Former President Donald Trump’s attorney doesn’t appear to be that confident he’ll win his hush money case in New York.
Appearing on Newsmax this Wednesday, attorney Alina Habba was asked how everything is going in the case. Her response was not encouraging for Trump fans.
“I don’t have hopes really that high at this moment that the New York courts will do the right thing, that the jury will do the right thing,” she said. “We’re in a blue state, as you know, and I think everything’s by design.”
“We’re in a case that was eight years old, over the statute of limitations, was denied by [former Manhattan District Attorney] Cy Vance, then brought only after President Trump decided he was going to run for office,” she added.
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But there is some good news. A day before Habba said what she said, The New York Times published a stunning op-ed by Boston University legal professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman arguing that the attempt to prosecute Trump for election interference just because he paid some hush money is a “historic mistake.”
“As a reality check, it is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement,” Shugerman wrote. “The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed, ‘Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.’”
The quote he used was lucked from a Los Angeles Times column written earlier this month by Richard Hasen, a University of California Los Angeles law professor.
“Although the New York case gets packaged as election interference, failing to report a campaign payment is a small potatoes campaign-finance crime,” he wrote in his piece. “Any voters who look beneath the surface are sure to be underwhelmed.”
As a reminder, Trump’s original charge was just falsifying business records to hide his hush money payment — a misdemeanor, at best. But to try to get Trump, prosecutors claimed that Trump also violated federal and state election laws by trying to conceal the hush money payment during a presidential election (the 2016 election).
Dovetailing back to Habba’s Newsmax appearance, she also slammed Judge Juan Merchan for imposing a gag order on the former president.
“It’s very troubling,” she said of the gag order. “We’re in the fight of our lives at this moment.”
Merchan issued a gag order last month barring Trump from talking about trial witnesses, prosecutors, and other figures tied to the case. But after he issued the gag order, Trump started attacking his daughter on Truth Social.
As seen below, he first claimed Merchan’s daughter “is a senior executive at a Super Liberal Democrat firm that works for Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, the Democrat National Committee, (Dem)Senate Majority PAC, and even Crooked Joe Biden.”
In a second post published a day later, he accused the judge’s daughter of posting pictures “of her ‘dream’ of putting me in jail.”
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And in yet another post published Thursday, he accused Merchan’s daughter of being a “Rabid Trump Hater” who works for the left and “has admitted to having conversations with her father” about him.
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The attacks did not sit well with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office subsequently penned a letter to Merchan asking him to “clarify or confirm” whether the gag order applies to attacks on family members, according to The Liberal Washington Post.
“Bragg’s office wrote in a letter filed Thursday and unsealed Friday that in light of the attacks, the judge ‘should make abundantly clear that the [gag order] protects family members of the Court, the District Attorney, and all other individuals mentioned in the Order,’” the Post reported.
“It also said that Merchan should ‘warn [Trump] that his recent conduct is contumacious and direct him to immediately desist’ and that ignoring the warning should warrant sanctions,” according to the Post.
Responding to this request, Trump’s attorneys penned a letter of their own arguing that the original gag order does not in fact apply to the former president’s recent social media posts.
“The Court cannot ‘direct’ President Trump to do something that the gag order does not require,” they wrote. “To ‘clarify or confirm’ the meaning of the gag order in the way the People suggest would be to expand it.”
Their point was that the original gag order had evidently said nothing about attacks on family members of the court overseeing the case.
JUST IN: Trump’s defense team sent a premotion letter to Justice Merchan clarifying the express terms of the gag order, saying that contrary to the People’s suggestion, “the Court cannot ‘direct’ President Trump to do something that the gag order does not require.” pic.twitter.com/YNXKRffEe1
— Tyler McBrien (@TylerMcBrien) March 29, 2024
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Author: Vivek Saxena
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