“BASELESS”: Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg DEMOLISHES Trump arguments for Judge’s recusal
The trial of Donald Trump on felony charges of falsifying business records relating to the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels begins in a week, and now Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has just blasted the former president for his last-ditch effort to have the judge recused.
Bragg systematically disassembled every claim in Trump’s latest plea for recusal, laying the raw, empty, substance-free realities of the case bare to the light.
He addressed Trump’s justification for the filing — the claim that new evidence has surfaced since Trump’s last filing on the same arguments.
Bragg pointed out that the so-called new evidence, which includes a client list for the company where Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter works, and a social media post about their clients, is not only old news, but still irrelevant since the ethics committee confirmed that a judge’s family member is free to have their own political views and activities, without it being deemed an influence on the judge.
Bragg hit Trump’s claim that this is now different, since he’s now the presumptive Republican nominee, pointing out that Trump claimed his political campaign as a reason for recusal in the previous filing, and it’s no more valid now than then.
He also dug into some of Trump’s specific arguments — what he calls ” a grab-bag of other baseless complaints, some having nothing to do with recusal at all.”
One of these is that Merchan’s daughter said on a podcast in 2019 that her father has a bias against Trump. Aside from being five years old and therefore not new evidence since the first filing, Bragg also points out that the claim about what she said is a lie. He says:
“The quoted statements show no such thing. The five-year-old statement attributed to this Court was that the Court ‘hate[s] that politicians use Twitter.'”
Bragg points out that there’s no real way to read this as a dig at Trump personally — President Joe Biden uses Twitter, as does virtually every presidential candidate in recent elections. Virtually every member of Congress on either side of the aisle is there, too.
He hits Trump’s claim that the younger Merchan deleted her Twitter account (the very one he claims she used recently to attack him) to cover up evidence that she dislikes him. Bragg points out that people delete social media accounts for many reasons, and suggests Trump is a more likely reason. He says:
“Indeed, people delete social media accounts for a host of reasons, not least of which is to avoid becoming a target of defendant’s online attacks — a fear that would be well-founded in this case given defendant’s recent campaign of harassment targeted at the Court’s family member.”
Bragg goes further in his conclusion, positing that the filing from Trump is not actually a good-faith effort to legitimately seek recusal, but a way to dodge the gag order and “pollute the court file with more ad hominem attacks,” and that his real objective is “to delay this proceeding indefinitely.”
District Attorney Bragg ultimately calls on the court to reject the motion for recusal.
If, as expected, Judge Merchan refuses to recuse, we can expect the trial to begin next week on April 15th. And we can expect Trump to try to find another method of delaying it.
