For the past half-century, Donald Trump has always had the same spaghetti approach to litigation: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
On Sept. 18, Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s New York felony trial, is expected to sentence him for his conviction on 34 counts of business fraud. But before doing so, Merchan will rule on two laughable pretrial motions offered by Trump’s defense team.
The first is yet another motion to force the judge to recuse himself from the case. Last spring, after an investigation, the New York courts determined that the work Merchan’s daughter performed for a Democratic political consulting firm did not pose a conflict of interest for the judge.
Of course, this did nothing to dissuade Trump and his legal team. When Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, they filed another motion for recusal, claiming that the work of Merchan’s daughter in Harris’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign “may result in a financial benefit” to his family. On Aug. 12, Merchan ruled that the defense motion was “nothing more than a repetition of stale and unsubstantiated claims.”
Of course, Trump wasn’t done. On Thursday, Todd Blanche, his lead lawyer, sent a bizarre letter to the judge arguing that the jury’s verdict should be dismissed and the case vacated “based on presidential immunity, until after the 2024 presidential election.”
What does the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity — which applies to what presidents do in office — have to do with the 2024 election? Here’s where things get a little, well, weird. First Blanche told the judge that his 2019 criticism of politicians who use Twitter — which Merchan had ruled irrelevant last March — must be revisited. Blanche now argues that the judge’s conversations with his daughter about Twitter should disqualify him from the case because the Supreme Court found that while president, Trump’s tweets fell under his “official duties.”
Then Blanche, no doubt following the boss’s orders, launched an even more explicitly political argument, down to calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party,” a handy G.O.P. insult for decades. He charged that Harris and Tim Walz “referred to this case in a public speech” — as if a campaign speech by Trump’s opponents is grounds for delaying sentencing or invalidating the jury’s verdict.
Blanche then writes ominously, with a little legal language to perfume his nonsense, “In the same time frame, Michael Nellis, a business partner of Your Honor’s daughter at Authentic Campaigns (and Authentic’s founder), posted on social media about, inter alia, making maximum donations to the Harris campaign and using his clout with that campaign to get Walz to ‘talk on our White Dudes for Harris call last week.’”
Horrors! Walz and the boss of the judge’s daughter are on a huge Zoom call together!
This is all vintage Trump, but also a sign of nervousness about his sentencing and the political peril he faces as the felonious nominee of the Republican Party.