Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-born CNN anchor and outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, made a surprising admission on Sunday about the forty-fifth U.S. President’s ongoing “hush money” trial concerning alleged payments to pornographic “actress” Stormy Daniels to remain quiet about an alleged affair.
During Sunday’s instalment of Zakaria’s eponymous CNN show Fareed Zakaria GPS, the Muslim-born talking head conveyed his skepticism that such charges would be brought against anyone but Trump and expressed his concern that such lawfare could alienate people from the Democratic party and motivate Trump’s supporters.
“The trials against [Trump] keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base — who see him as a martyr and even may serve to make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believe that his prosecutors are politically motivated,”
He further opined, “This happens to be true, in my opinion. I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.”
Zakaria also referenced a CNN poll indicating that 56% of Americans doubt that Trump will receive a fair trial, underscoring the perceived political bias in the prosecution. However, he did not provide detailed reasons for his belief that the charges would not be pressed against anyone but the brash New York real estate tycoon whose upset victory in 2016 jarred the political establishment and progressive media institutions alike.
In his monologue, Zakaria also touched on the current political landscape, suggesting that President Joe Biden’s prospects in the 2024 presidential election seem less promising than previously anticipated.
“There’s no denying that the [Democratic] party seems more openly divided than it has been in decades,” he said. “Only 33% of Americans said they approved of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, which is now opposed both by people who think he’s too soft and people who think he’s too hard on Israel.”
“Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be uniting behind Trump,” Zakaria added.
Zakaria even lambasted President Biden for his handling of the current border crisis, going so far as to admonish his own party to “learn something from Trump” to address the hot-button issue.
“So the whole system is broken,” Zakaria said regarding the current asylum process. “And Biden needs to confront that and say, you know, ‘We are going to have to reform the whole system.’”
The hush money case is being led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat. Trump, aged 77, faces a 34-count criminal indictment alleging he falsified business records to hide payments made to suppress damaging stories about his personal life. This includes payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who testified last week regarding her dealings with Trump and her claims of an affair with him during the mid-2000s.
Prosecutors argue that the falsification was aimed at concealing a graver crime, possibly related to campaign finance violations. Although the statute of limitations for the case technically expired, the Manhattan DA’s office began its investigation in 2018 and has sought legal avenues to extend or bypass the statute limitations.
Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing, pleading not guilty to all 88 criminal counts across four indictments that have been brought against him.
Zakaria, who has been openly critical of Trump and supportive of Biden, acknowledged his personal hopes for Biden’s success in the upcoming presidential election on November 5.
While Zakaria’s frank admission that the hush money charges against former President Trump may be less than impartial might resonate as shocking, Zakaria is not alone in questioning the merits of this particular legal challenge to the Art of the Deal author and unlikely Commander in Chief. Zakaria’s remarks reflect an apparent consensus among the center-left wing punditry that the hush money charges are the most frivolous of the legal challenges levied against Trump. Even as vanishingly few left-wing pundits have questioned the merits of most of Trump’s other legal challenges, the progressive opinion-industrial complex has been surprisingly candid in its skepticism of this particular case. In an opinion column for New York magazine published last year, Democrat journalist Jonathan Chait wrote:
“The legal deficiencies of Alvin Bragg’s indictment have been thoroughly litigated in the media. The case converts what would normally be misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into 34 felony counts by arguing that $130,000 in hush money paid to Stormy Daniels was an illegal campaign expenditure and each record created for it was criminal. To imagine this particular combination of campaign-finance charges and business-records enforcement as simply “the law” is wildly naïve. Prosecutors have some cases that clearly constitute crimes (say, tax fraud), others that clearly do not constitute crimes, and a nebulous middle ground in which judgment is required.”
Chait added: “Yes, the first criminal charge against Trump carries special symbolic importance. Yet we are loading more social and political weight on these charges than they can bear. The world can be a complicated place. Sometimes people with good intentions do bad things, and sometimes bad people are the victims of unfairness. The correct response to Trumpist hypocrisy is to wait for it to manifest rather than abandoning standards of fairness. Since Trump faces a high likelihood of being charged for one or more solid crimes in the very near future, the only price of intellectual consistency is a modest degree of patience.”
The post CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Admits Prosecutors Would not File Hush Money Charges Against Anyone but Trump appeared first on Resist the Mainstream.
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Author: Nicholas Dolinger
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