg in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. In fact, he was the number-three guy in the DOJ, before he took a massive demotion to work in a much smaller local prosecutor’s office.
Why would he do that? Is he just really passionate about impartially enforcing bookkeeping laws in Manhattan? The New York Post did some digging on Colangelo, and that doesn’t seem likely. It looks a lot more like Colangelo took the assignment to serve as the Democratic Party’s hatchetman to take out Trump. As the Post states: from the Post: “The DNC paid Matthew Colangelo $12,000 in January 2018 for ‘political consulting,’ Federal Election Commission filings show.” He was also an Obama donor. This is the man who went right from Joe Biden’s DOJ to Alvin Bragg’s office — right around the time that Bragg was reportedly waffling about bringing charges against Trump.
You could choose to believe this is all a coincidence. Maybe, you’d think, Matthew Colangelo would treat a Democrat in exactly the same way as he just treated Trump. If a Democrat supposedly falsified some business records, then Colangelo would be hot on their heels. But that doesn’t appear to be likely, either.
In 2022, while Colangelo was still at the DOJ, the Clinton campaign and the DNC struck a deal with the F.E.C., after the F.E.C. alleged that they had falsified campaign records. As the AP states:
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee have agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated campaign finance law by misreporting spending on research that eventually became the infamous Steele dossier. …The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, which then hired Fusion GPS, a research and intelligence firm, to conduct opposition research on Republican candidate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. But on FEC forms, the Clinton campaign classified the spending as legal services.
Well, that sounds a lot like what Donald Trump was accused of doing. Actually, it sounds much worse. The Clinton campaign allegedly falsified records to hide their involvement in spreading the Russiagate lie. That was the lie that dominated the political landscape for, what, six years? It led to thousands of fake articles and investigations and ruined the lives of several people who worked on the Trump campaign. But no member of the Clinton campaign was ever hauled before a jury for falsifying records or for doing anything else. Matthew Colangelo never even dreamed of prosecuting them — and of course, neither did Alvin Bragg. The Clinton campaign and the DNC just paid a fine and the matter was resolved. There was never any criminal prosecution, much less talk of prison time.
But in Trump’s case, the media is now doing everything it can to convince Americans that, according to established legal precedent, Donald Trump must go to prison for this fake crime. That appears to be the next step here.
CNN trotted out several panelists yesterday to make that case:
These panelists want you to believe that Trump is getting special treatment in New York if he doesn’t go to prison. This is a city where you don’t even go to prison if you pummel old ladies in the street. This is a city that is profoundly reluctant to send anyone to prison for anything, even and especially for actual violent crimes committed against innocent people. But this business records case is on a whole other level, they say. Trump didn’t show remorse for this fake crime, so he needs to go to prison. That’s the logic, as Soviet as it is. We’re supposed to believe that’s the normal outcome in a case like this.
But it’s not. If you look up recent prosecutions in New York for falsifying business records, you’ll find that virtually all of them involve allegations of tax fraud or workers’ compensation fraud where the defendant made money. For example, there was New York v. James Garner, a case from November 2021, in which a, “Mental health therapy aide was indicted for allegedly defrauding over $35,000 in workers’ compensation benefits.”
There was also the case of New York v. Josue Aguilar Dubon (from October 2022), in which, “A Bronx business owner was indicted for failing to report over $1 million in income, avoiding paying $60,000 in taxes.” On their website, the outlet “Just Security” has tallied many other examples like this. Again, the point is that these people allegedly lied to obtain more money.
In his case, as I said, Trump overpaid his taxes, if anything. So his prosecution is highly unusual for that reason alone. And that’s not the only strange aspect of the case. It’s also more than a little odd that the same judge who handled this hush money trial is also handling the criminal case against Steve Bannon and the criminal case against the Trump Organization. And this judge just so happens to be a Joe Biden donor. Is this normal? The CNN panelists wouldn’t say, but we all know the answer.
They gave every Trump-related case to one single judge, and it just so happens to be a judge who donates to Trump’s political opponent. They aren’t even trying to hide what they’re doing. This is the kind of political corruption you might read about in the Gulag Archipelago. And up until now, you’d read those stories and think naively to yourself, “Wow, well thank God nothing that absurdly corrupt could ever happen here.”
With the Trump trial, the Left has trampled every norm that exists in the criminal justice system. They prosecuted the leading presidential candidate in an election year for a seven-year-old fake crime. They assigned a hack judge to the case who essentially guided the jury to a conviction. And they did it all in front of a jury in one of the most partisan places in the country.
A few weeks ago, one prospective juror who disqualified herself from the trial gave an interview in which she explained that, after meeting the other jurors, they didn’t seem completely impartial:
There’s some speculation on social media that this woman might have leaned towards acquitting Trump, but we have no idea. The fact she’s speaking to MSNBC would suggest otherwise. But the key point is her first-hand observation of the jury, which is that they might not be impartial in this case. We all knew that, of course. It was always impossible — quite literally impossible — that Trump would get an impartial jury. Nobody on Earth is impartial to Donald Trump — and if such a unicorn does exist, they certainly don’t live in New York City.
But this illustrates a key difference between the Left and the Right, which is that in general, the Left is committed to winning at all costs. They’re happy to seat biased jurors and judges to get what they want. Meanwhile, conservatives are preoccupied with “norms” that no one else in the country cares about.
Republicans could have arrested and charged Hillary Clinton for any number of crimes, at any point in the past decade. They could’ve pursued that Steele Dossier F.E.C. charge I mentioned earlier, or investigated the Clinton Foundation, or prosecuted Clinton’s retention of classified materials (followed by her lie to the FBI during an interview about those materials). But Republicans didn’t do any of that — on the basis that Democrats might return fire. And so Republicans continue to cherish our “norms” while Democrats blow the norms to smithereens with a thousand sticks of dynamite.
The necessary response is now obvious, although it won’t be pleasant. Donald Trump should immediately create and publish a list of ten high ranking Democrat criminals who he will have arrested when he takes office. First on the list should be Joe Biden. Second should be Joe Biden’s crackhead son.
In the meantime, Republican AGs all over the country should pursue their own indictments. Border states should charge government officials for deliberately contributing to human trafficking at the southern border. If Donald Trump’s “hush money” was illegal because it interfered with an election, then so is importing millions of foreign nationals every year. That’s the biggest form of election interference imaginable. Time to empanel a grand jury right away, in the reddest city in the reddest state on the map. Better issue a gag order on Joe Biden, too, for good measure. Put corrupt Democrats on trial in front of juries that already hate them before the trial even begins. Does that mean we’re “stooping to their level”? No. It means that we must stop pretending that we live in a country that no longer exists.
Will any of this ever come to pass? We’ll see. It’s doubtful. But it’s the only viable option. Right-wing lawfare is what’s necessary to defeat Left-wing lawfare. The entire legal system depends on a series of unstated principles — that prosecutors won’t pursue political cases, that juries will be impartial, and that crimes must be clearly defined. Once one side violates all of these principles, then the principles cease to exist for everyone. It’s mutually assured destruction. But that’s a deterrent that only works if there’s a real possibility it’s enforced. And after what just happened in Manhattan, it’s well past time to introduce the Left to what “mutually assured destruction” might look like.
Frankly, I don’t want to hear elected Republicans complaining about this verdict. I don’t need to see their tweets and statements condemning it. The only thing I want to hear from these people is which Democrats they will have arrested. Don’t tell us that you’re sad about the verdict. We don’t give a damn about your feelings. We want to see corrupt Democrat criminals frog marched on camera in handcuffs. Don’t whine about the double standard. Force the Democrats’ own standards upon them. Drag them there kicking and screaming. If you won’t do that, then just shut up.
