“Criminal Conspiracy” – Trump’s trial, ended before it began

Donald Trump is accused by New York prosecutors of having set up a “criminal conspiracy to rig the 2016 election”. He “orchestrated a criminal conspiracy to rig the 2016 election” and “lied on accounting documents repeatedly” to hide the “conspiracy,” charged Matthew Colangelo, one of the prosecutors.

Listening to such accusations, and especially the inflated reports in the major American newspapers, it would seem that the Russiagate file initiated during the Obama-Clinton administration is child’s play – now, it seems that Donald Trump will be convicted and removed from politics for good . In reality, we are dealing with a case in which Trump is accused of a misdemeanor – he paid for the silence of a porn starlet during the 2016 presidential campaign. What is worse is that the money in question was initially paid from the funds of campaign.

Trump’s case is being orchestrated by the Democratic Manhattan District Attorney (district attorneys are elected like politicians in the US). The aforementioned Colangelo is one of the prosecutors working under Democrat Alvin Bragg. The prosecutor is being assisted by a former Justice Department official from the Biden administration who, more or less coincidentally, joined Bragg’s team to build the case against Trump. In parallel, Trump is dealing with another trial, this time of Democratic prosecutor Letitia James. There are also accusations from another Democratic prosecutor, Fani Willis, from the state of Georgia. There are two more indictments coming from a prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department under the Biden administration. However, the first trial has the highest stakes, because it is the only one that has a high chance of reaching a verdict before the presidential elections in November.

The big question is not what the Justice Department will do with Donald Trump, but what Democrats want from the Justice Department. And the answer is: sabotaging the presidential campaign of the de facto Republican Party presidential candidate and getting a conviction before the November election.

President Joe Biden has a lot of vulnerabilities in his presidential campaign – an approval rating of only 35%, unenviable physical and mental fitness, inflation and especially immigration and chaos on the border with Mexico, plus the situation from the Middle East. That is why it is very important that Donald Trump is confined to a seat in a courtroom in New York (where his campaign team can only organize minor election events for him), while Joe Biden can travel in key election states like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

The fact that scores of other cases were spun off from the case against Trump, adding up to more than 80 counts against the former president, has been another target of Democratic rivals as the “criminal conspiracy” to rig the election draws public and tarnish Trump’s image before the election. And because it is happening in America, the satisfaction that political rivals have when Donald Trump is forced to throw away tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars of his fortune to defend himself cannot be ruled out.

The second big goal of the Democrats is to turn undecided voters away from Donald Trump. Therefore, the true verdict of this trial will not be that of jurors, but of opinion polls and, ultimately, voting machines. At the end of March, before this trial began, 12% of those interviewed in a Quinnipac University poll indicated that a possible conviction would make them more likely to vote with Trump, while 29% said it would away from Donald Trump. 55% indicated that the Trump trial will not influence them. Now, as the trial enters its second week, the polls have similar results: 15%, 21%, and 62%, respectively. There is an increase in undecided voters, and these few percent are the Democrats’ stake. Even if, in the end, Trump will be convicted of a minor crime, the important thing will be how many voters were convinced, by the multitude of aberrant accusations, by the aggressive media coverage, not to vote for the former president.

Not that the verdict didn’t matter. The American Conservative wrote about how difficult it was to ensure a minimum of impartiality among the 12 jurors in this trial. Those who reached the last stage of the selection had to answer a questionnaire with 42 questions. One of the questions was about the jurors’ sources of information. The vast majority get their information from The New York Times, a newspaper that even the FBI agents “smeared” in the Russiagate affair said was very involved in the action of the deep state to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump to the White House. Only one juror reads the New York Post, the newspaper that started the scandal of the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of the current president, and only one juror watches Fox News, a television consi

rather favorable to Donald Trump (but this partisanship is debatable). Considering where the jurors are getting their information, The American Conservative concludes that the New York trial is over before it begins—Trump will be convicted, and by then he’ll miss weeks of campaigning and be subject to media campaigns fueled by Democratic prosecutors’ allegations.

If the Trump-Biden rematch is as close as it was in 2020 (and polls show it will be), any legal trick to turn a misdemeanor into a grand criminal conspiracy and multiply the indictments can be decisive from an electoral point of view. A trial for which prosecutors would otherwise have invested no resources may be decisive in this year’s election.