“In Friday’s Morning Consult poll, voters were split between those who said the New York grand jury’s decision to indict Trump was mostly based on evidence that Trump violated the law (46 percent) and those who said the grand jury was motivated “to damage Trump’s political career” (43 percent).”
There’s actually a factual answer to a question relevant to this poll result. Has any evidence appeared in the press that indicates the motivation behind this indictment was political? (I’m not aware of any.)
I presume it’s inescapable that there is some motivation relating to the law, if a grand jury was satisfied that laws were broken.
If they “ran on a platform” of “getting Trump”, there would have to be something, somewhere with that on it. A sign, a statement from the campaign, a radio or TV ad, something.
And if that thing existed, it would be plastered all over the entire right-wing media environment. Wall-to-wall, 24/7. That all you’ve heard is an allegation is pretty solid evidence that this claim is bullshit.
We don’t even know who the members of the grand jury are. How can we possibly know what the motivations are for a (currently) anonymous group of people.
IMHO a certain identifiable segment of the voting population has been primed to believe that all investigations and prosecutions are (and should be) politically motivated. This is what “their side” does, they expect it, so they think that it what everyone does. It is literally inconceivable to them that an investigation and prosecution of a political figure is actually about real laws being violated. The poll reflects this belief.
So the following may be pertinent, from a CNN overview of the situation:
On February 22, 2022, Bragg informed the prosecution team that he was not prepared to authorize charges against Trump, CNN reported. The prosecutors, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, resigned the next day.
In his resignation letter, Pomerantz said he believed Trump was guilty of numerous felonies and said that Bragg’s decision to not move forward with an indictment at the time was “wrong” and a “grave failure of justice.”
“I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating,” Pomerantz wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/politics/trump-bragg-inside-indictment/index.html
It’s curious how a DA who Fox and other right-wing sources claim was politically motivated to destroy Trump was actually reluctant to prosecute during the earlier stages of evidence-gathering. It seems that fact don’t matter to these lunatics, and facts that totally contradict their story are just ignored.
They’re also making much of the fact that this is the first time in American history that a former president has been indicted. Did they ever stop to think that maybe this was because it’s the first time in history that a president was guilty of such a long string of criminal transgressions that it’s more typical of a mobster than a national leader. The “anonymous jury” proposed for Trump due to potential threats and intimidation is reminiscent of mobster trials.
As a person who served on a grand jury, this is pretty much true. They read you the law, they present their evidence and ask you to vote. There is rarely anything resembling exculpatory evidence, though I did once hear from a defendant who was invited to testify. In that particular case, I felt like the DA didn’t actually want us to bring a true bill.
It helps also that the bar is so low… A crime was committed and this guy probably did it.
Another angle for the flag-waving Trumpist nutjobs is that NYC is a Democratic stronghold, therefore NO jury empaneled there could possibly be politically neutral. Ergo, this indictment is politically motivated.
Yet this doesn’t hold true when any Democratic politician is indicted in NYC. Which never happens, of course. /s
Technically speaking, a grand jury doesn’t get to hear a defense so they are, in essence, listening to a one-sided propaganda piece against the accused.
But, that said, the judge should be ensuring that the evidence shown is complete and fairly presented and the prosecutor should be doing the same. They both look like idiots if they cheat the grand jury, just to have the case smacked down on the real trial for clear omissions of reasonable consideration of the merits of the evidence.
And, because they have access to the evidence at hand, sometimes grand juries do deny the arguments of the prosecutor.
Ultimately, the real court case is what matters. Cheating a grand jury is like cheating out a good answer on a self-help questionnaire. It’s self defeating.
Yes. I found that troubling when i was on a grand jury. But unlike a petit jury, grand jurors can ask questions of the witnesses.
I thought most of the charges presented to us met the “more likely than not” standard, but a few seemed like a stretch, and i thought they were added for leverage, not because they were legit. My fellow grand jurors mostly thought their function was too help the da, though, and not to determine whether the charges were reasonable. (Some said this explicitly.) So all of the charges presented to us turned into indictments.
Anyway, there can’t possibly be evidence at this point whether the grand jury’s decision was political. So any claim is just hot air. It’s not unreasonable to ask whether the DA was politically motivated, however.
Not at all. Also, the Big Lie has been going on for much longer than that. Did you think Trump and his sycophants thought it up themselves? I’ve been hearing my whole life how every Democrat that ever won an election stole it somehow.
The only way we could be sure that the prosecution is politically motivated is if the DA or someone on his staff came out and said so, and obviously that’s very unlikely to happen.
If there is any basis for the charge of bias by right wingers it’s that the District Attorneys don’t normally prosecute nonviolent misdemeanors from many years in the past, so therefore it must be politically motivated.
In the city where I live there is a street fair during the summer. The road is closed off to vehicle traffic and various vendors set up tents and tables along the length of the street. Any local homeless persons are made to understand that they may continue to wander the length of the street during the fair but should they stop and become an obstacle, they will be removed. By and large, they understand and either blend in or displace to greener pastures for the evening.
One evening, I was sitting at a coffee shop enjoying my coffee when I witnessed a couple of members of the local constabulary encountering an individual who did not understand the rule, did not care for the rule and had little to no regard for the officers who were addressing him. He made many loud and aggravated statements about how he was being oppressed and how he had rights and so on and so forth. The officers did not find these statements compelling in any way whatsoever and they hauled this person and his belongings away so he would no longer be impeding the smooth flow of commerce. This took only a few minutes and it only took that long because the homeless person had a fair amount of belongings that the officers were trying to gather up. I do not know what happened to this individual after the police hauled him away but he did not return.
Trump is much like that homeless person except in his case he screams “oppression!” and for some absurd, unfathomable reason this brings the entire system screeching to a halt on the minuscule possibility that he might somehow be right. He is not right and there is no reason to dignify his abject stupidity. He is not being held accountable for his politics. He is being held accountable for his crimes. It is not the fault of the justice system that Trump is unable to distinguish between the two.
