Deranged Dems only boost Don
THE “Get Trump” Democrats are beside themselves with glee about the former president being stuck in a Manhattan courtroom for the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial while the current president hits the campaign trail.
They have taken to calling Donald Trump “Hitler Pig” in emails and text messages among White House staff, campaign aides and other Democrats close to the administration, reported Politico Wednesday.
So much for Joe Biden bringing civility back to politics. That’s as believable as his other tall tales, that he stopped inflation and never spoke to his son about overseas business dealings.
Behind closed doors, the president reportedly calls Trump a “sick f--k” and a “f--cking a--hole.”
It must infuriate Biden that all the lawfare that his DOJ and other Democratic prosecutors have flung at Trump has succeeded so far only in turning public sympathy toward the former president and given him a constant media presence.
Trump seems to have a knack for turning legal lemons into polling lemonade.
Of all the cases to go to trial first, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s hush-money case is the feeblest and most embarrassing — for Trump’s Democratic persecutors, as well as for Trump himself as it involves allegations, which he denies, that he had an adulterous affair with a porn star and then had his then-lawyer Michael Cohen pay her off before the 2016 election to stop her spilling the beans.
Bragg has been doing his best to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by trying to recast the case as being about election interference, in which Trump sought to keep voters in the dark about damaging information — the Daniels payoff — that could have cost him victory in 2016.
“The case — the core of it — is not money for sex,” Bragg said in a radio interview last year. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”
Bragg has declared he was compelled to bring the case because he “cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.” That’s a joke, because normalizing criminal conduct is all that Bragg has done since his first day in office, to the great detriment of the residents of this city. In his infamous “day one” memo made public in January 2022, he directed his office to downgrade felony charges for armed robbery and drug dealing.
Giving thugs a pass
Instead of getting tough on thugs randomly punching women in the face, Bragg is cracking down on “irregular bookkeeping.”
Here he is, while violent criminals roam the streets, seeking 34 felony counts in a case against Trump that is really about a misdemeanor allegation of falsifying business records to conceal the hush-money payments. According to Bragg, Trump should have told his accountants to list the $130,000 payment to Daniels as “hush money” rather than legal fees, which you would think rather defeats the purpose of paying hush money in the first place.
Bragg has creatively transformed this bookkeeping misdemeanor into a felony by alleging the falsification was done to conceal campaign-finance violations.
His star witness is Cohen, a convicted felon, perjurer and disbarred lawyer with a pathological hatred of his former boss and a Rolodex stuffed with the most Trump-deranged media figures in the country, such as Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow and George Stephanopoulos.
A curious element of the case is that lawyer Bob Costello, who was briefly Cohen’s legal adviser after the Trump fixer was raided by the FBI in 2018, has not been asked to testify on Trump’s behalf as a character witness against Cohen. Costello was a dynamite witness for Trump in his testimony to the grand jury.
When Costello first met Cohen at The Regency hotel, Cohen was distraught and suicidal, and said repeatedly, “I will never spend a day in jail” and “I don’t care what the f--k I have to do,” according to a file note Costello wrote afterward memorializing the meeting.
Cohen kept asking what his “escape hatch” was, and Costello, a former Manhattan senior federal prosecutor, told him information incriminating Trump would be his “get out of jail free” card. And yet Cohen insisted to his lawyers that he didn’t have anything on Trump to trade.
Now Cohen has changed his tune again, and on his word rests Bragg’s entire flimsy case.
Costello is perplexed about why he hasn’t been asked to testify by Trump’s defense team.
The omission has led people close to Trump to question the motives of the praetorian guard of advisers insulating the former president, with suspicions that someone in his inner sanctum may have been compromised by DOJ special counsel Jack Smith.
Finger-pointing
Fingers have pointed to Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, said to be an “unindicted co-conspirator” in Smith’s filings and described as a “control freak” who has alienated other Trump lawyers, such as David Schoen and Tim Parlatore.
When Parlatore quit the classified-documents case, he blamed Epshteyn for “doing everything he could to try to . . . prevent us from doing what we could to defend the president.”
Whatever is going on, Costello is Trump’s trump card and it is inexplicable that he would be left out of the case.
In the end, as with the rest of the lawfare against Trump, this trial serves as a smokescreen to cover the corruption revelations about the Bidens that have come from the House impeachment committees.
Biden let the cat out of the bag when asked about the probes of Trump the day after the 2022 midterms when he said his goal was to make sure Trump doesn’t take power.
“We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power if he does run, making sure he — under legitimate efforts of our Constitution — does not become the next president again.”
The next month, Biden’s No. 3 political appointee at the DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, was sent to Bragg’s office to run the Trump case.
Bragg is a cog in the Democratic attack machine. That’s the real election interference.