"Defendant is hereby warned that the Court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders," wrote Judge Juan Merchan in his ruling on Trump's double-digit-and-counting violations of his gag order.
Merchan imposed on billionaire Trump a fine of 5¢ for each of the nine contempt charges, thus whacking him for a total of 45¢. Court observers quickly calculated the street value of the fines to you and me: $1,000 for each charge, so $9,000 total. (For us, ouch.)
The judge also insisted that Trump delete the offending posts from his social media site and warned that should he repeat such offenses, he'll be gravely warned about the nonexistent prospect of jail time.
No, I shall not again grumble about "America's two-tiered system of justice" — one observation that Trump got right in his characteristically blind, ironic way. The bifurcated legal system is surely apparent by now to all who are paying even scarce attention to Trump's joyous prancing through the lily fields of I was president and you weren't.
One prominent theory of Merchan's kid-glove reasoning is that he's quite aware of Trump's angling for a spell in the clinker for use as more propaganda, and he won't give Trump the satisfaction.
If the latter is true, then before us we have some truly peculiar judicial thinking. Jail time for contempt after contempt is the standard penalty prescribed by judges, and never has the offender's last job been the deciding factor in meting it out. Nor should Judge Merchan be playing mind games with Trump, i.e., trying to second guess motives behind his contemptuous behavior. He exhibits it repeatedly, the law is the law in addressing it, and that should be that.
Trump might also have second thoughts about his in-the-judge's-face gambit once he finds himself in a stinking, rat-infested NYC jail cell with no golden toilet.
Two incidentals. One came this morning in The NY Times, which noted in a straight-news kind of way that Trump's all-time favorite lawyers were the demonic (my addition) Roy Cohn and a chap by the name of Jay Goldberg, "who before he died in 2022 handled various issues" for him. But The Times fumbled from there, reporting: "Both Mr. Cohn and Mr. Goldberg also represented mobsters." In that sentence there lies an extraneous adverb.
Incidental #2: While reading about Trump's leisurely legal affairs I received Politico's breaking news about Jareh Sebastian Dalke's legal nightmare. This fellow, age 32, worked only one month at the National Security Agency, where he made excellent progress in looking after No. One at others' expense — identical to Trump's lifetime behavior.
That is to say, an FBI agent paid Mr. Dalke $16,499 in cryptocurrency and promised to pay him $85,000 more for classified documents. Also like Trump, Mr. Dalke is an idiot; he thought he was selling the information to a Russian official. So there he was, yesterday, standing before a judge while in possession of Trump's two most defining qualities: limitless greed and boundless stupidity.
The one real difference between Trump and this fellow? Mr. Dalke got 22 years behind bars. There was no kid glove fitting the iron hand of U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore, who bellowed in his sentencing of the defendant, "This was blatant. It was brazen and, in my mind, it was deliberate" — as deliberate as Trump's recidivist contempt of court.
Judge Moore added, "It was a betrayal, and it was as close to treasonous as you can get." If Special Counsel Jack Smith secures a conviction of Trump in the D.C. case, during sentencing U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan will likely have very similar words for the defendant.
Show of hands. Who believes Judge Chutkan will then follow Judge Moore's example and sentence Trump to 20-some-odd-years in prison?
If only the judge had had the courage to impose the maximum penalty, 30 days in jail, for each of the nine incidents. The Orange Stain would be sitting in Rikers through the rest of the year. I doubt even Trump would look forward to that.
Posted by: Uncle Billy | April 30, 2024 at 02:20 PM