RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/undercover-prosecutor-merchan-helps-bragg-lawlessly-stress-cohens-guilty-plea/?utm_source=

The judge in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial has stacked the deck against the former president.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of two columns on how Judge Juan Merchan has allowed prosecutors from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to prove a federal campaign-finance crime against former president Donald Trump by relying on blatantly inadmissible evidence — the guilty pleas of Michael Cohen and a non-prosecution agreement David Pecker struck with the Justice Department. The second column will appear tomorrow.

How far out on a limb is Judge Juan Merchan willing to go to help Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, convict former president Donald Trump based on inadmissible evidence?

Very far.

As I’ll discuss in this column and a second one tomorrow, the inadmissible evidence in question consists of (a) guilty pleas by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to two Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) felonies in a case brought against him by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY); and (b) a non-prosecution agreement that former American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker — Trump’s longtime friend, who controlled the National Enquirer — entered into with the Justice Department because he feared being indicted under FECA. (Relatedly, AMI agreed to pay a fine to the FEC.)

To avoid too much redundancy, let’s focus on Cohen’s guilty pleas, which trigger the same legal objections as the non-prosecution agreement and the fine. The two pleas relate to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that Cohen helped obtain for Trump’s benefit during the 2016 presidential campaign in connection with two women — Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels — who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Trump in 2006. McDougal, a former Playboy model, was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer, pursuant to an arrangement Cohen, then a lawyer for Trump and the Trump Organization, made with Pecker. Subsequently, when Pecker balked at paying Stormy Daniels (a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford), Cohen paid for that NDA himself — only after, he claims, Trump promised that he’d be reimbursed, which he was in monthly installments in 2017.

We have been over why the guilty pleas are worthless (see, e.g., here and here). In my opinion, as a former SDNY prosecutor who worked there for nearly 20 years — and was a supervisor there for over a decade — they are worthless as evidence. But you needn’t agree with me on that because it is incontestable that they are worthless — or at least should be — as a matter of law.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/can-americans-still-mourn-as-americans

Only a nation can mourn its dead. There is always the abstract reverence for sacrifice, the human awe that acts of valor inspire; that is universal. But to mourn takes something greater. You can admire the Dying Gaul, or Horatius at the bridge; you can only grieve for your countrymen.

This may be, in part, why it took more than a century for Memorial Day to take shape in this country. America was a nation born in war—unlike almost any in history before it—yet the early devotions to its fallen sons were mostly the private remembrances of soldiers’ organizations. A generation of relative peace followed, with fewer than 3,000 battle deaths between 1815 and 1861.

Then came civil war, when secession put the question of the American nation to a mortal test. Recent interpretations left and right have centered slavery at the expense of Union, the principle that Lincoln and other Northern leaders claimed as their motivation: that the American nation was bound by ties of law, of history, of purpose that could not be broken. Ultimately, more than 360,000 Northern men and boys died for that proposition—nearly twenty times as many Americans as had died in all theaters of conflict since 1775.

The war had settled the question: this was one nation. Yet that nation had also been transformed, in no small part because so many thousands of its sons had shed their blood. And so their sacrifice became a central object of the American civil religion: in Lincoln’s famous homage to the fallen men at Gettysburg, in the highly visible practices of the Grand Army of the Republic, and especially in the observance of Decoration Day, when the graves of the war dead would be adorned with flowers, flags, and other objects of patriotic reverence. The remembrance of their sacrifice served doubly to remind the mourners of the cause for which they fought, as a visible illustration of the price by which the Union—the American nation—had been preserved.

This was not the whole story, though. Beside those many Union dead, some 258,000 Americans had fallen in service to the South. Their families and communities would honor them, of course. But what was the nation to do about them?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/3016509/free-speech-is-in-dire-shape/

The following are the prepared remarks of Jay Bhattacharya upon receiving the 2024 Bradley Prize, an award to “honor scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.”

Thank you! I am so grateful to be honored by the Bradley Foundation today. I am especially thankful
because, in my view, this award is not just to honor me but to acknowledge so many brilliant scientists,
politicians, public servants, teachers, lawyers, firefighters, small business owners, CEOs, and people
from every walk of life who risked their jobs, their reputations, or their family bliss to oppose COVID-19
tyranny. I dedicate this award to each of them.

It’s not hard to see that our pandemic response failed. Official counts attribute more than a million
deaths to COVID in the United States and almost seven million worldwide. By early 2022, about 95% of
Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures in most states, including
confinement of broad populations, business closures, cessation of religious and other gatherings,
school closures, and widespread violation of fundamental civil liberties. Very clearly, these measures
failed to protect Americans from COVID.

Many powerful scientific bureaucrats justified these policies with the idea that all scientists agreed that
the lockdowns would work to suppress or even eliminate the virus. This was known false by spring 2020. For instance, the Swedish experiment with keeping schools open in spring 2020 was a
tremendous success. Lockdowns are inherently leaky because human societies, human health, and
human well-being require physical proximity. It is unhealthy to treat our fellow human beings primarily
as biohazards.