As the rest of the world watches the alien lizard virus invasion of America

     

    In 1968, I graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law and clerked for United States District Judge Clarence W. Allgood in Birmingham, Alabama. He presided over every federal prosecution in north Alabama. Behind the scenes, he ran the Democratic Party in Alabama, except for the George Wallace faction. Although he did not attend church, he was the most Godly man I ever knew. He is he first person memorialized in my book, A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known, which is a free read at the internet library, archive.org- https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210

    An amiga, who lives near Birmingham and has followed my online musings since my younger brother Major died in 2010,  texted me after the hush money jury verdict came in, in New York City.

Mortica 

Now I can breathe, I can’t wait to see your post about it.

You know people know who was on the jury. If you were off seven weeks and the triall was 7 weeks. Coworkers figured it out already. 

    After publishing yesterday’s the great pussy grabber’s pecker was convicted by an extraordinarily brave jury of his peers in his hometown of tampering the 2016 presidential election, I texted Morticia, and then we had ourselves a little jitterbug perfume waltz tango.

Me

Trump’s lawyers were given the jurors' names

Morticia

Surely they won’t make it public, that fool might.

Me

I will be very surprised if they didn’t give Trump that info, even though they were not supposed to. I expect a leak in the courthouse will out the jurors. No way they remain anonymous.

Morticia

That’s a shame, I heard Trump’s lawyer say they expected all along a guilty verdict.

Me

I just now saw on CNN that MAGAs are claiming the evil judge gave bad instructions to the jury, but, hey, Trump’s lawyers had signed off on those instructions.

Morticia

Trump’s sick mentally.

Narcissist. He’s the type it’s everybody on earth's fault but his.

Me

Actually, it’s his pecker's fault :-) 

 

Morticia

He’d have to have Bill Cosby (drug) me. Honey Bunch. That was his name for Stormy in her book. “When will you be back in my Honey Bunch”? Well, he loves to be the number one person. I wish the news would shut up talking about him. I think he should go to Rikers. Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy were chained in courtroom shackles and led straight to prison. At least Trump was found to be a felon and you know he has to be livid. If they quit talking about him on news that will get him even worse.

What really will kill him if he’s incarcerated or house arrest NO GOLF!!!!!

Me

I prefer Rikers.

After tampering the 2016 presidential election, Trump tried to overthrow the national government, claiming the Dems rigged the 2020 election. 

[Siegelman was an Alabama governor and Scrushy owned a Birmingham hospital.]

Morticia 

Riker’s no Secret Service.

No Diet Coke

Me

Orange Crush  

 

    My friend Bob, who does the tech work for my books at the free internet library, said he perused Trump’s Truth Social, and it's filled with conspiracy theories: those people will believe anything; they say the New York hush money case prosecutor is a lizard person, a reptilian alien.

    Bob said it's in the online media that the hush money case jury was not picked from Manhattan, but was picked from somewhere else in New York where Democrats far outnumber Republicans, when, in fact, the jurors all live in Manhattan.

    Bob said it's in the online media that Judge Juan Merchan’s parents were illegal immigrants from Puerto Rico. I said Puerto Rico is an American territory, and New York City is full of Puerto Ricans.

    Bob said it's in the online media, which I also had heard from a MAGA friend, that in Judge Merchan's instructions to the jurors, he said they didn’t have to be unanimous to convict. 

    I emailed Bob what Judge Merchan instructed the jurors, which Trump’s lawyers had signed off on, and MAGAs twisted into nonsense.

Your verdict, on each count you consider, whether guilty or

not guilty, must be unanimous. In order to find the defendant

guilty, however, you need not be unanimous on whether the

defendant committed the crime personally, or by acting in concert with another, or both.

“By Unlawful Means”

Although you must conclude unanimously that the

defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means, you need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.

In determining whether the defendant conspired to

promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means, you may consider the following: (1) violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act otherwise known as FECA;

(2) the falsification of other business records; or (3) violation of tax laws.

    

    Bob said the twisting and spinning will get a lot worse. I said it’s been worse for a long time. MAGAs are like a lizard virus that keeps mutating into strange new forms. Ditto the Democrats, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his devotees.

    Bob said the jury wasn’t sequestered and Trump kept bellowing to the press and other news media and on Truth Social what he thought about the trial, Judge Merchan, the prosecutors and the witnesses, and the jury had to hear of that and it did not sit well with them. 

    I said I can imagine the jurors also got wind of Trump and MAGAs and FOX News and other conservative taking heads claiming the New York City trial was a political witch hunt, behind which was President Joe Biden, who had zero sway over what the New York state prosecutor was doing, and I can imagine that did not sit well with the jurors, either, and I can imagine it crossed their minds that Trump actually is a warlock and their job was try to do something about it.

     I told Bob that the hush money jury had two lawyers on it, and he said he had not known that. I said Trump and his lawyers really screwed up letting lawyers be on that jury. When a lawyer is on a jury, the jury behaves very differently, because the lawyer cuts through all the bull shit and hones in on the facts and the law. 

    A trial that long, the jury reached unanimous verdicts on all counts in two days’ time, I can’t imagine that happening that fast without the two lawyers on the jury and if the jury was not overwhelmingly convinced Trump was guilty.

    Trump had boasted he would testify, but when it came down to it, he didn’t, and he was the only person who could refute what Stormy Daniels and the former editor of the National Enquirer David Pecker and Trump's own lawyer Michael Cohen, who did the hush money deal with Daniels, had testified.

    I read enough news reports of Daniels, Peckers and Cohen’s testimony to think there was no way the jury would think they were lying, and the jury knew Trump’s lawyers thought Daniels, Pecker and Cohen were telling the truth, and Trump’s lawyers kept badgering them, did not sit well with the jury. 

    I think any lawyer worth his or her salt would have told Trump to plead out and get a wrist slap, and I imagine his lawyers did that and Trump told them it wasn’t going to happen, and I imagine the two lawyers on the jury explained that to the rest of the jurors.

    Nor did Trump seeming to fall asleep many times during the trial. and acting out in  and outside the courtroom, as if he was the king of a banana public.

    I spent a good bit of time in poor tropical countries and Americans who have not done that have no clue what a banana republic is. MAGAs call Democrats communists, when they should look at the guy Trump looks up to, Vladimir Putin, who was KGB.

    When I heard that Trump raised $50,000,000 since the jury verdict came in, I was not surprised, and two thoughts came to me: "You cannot worship God and mammon", and "A sucker is born every minute.” 

    The hush money trial and conviction indeed made the great pussy grabber lizard virus more vigorous and determined, and it very well might get him elected in November.

    I think there was a problem with Judge Merchant being the judge after he had donated to the Dems, and he was assigned the case instead of a computer lottery assigning the case, and perhaps the prosecutor should not have brought the case under the legal theory it used. However, some of the Republican justices on the United States Supreme Court don't recuse themselves when they have a conflict of interest. 

    It was important for the American public to see that Donald Trump bought silence to help him win the 2016 presidential election, and in that way he rigged that election.

    Alas, I think the lizard Joe Biden should retire- I won’t vote for him in November- but he’s the Democrats’ horse, and the Republicans have no other horse but Donald Trump, so unless Biden and Trump, and the lizard Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are abducted by aliens, or the the Lord takes them, and Chaos of an entirely different kind arrives...

    Good grief, what if the presidential election ends in a dead heat, a tie, and the House of Representatives has to decide it? Eeek!!! 

    I told someone yesterday, who was moaning about America going to hell, that the only solution I see is to nuke Washington, D.C., when Biden and Trump are there, and Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court are in session- that would drain the swamp.

    Since that’s not likely to happen, I add to my recent offer to God, my life for Donald Trump’s life, my life for Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy’s lives, too.

    MAGAs are not the only lizard virus, but they and their Warlock are the most dangerous lizard virus in America today. They are a reaction to the Democrats nominating the lizard Hillary Clinton in 2016, so in that sense, the Democrats are responsible for the lizard Donald Trump being a convicted felon. 

    For those who prefer mainstream reporting and commentary. I interjected just a few words, in bold.

Courthouse News Service

JOSH RUSSELL / May 31, 2024

MANHATTAN (CN) — After a mixed jury of a dozen New Yorkers unanimously delivered guilty verdicts on all 34 felony counts against Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon, legal experts told Courthouse News that two lawyers on the panel may have helped other jurors see through the noise in the case and focus on the “actual law” behind the charges of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.

Deliberations lasted roughly 12 hours over two days before jurors reached the unanimous guilty verdict on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, making the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in November's election the first former U.S. president in the nation's history to be convicted of a crime.

The jury — seven men and five women — included two attorneys, a software engineer, an e-commerce sales professional, a security engineer, a teacher, a speech therapist, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager.

Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Courthouse News he thought it was a mistake for Trump’s lawyers to not strike the two lawyers from the trial jury.

“That never ever happens,” he said. “You rarely have one, much less two.”

Rahmani said lawyer-jurors can be “so powerful in the deliberation room” because they’re able to set aside the irrelevant spectacle surrounding a case and instead “focus on the jury instructions and the actual law in the case.”

“When you have lawyers on the panel, they tend to sway the deliberations, so you have to make sure that they’re on your side,” he said, noting that as a trial litigator he nearly always uses peremptory strikes to remove lawyers from the potential jury pool.

“Lawyer-jurors are very, very risky unless they’re on your side,” Rahmani added.“Jurors like that are high-risk, and certainly not helpful.”

The 12-person jury, empaneled six weeks ago after more than two days of jury selection, found Trump guilty of falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursement of a payment to actress Stormy during the 2016 presidential election to silence her about an extramarital tryst with Trump a decade prior.

At the request of the jurors during deliberations, Justice Juan Merchan reread his lengthy instructions [click that link to see Judge Merchan’s v-e-r-y l-o-n-g instructions] about how the jurors were to consider evidence and what can and cannot be inferred from it.

"You must set aside any personal opinions or bias you might have in favor of or against the defendant, and you must not allow any such opinions to influence your verdict,” the judge instructed.

Jurors were not given a written copy of those instructions, per state court rules, but the judge was allowed to reread the instructions out loud. Many jurors were seen writing notes while Merchan spoke.

They also asked to review transcripts of testimony from prosecution witnesses, Michael Cohen and David Pecker, whom the Manhattan district attorney accused of conspiring with Trump to bury negative publicity around the 2016 presidential election.

Attorney Renato Stabile told Courthouse News he believed that Trump’s defense pinned hope on a holdout juror prompting a mistrial, and believed the two lawyers on the slate of jurors “were going to parse the legal issues very carefully for the rest of the jury.”

“I'm not sure that happened in this case,” Stabile said Friday. “While the jury asked for a readback of the jury instructions, I ultimately think that the instructions … were too complicated for even the lawyers to fully understand and dissect.”

Horse shit 

 

Stabile said the other jurors, including would-be holdouts, are likely to look to lawyers as leaders, even if they practice civil litigation, not criminal law.

“For that reason, I tend to avoid keeping lawyers on any jury unless I am very confident that they will be on my side,” he said. “In this case, I believe that political affiliation was the ‘super factor’ in jury selection and was significantly more important than any other juror characteristic."

Juror No. 3 was identified as a corporate lawyer originally from Oregon. During jury selection, he told the court that he is “actually not super familiar with the other charges” Trump faced. 

“I don’t really follow the news that closely; a little embarrassing to say,” said the juror, who told the court he gets his news from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Google.

The other lawyer on the panel was Juror No. 7, a middle-aged civil litigator who is originally from North Carolina.

He told the court he didn't know “anything about election finance” and said he was ambivalent about Trump, liking some things about him but disliking others.

“I’m not sure I know anything about his character,” he added. “I’m a litigator, so I take the law seriously and I take the judge’s instructions very seriously.” He also said he was a regular listener of the New York Public Radio station, WNYC.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Thursday credited the jury for reaching a verdict “based on the evidence and the law, and the evidence and the law alone."

"Over the course of the past several weeks, a jury of 12 everyday New Yorkers was presented with overwhelming evidence — including invoices, checks, bank statements, audio recordings, phone logs, text messages and direct testimony from 22 witnesses — that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump illegally falsified 34 New York business records,” Bragg said in a statement announcing the verdict Thursday.

Throughout the trial at the New York Supreme criminal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, Justice Merchan and the New York Office of Court Administration took special measures to ensure the jurors remained anonymous. The judge specifically prohibited the release of their names or addresses, without objection from Trump’s lawyers.

After delivering the guilty verdicts on Thursday, three black Ford Transit passenger vans with tinted windows, appearing to be carrying the anonymous jury, drove the wrong way up a one-way street away from the frenzied scene around the courthouse.

Trump's lawyers have vowed to appeal. He is set to be sentenced on July 11, days before the delegates of the Republican Party are expected to confirm him as the party’s nomination for presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In March, he moved to have the proceedings indefinitely adjourned due to “prejudicial pretrial publicity,” claiming that the juror pool in Manhattan had been “bombarded” with negative media coverage of Trump which tainted his odds at a fair trial.

On the heels of the verdict Thursday, donors contributed a daily record of nearly $35 million to Trump’s effort for a second term as president, his campaign announced Friday.

Throughout the trial, Trump regularly opined to reporters that he should have been out campaigning but was in court instead for what he called a “a very unfair trial.”

What was unfair was Trump hid paying hush money to keep private information that might have cost him the 2016 election, and he didn’t take the stand and defend himself, boo hoo, and the jurors, prosecutors, prosecution witnesses and Judge Merchan put their and their families’ lives at risk. 

sloanbashinskky@yahoo.com