Trump Convicted. Prayers for Our Republic

Late on Thursday afternoon, American democracy came under extraordinary threat when a New York jury, twelve New Yorkers, decided to convict Donald Trump.

Trump was found guilty by the jury on 34 separate felony counts. If he is sentenced to jail time, that jail time could be up to four years, if all the sentences run concurrently.

It’s a travesty of justice.

This case was a joke from the very beginning. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who set this entire thing up to become more famous and more powerful. Judge Juan Merchan, who basically gave every benefit to the prosecution and whose jury instructions were unprecedented in their willingness to flout the law.

This was all set up to convict Donald Trump simply so the Democrats could either jail Donald Trump or spend the next few months declaring Donald Trump a convicted felon for purposes of the 2024 election.

The actual methodology by which he was found guilty is utterly uncertain. The reality is there were two crimes alleged: a misdemeanor falsification of business records — which would not have resulted in any possible jail time — but to become a felony that was reliant on other unspecified crimes.

And those crimes could have been a violation of federal finance law — except that Donald Trump clearly did not violate federal finance law. Not only that, the federal government never even bothered to charge him with violating federal finance law, federal election law in 2016.

Check your calendar. It is currently 2024, and the case that New York just made is effectively that Donald Trump violated election law in 2016 and falsified business records in 2017.

Somehow, despite the fact that the statute of limitations has run already, this is now a class E felony in the state of New York, lengthening the statute of limitations. The number of hoops they had to jump through in order to manufacture this case, is extraordinary. The number of pretzel-like contortions the prosecution had to drag the jury through was extraordinary.

But did any of that matter in the end? Was this ever about the legality of the case?

When the evidence was presented by a porn star, Stormy Daniels, or a convicted perjurer, Michael Cohen — was it ever about any of that? Or was it simply this: If you get Donald Trump in front of a jury of his supposed peers in New York City, one of the bluest places in America, and you charge him with anything, even if you charge him with jaywalking, they will convict him.

We all know the answer to this. This was, in fact, jury nullification, but it is also prosecutorial nullification and judicial nullification of the law.

This particular trial was about getting Donald Trump. So did they get Donald Trump? We have yet to find out.

I think the backlash on this is going to be extraordinary, because this is so obviously a manufactured case and so obviously a stupid case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s supposed violations of law. I don’t think the American people are going to stand for this.

I think that if Joe Biden believes this is going to somehow redound to his benefit, rather than appearing as a politically-motivated hit job on his political opponent in an unprecedented prosecution of the man most likely to take him out of office in November, I think he’s got another thing coming.

I think this makes Joe Biden the hero in his own mind.

I don’t think the American people are going to react quite that way.

WATCH: BREAKING: Trump Found Guilty with Ben Shapiro

As to what happens next, there is a procedure and there is a process. But it is quite possible Donald Trump could end up in jail because Judge Merchan has been out to get Trump this entire time. From the gag order to the allowance of evidence, Judge Merchan has made clear he wants Donald Trump convicted. I think he’s going to make clear he wants him behind bars.

So what exactly happens next?

There will be a sentencing hearing. That sentencing hearing will be within two or three months of the verdict. So we’re going to get weeks and weeks of speculation about whether Donald Trump is going to go to jail.

Trump’s attorneys presumably will attempt to appeal to the judge and hope to postpone the sentencing beyond the election; Merchan is almost certainly not going to go along with that, because the reason he has structured this trial in this way is to convict Donald Trump and put him behind bars, or at least sentence him, prior to the election.

Trump is not going to be dragged to jail today. That’s not the way this works, because it’s a nonviolent felony. He will not be detained pre-sentencing or forced to post bail, in all likelihood. Instead, in the next few weeks, he’ll be dragged over to that dingy probation office at the New York City Courthouse.

The court could agree to stay Trump’s sentence pending an appeal. That process would last beyond the November 5 presidential election.

But again, I highly doubt they are going to stay Trump’s sentence pending the appeal. The only plausibility there is that if there were a sentence that were so short that it would actually be shorter than the appeals process itself, maybe you delay the sentencing until after the appellate process goes forward.

Merchan’s not going to do that, given everything we know about Merchan. It is highly likely Merchan will move forward with the sentencing hearing.

Merchan could impose a financial penalty, require him to do community service, undergo counseling. He could also impose home confinement, which would mean that Donald Trump would basically be confined to doing events in and around Mar-A-Lago in Florida.

It’s also possible that he could just throw him in jail. And no one knows what the hell happens then.

The Secret Service has been gaming out this possibility for months. If he ends up in prison, the Secret Service would have to screen his food and his personal items and watch him with a detail of agents 24 hours a day. The agents would be armed.

All of this is insane. The fact that we are even considering this is totally and utterly insane. We keep being told by the media that Merchan is unlikely to sentence him to any jail time, because he wouldn’t want to be the man who puts the chief Republican candidate in prison. I think precisely the reverse. I think Democrats truly believe that if they throw Trump in jail that the American people will surrender to the Biden administration.

This is a thwarting of basic standards of democracy; To take a political opponent on trumped-up charges, find him guilty, and then throw him in jail for purposes of the election, is insanity. It is third-world crap. It is insanity.

And that’s presumably what we are talking about right now when we talk about the idea that a politically-motivated Manhattan D.A. could go into his job with the purpose of convicting Donald Trump.

That’s what we are talking about. Third-world nonsense. Not only that, the sentencing is going to be at least partially dependent on Trump’s attitude. So in the probation hearing, there are a few different factors that are going to be brought into play. His age, his health, his likelihood to commit an offense. But one of the factors is remorse.

You can see why that is. Normally in a criminal case, if somebody commits a really dire crime, they show no remorse at all. You can see why people would want them to be in jail. But in this particular case, it’s a catch-22 for Trump. If he shows remorse for a crime he did not commit, then Biden hammers him on that the rest of the election cycle.

If he doesn’t show remorse, then Merchan says he committed a crime: “I had to put a gag order on him and then he didn’t show remorse. I’m throwing him in jail.”

There is a very real possibility here that come November 5, Donald Trump is sitting in Rikers while the American people are voting. And if that’s the case, the American people should vote for him all the more, because this was a politically-motivated prosecution.

The evidence was not there to support a conviction. In fact, the charges were not even there to support a conviction. That’s why Merchan had to come up with this bizarre theory whereby four jurors could vote for one underlying crime, four jurors could vote for another underlying crime, and the last four could vote for a third underlying crime, and they could combine all of those into one giant felony that would serve as the predicate for the class E felony for falsifying business records.

There’s a high probability this will be reversed, either in the state or in the federal system. It’s certainly a violation of law in the state. It’s probably a violation of law federally, because using the Federal Elections Funding Act to convict a guy in state court is bizarre.

The Democrats just set the country on fire.

The consequences of this are extraordinarily dire, because play this one all the way out: Let’s say for a second that Donald Trump is sent to jail by Merchan. Let’s say that while he is in jail, the election goes forth. And under those conditions, he then loses the election.

If you think he was claiming rigging back in 2020, wait until you hear about 2024 when the Democrats charged him with a bunch of garbage and then got 12 like-minded jurors to throw him in jail under the auspices of a glory-seeking judge, and took him completely off the campaign trail and smeared him as a felon in advance of the election.

You’ve got all the same people crying, “Trump will be a tyrant. Trump will undermine the rule of law. We cannot have a country with Donald Trump, who will certainly destroy democracy.”

It is hard for me to think of anything less democratic than trumping up a charge on your political opponent to jail him during an election cycle. Especially when the candidate on your side is losing, which is what Joe Biden is doing right now.

Where do we go from here as a country? The polling shows that a huge percentage of Americans will not change their vote based on that. One of the things that makes the case so unbelievably astonishing is that this is an election that’s going to come down to tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states.

Right now, Donald Trump is leading outside the margin of error in Nevada, which means all he has to do is win Michigan or Pennsylvania and the election is over. The election could easily come down to 2000-4000 votes in one swing state. If Donald Trump were to lose in November while he’s serving prison time on a trumped-up charge, the response in the United States will be absolutely explosive.

You can only talk about an illegitimate president at that point. The American people will see a Democrat elected under those auspices as illegitimate. There’s no other way to even see that.

Biden is presumably going to make comments about the law having been done, and that no one is above the law, while simultaneously the DOJ attempted to broker a deal to save his own son from jail. He himself was spared a prosecution on mishandling of classified documents because he was supposedly a doddering elderly man, and he’s going to lecture us about how the justice system just worked.

It just did the reverse.

Pray for the Republic.

Because something truly terrible just happened in New York City.

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