https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/14/politics/donald-trump-fani-willis-georgia-grand-jury/index.html
“It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich. To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another,” the lawyers wrote.
What does this even mean?
Partial explanation here:
But what is the napkin in this analogy?
Can we please have some serious replies before we start with the jokes and name-calling.
I think it’s saying that while a GJ may well be convinced to indict a ham sandwich (my gosh, such a low bar!), a stained napkin is an even more remote target.
I think it’s a shitty analogy and a bit of a non sequitur. It might make more sense as: It’s one thing to indict a ham sandwich, it’s quite another to indict the ham sandwich because you found a napkin stained with mustard.
But either way, it’s a shitty analogy.
I’m not sure, but given that it’s Trump’s own attorneys who made the “mustard-stained napkin” reference, I don’t believe they were referring to Trump.
At least, not intentionally.
And if it was intentional, he should probably start looking for new attorneys.
However, I sat on a GJ, and trust me, that line does not apply in all cases. In fact I think Jurors are getting better at this
Yes, I was on a month-long GJ that heard 80-90 cases and we certainly didn’t rubber stamp any of them. In one instance, an attorney was very angry with me because I insisted on seeing the statute. I knew he was misrepresenting it because I had to pass a jurisprudence exam to get my health authority license.
Perhaps the napkin is so remote an associate of the sandwich that is innocent of the sandwich’s crime.
It could just be an attorney trying to sound, well, surely not eloquent, but lofty. Trump is distanced from the guys who are accused.
I think it’s the attorneys’ effort to sound clever, while it really makes no sense.
Agreed.
Although I struggle to think it wasn’t a sly, sub rosa reference to Trump himself. Invoking the color of mustard was an unfortunate (for Trump) Freudian slip on the part of his attorneys.
The napkin could have been dirtied with mayonnaise. Or the lawyers could have specifically invoked Dijon, which color could never be mistaken for French’s. Or Trump’s.
Yeah, that may be a very quotable quote, but that doesn’t make it right.
Grand juries, like trial juries, vary enormously in their work ethics, independence, assertiveness and approaches to their very important duties. The general trend in recent years has been, however, towards training them better and not having them be mere rubber stamps for prosecutors.
Trump’s lawyer is merely trying to assert that this particular Grand Jury was even more incompetent and partisan than usual. It’s a shitty and insulting insinuation.
One of the reasons why it’s usually pretty easy to get someone indicted is that it’s the DA’s show, no defense present, no defense witnesses. (Off-topic – that’s why it’s meaningless to me when some cop accused of something doesn’t get indicted. All that indicates is that the DA didn’t want the cop indicted, which was my own experience on a GJ).
So, the saying goes, it’s so easy that you can get a ham sandwich indicted. Ham sandwiches are typically made with mustard, so if the sandwich was sitting on a napkin, the napkin might be mustard-stained. If the original joke is that the ham sandwich obviously can’t be culpable of any crime, then the even more remote and inanimate napkin really can’t be culpable.
In this analogy, Trump is the napkin – innocent bystander, obviously too innocent for any charges, and evidence of such DA overreach that they went past the ham sandwich and all the way to the napkin.
I’d love it if the court were to demand an explanation.
And what about the pickle, your honor? Are we to believe that it had anything to do with the making of this mustard blot?
If it’s a mustard-stained napkin, it can’t possibly be Trump.
A ham sandwich made with ketchup? 
This is not true at all in at least most cases. Yes, only the DA can bring evidence, but the jury can- and should- grill the DA.
If the evidence is paltry or there is clearly good reasons or extenuating circumstances than the GJ should not bring a true bill.
Moderating:
This is a hijack to this thread. The OP was specifically directed to take his mustard stain discussion to a separate thread, and he did. Now you and others are hijacking his thread to discuss grand jury behavior. Please start a new thread if you wish to discuss this. Thanks.
My response to Trumpers’ claims that grand juries can and will indict anyone on the flimsiest of evidence is to point out that, despite the concerted efforts of the GOP over the past three decades, Hillary Clinton remains resolutely unindicted.
I think RitterSport got it quite right in post 11, that is also how I, a layman, would understand the expression. But this is only based on a feeling, not any knowledge of the law. In any case I can attest that translating lawyers is among the most difficult fields to translate, and when they are American and get waxing lyrical with obscure references, puns and wordplay they lose me (or I lose them, the translation’s quality may vary accordingly).
Now I am trying to get the image of tanTrump having mustard coming out of his… whatever out of my mind before lunch.
Barricades have gone up at the Fulton county courthouse.