T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month,” but April 2024 is undoubtedly the strangest. Already, we have seen a solar eclipse that will not recur for 24 years, the biggest earthquake with an epicenter in the New York City area since 1884, and a criminal trial of a former President of the United States is set to begin for the first time in American history.
Donald Trump is charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payoff to Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors claim that the falsification concealed the underlying crime of illegal interference with the 2016 election.
Trump does not want to go to trial. He wriggles like a fish out of water, trying to extricate itself from a barbed hook. He has started a weird lawsuit in the appellate division, suing the trial judge because of the gag order against him, and on Monday, it was shot down in a one-sentence order.
He also lost his bid to move the trial venue outside of Manhattan. Naturally, Manhattan will deal justice from a stacked deck. This is not St. Lucie County, Florida, the venue for the classified documents case, where Trump won the county over Biden with 50.38 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. This is Manhattan, where Trump won a paltry 12.3 percent of the vote.
Trump has also renewed his motion to disqualify the trial judge, Justice Juan Merchan, who first made it last summer. Trump is no stranger to such gambits. In Washington, he asked Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan to recuse herself from his January 6 election interference case, but she saw no reason to step aside. In New York, he moved because the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of a political consulting company, Authentic Campaigns, Inc., a digital marketing, paid media, and fundraising firm numbering prominent Democrats among its clients. Trump repeatedly trashes Loren Merchan with threatening and intimidating social media posts. Trump’s latest blasts probably violate a gag order that Merchan put in place to prevent Trump’s repeated attacks on court personnel and their families. Trump has dared the judge to punish him for violating the gag order. He claims to be a victim, comparing himself to Jesus Christ and Nelson Mandela. But he’s more like the criminal of conservative mythology—trying to get sprung on a technicality.
Trump made his first motion to disqualify Merchan because the judge had contributed the august sum of $15 to Biden’s 2020 campaign. The motion was denied. Merchan said he was sure to be “fair and impartial” and that removing himself from the case “would not be in the public interest,” which is especially true now that this is likely the only criminal case against Trump that could see resolution before election day. Merchan concluded that Trump’s lawyers “failed to demonstrate that concrete, or even realistic reasons exist for recusal to be appropriate, much less required on these grounds.”
Wisely, Merchan had referred the matter of his daughter’s involvement to an ethics panel, which concluded he did not have a conflict because the outcome of the case wouldn’t impact his daughter’s business. As the panel put it, “A relative’s independent political activities do not provide a reasonable basis to question the judge’s impartiality.”
Trump’s attacks on Loren Merchan have been unrelenting and false. Last week, court administrators debunked his claims that she had posted on social media an image of Trump behind bars. A court system spokesperson stated that her Twitter account was apparently hacked and that the post is not attributable to the judge’s daughter.
In his latest recusal motion, Trump has doubled down on the attack. Political analyst and former prosecutor Norman Eisen calls the motion “garbage,” and most other legal experts would agree. The outlier is retired federal judge Shira Scheindlin, tapped by Bill Clinton to replace Louis Freeh, who became FBI director and a Clinton nemesis. Scheindlin finds the motion more problematic for the judge. A New York statute provides that a judge must disqualify himself if a close relative, such as a daughter, “has an interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.”
It’s all about the money. The line is that Authentic Campaigns puts out posts, the client receives contributions, and Authentic is compensated based on a percentage of the moneys contributed. Authentic has collected at least $70 million in payments from Democratic candidates and causes since she helped found the company in 2018, records show.
The firm’s past clients include President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Trump archenemy Representative Adam Schiff, who is running for the U.S. Senate seat in California. According to campaign finance disclosures, a big-spending political committee affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has paid Authentic Campaigns $15.2 million.
The proposition that Trump’s possible conviction could affect Loren’s compensation as a guiding spirit of Authentic Campaigns is far-fetched. Presumably, Authentic will continue to garner contributions for political candidates, whether Trump is convicted or not.
Moreover, Merchan is known as a no-nonsense judge before whom Manhattan prosecutors like to try cases, and while that shouldn’t be determinative in a recusal case, it doesn’t hurt. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is prosecuting the case, has made no secret that he would like Merchan to keep the case. Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo argued in a letter to Justice Merchan that the defense’s claims that Loren Merchan is profiting from her father’s decisions require “multiple attenuated factual leaps here that undercut any direct connection” between her firm and this case. “This daisy chain of innuendos is a far cry from evidence” that Judge Merchan has a direct, personal, or financial interest in reaching a particular conclusion, Colangelo wrote.
The decision on the recusal motion is entirely up to Merchan. Trump has sued Merchan, but that won’t fly. If the Colombian-born jurist decides to keep the case, there would be no grounds for appeal. If he were to step aside, however, it would throw the trial schedule into total disarray as a new judge would have to get up to speed, and there would be little hope of a verdict before election day. The public interest in a speedy trial heavily outweighs any fanciful notion of conflict. Justice Alito has said that the public, like the defendant, is entitled to a speedy trial in a criminal case.
But count on Trump to keep looking for technicalities to delay the trial until after the election.
As Judge Aileen Cannon drags out the Trump documents trial and the Supreme Court slows the January 6 insurrection trial, we need one that proceeds. T.S. Eliot also said: “Hurry up, please, it’s time.”
