Democrats Need To Be Held To Account For Denying Trump’s Due Process Rights.
Due process of law, or at least its absence, is the heart of the unconstitutional lawfare aimed at Donald Trump this week in a New York courtroom, ostensibly for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. This is a crossing of the Rubicon moment for our Republic.
“Due process” is ancient shorthand for the sum of all the procedures the government must comply with and honor before it may take a person’s life, liberty, or property. The right to due process is over 1,000 years old in English jurisprudence. It is a right of every citizen and a duty of every government.
A year ago, I wrote about DA Bragg charging Trump with a crime, but not identifying the crime. Within the past few days, Andrew McCarthy called the prosecution a “farce” and listed its many failings. Prof. Jonathan Turley wrote that Trump is not being prosecuted for any actual crime. Prof. Jed Shugerman called the prosecution unfounded, both a “legal embarrassment” and a “historic mistake.” Matthew Whitaker said that Judge Merchan, who presides over the Manhattan kangaroo court, is hopelessly conflicted to a degree that would make Joe Biden blush.
The fundamental issues with this trial all revolve around a denial of due process. This is criminally unconstitutional, and, because it is meant to distort a free and fair presidential election President, creating an existential crisis for America.
Image: Donald Trump by AI.
A Brief History of Procedural Due Process
Since 1215, an ocean of blood has been spilled by men on English and American shores to vindicate individual rights. Civil wars (including the 1st and 2nd Baron’s War, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the American Revolution) have been fought, kings deposed, a king executed, and nations sundered to vindicate those rights. And in virtually all those conflicts, a government’s systemically denying its citizens’ due process rights was at the conflict’s heart.
The British freemen’s right to due process of law appeared first in the Magna Carta of 1215, when the tyrant King John was imprisoning men and extorting their lands and possessions. That same right to due process of law appeared in writing again as a right of all English citizens in the Petition of Right of 1628 when Charles I was imprisoning and even executing men, not for any crime, but to take their lands and estates. Due Process of law was reaffirmed as an Englishman’s right in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 after the English deposed James I for dispensing with those rights and ruling as a tyrant.
In 1761, King George III began to deny the colonists many aspects of due process of law. By 1775, George III’s refusal to honor the Americans’ rights led to the American Revolution. After the Revolution, America’s Founders wrote “due process of law” into both the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. It appears generally in the 5th Amendment and specifically as to component parts of due process in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments.
Due process is at our republic’s very foundation and is indispensable to our nation’s functioning. Take away “due process of law,” and there is nothing to stop government tyranny and criminality. There is nothing to stop our own versions of history’s Mao, Stalin, Robespierre, and Charles I. We see it in the currently unstoppable Alvin Bragg, Juan Merchan, and the rogue’s gallery of others plotting lawfare to de facto overthrow our republic.
The Mechanics of Due Process of Law
Much of the U.S. Constitution is not an explanatory text. It is written in shorthand, with references to things that were well-known in law and culture when the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified. Thus, when the 5th Amendment says no one “shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” every American understood that to mean the sum of those procedures that American and English courts followed in 1791.
It helps to think of due process of law in two prongs. The first prong is the procedures the government must follow. They are characterized by ensuring that a large number of people come to an objective agreement that a crime occurred and that the defendant committed the crime. This prong guards against any one government actor acting out of wrongful motive, whether it be avarice, vengeance, or political gain.
The second prong is the information and rights that the government must make available to the defendant to ensure he has an adequate defense against the government’s overwhelming power. This includes telling him the crimes for which he is charged, allowing him to hear the evidence against him, and allowing him to present a defense, including the right to cross-examine witnesses.
The federal and state governments all have their own laws defining procedural due process of law. They’re very similar, with some minor local variations. As a general matter, when a law-enforcement officer proposes to arrest someone, the officer must meet with a prosecutor and show the evidence. Only if the prosecutor agrees that the putative defendant violated a valid law does the prosecutor present those facts to a Grand Jury.
If the Grand Jury returns an indictment, the prosecutor refers the matter to a magistrate who reviews the charges and, if they’re legally sufficient, issues a warrant to arrest. By this point, the process has involved twenty or more people, all of whom have had a chance to see the evidence and weigh the prosecutor’s decision.
After arrest, the defendant must be brought before a court, where the exact charges are read against him in front of a neutral magistrate. The defendant then has several additional due process rights to ensure that he is treated fairly, including the right to trial by a jury of his peers.
The government must produce evidence at the trial, and it is the government, seeking to take away the defendant’s life, liberty, or property, that has the burden of proof of guilt (rather than the defendant having to prove the negative, which is his innocence). A neutral judge must preside fairly over the trial.
At trial’s end, only after the jury has heard all the facts and after watching the defendant confront his accusers, then, and only then, if the jury approves the charges based on the facts can government invade the defendant’s God-given rights to life, liberty, and property.
Donald Trump’s trial in NYC has been an obscene mockery of Due Process. It is criminally and blatantly unconstitutional:
[Per AT, McCarthy, Turley] DA Bragg charged Trump with accounting fraud (a misdemeanor) done intentionally to hide a second crime. At no point before trial did Bragg inform Trump what the second crime was that he was alleged to have committed. No one, whether in 2024 New York City, Charles I’s Star Chamber, or a televised show trial from the Soviet Union, can possibly defend against hidden crimes.
[Per McCarthy, Turley, Shugerman] It gets worse. At the trial, DA Bragg is alleging a second crime of “conspiracy” (hiding information) that was not in the indictment, and that does not apply to the alleged facts of the case.
[Per Whitaker] Judge Merchan, overseeing the trial, is not a disinterested party to these proceedings. His daughter is a Democrat fundraiser making millions of dollars thanks to this particular criminal trial.
[Per The New York Post] Judge Merchan has not merely allowed this trial to proceed under these outrageous circumstances, but he is allowing DA Bragg to spend days bringing in irrelevant evidence about Trump’s alleged affair with Karen McDougal. The law in all American jurisdictions makes this type of evidence impermissible because it invites a jury to convict for acts other than the crime charged. It is classic judicial and prosecutorial misconduct. Indeed, it was for just such acts that New York’s highest court recently vacated Harvey Weinstein’s conviction.
This case—its timing and the sum of its irregularities—has no chance of surviving an appellate review, even if a rabid progressive jury convicts Trump for being Trump. This case is designed solely to have an immediate impact on the 2024 election.
Make no mistake, this is a civil war battle, only it’s fought with a quill instead of a sword. Its existential ramifications for our nation are no less serious. What’s happening is a blatantly unlawful attempt to disenfranchise over half this nation and, by setting a precedent that sees Republicans exist below the ancient protections of due process, it threatens our nation with disunion at best.
Properly understood, these are acts of seditious conspiracy and treason meant to be felt throughout the United States. As such, Judge Merchan, Alvin Bragg, and all their cohorts need to be arrested and tried in the heartland of our nation. Let them face America. If convicted, they need to be punished to the maximum extent allowed by law.
Wolf Howling is an attorney and retired military officer who blogs at Bookworm Room.
Democrats Have Deliberately Shattered The Ties Binding America
There has never been a more dangerous time in the world than right now. Moreover, great empires can end quickly, as the Soviet Union’s abrupt collapse showed. The lesson we should take away from this monumental historical moment is that nothing is assured and countries must be held together by more than the brute force of government power. In America, under Democrat leadership, we are intentionally splinter ourselves along artificially created fault lines, whether cultural or financial. That must change if we are to survive.
We Americans require leaders who can communicate a simple, understandable, and compelling message that strikes at the heart of our primary divisions and challenges us, much as President Kennedy did in his famous “Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You “speech. Our leaders must stop pandering to the partisan interests that are so prevalent today.
Our country is shot through with millions of people who do not wish our nation well or, even worse, do not understand what is in their best interest or that of the country. With shouts of “Death to America“ echoing on American campuses, we can no longer be patient with those elements that seek to destroy us and show no loyalty to their mother country.
Rampant illegal immigration also destroys American cohesion. A gold rush is going on, with illegal immigrants rushing to stake a claim before the border closes. Many, if not most, of the people coming here, have no interest or understanding of what it means to be an American and the responsibilities that go with it. They come here for the freebies. Dedication to the rule of law is an afterthought or goes out the window entirely when they storm our borders with no thought of doing it the right way. It is all downhill from there.
Image by Andrea Widburg.
America is imperfect, but that’s not expected of any human institution. Still, America has done so much good in this world, especially because of its extraordinary contributions to winning WWII and preventing the spread of communism in the decades after. Those accomplishments saved the world and led to the most extraordinary drop in world poverty in history. We can’t continue helping the world prosper if we are overrun!
To continue the good we’ve done to date, America must return to its creative roots in engineering, computer science, infrastructure, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, and most importantly, financial discipline. Consumerism, by itself, does not make an economy. One also needs a government with fiscal discipline, which America completely lacks.
Did you know that America creates a trillion dollars in debt every 100 days? It’s not that we don’t pay enough taxes; our country collects more taxes than any other nation. It’s how we spend it that is broken and must be reformed.
You must now ask yourself what allowed this disconnect between expectations and available resources. The Founders understood that there would be a day when the electorate would figure out they could vote themselves other peoples’ money. That day has arrived and expanded to include border crossers.
The current path is not sustainable and ends badly. Good leadership lays out essential priorities, making decisions less politically and more pragmatically.
To start America’s recovery, here’s an excellent first step: Have the President regularly talk to the American people about the realities of unlimited wants versus limited resources. It may take a while, but eventually, the argument’s logic can convince enough people that the nation’s living within its means is in everyone’s best interest. It is only through enlarging the pie that great accomplishments (now scarce) will once again become common.
The Democrats, with their hard left base, see squeezing the rich as the appropriate and/or populist path. However, if you confiscated the wealth of the top 1%, you would be back to where we are today in about ten years, and then what? Remember that a substantial portion of the wealth of the top 1% is invested. Spend it, and there would be little investment, leading to a likely even shorter period before we are broke again!
Two generations of leftist media, a broken education system, and a corrupt government that protects itself at all costs have brought us to this day. By and large, our youth have lost their ability to look rationally at what is required of them to shape their own future. They feel simultaneously entitled and angry.
Ask them, and they’ll tell you that the Baby Boomers were the last generation to make it. They feel justified to malinger and complain about the remaining scraps. Biden told them they were entitled to abandon their student debt obligations.
15% of Americans want to leave our country. Never before have so many been so disenchanted that they effectively see the American Dream as dead.
The clock is ticking down our remaining time, however much that is. There is time left to make a difference. How many of my readers and millions more understand that their future is tied to a thriving America?
The time to dither is over. There are too many ways to step wrong and fail or wind up in a defensive war we are unprepared to fight. We must have better leaders. We must stop destroying the best of us and promote them to leadership positions instead. Everyone is legally equal, but those who wage war on us using Equity as their weapon will only succeed in destroying everything and everybody.
Who will fight for the values that our forefathers fought so valiantly for, risking everything in the process? If not you, then who? The blood of an untold number of patriots waits for your answer.
God Bless America.
Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com.
Biden’s ICE Sued for Withholding Information on Hiding Identities of Criminal Illegal Aliens
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) is suing President Joe Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for withholding internal agency information regarding its policy to hide the identities of criminal illegal aliens that agents arrest.
On Thursday, IRLI’s Dale Wilcox announced that the watchdog group is suing ICE after the agency failed to reply to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
That request asked ICE to hand over internal information and emails on how the agency decides when to reveal a criminal illegal alien’s identity in press releases.
IRLI conducted an investigation last year which found that under former President Donald Trump, ICE named 97 percent of criminal illegal aliens identified in press releases while under Biden, only 67 percent of criminal illegal aliens are being named in press releases.
“ICE’s sudden decision to omit the names of alien offenders from press releases appears to be a deliberate attempt to keep the public from determining whether dangerous foreign criminals have been removed from the United States,” IRLI’s Director of Investigations Matt O’Brien said in a statement. “That’s rather hypocritical coming from an administration that claims to be the most transparent in the history of the U.S.”
Most recently, for example, ICE issued a press release that detailed the arrest of an unidentified 27-year-old illegal alien from Ecuador who has been convicted of second-degree assault and indecent assault of a child in Danbury, Connecticut.
In another, ICE detailed the case of a 32-year-old Dominican illegal alien who was convicted in Waterbury, Connecticut of trafficking cocaine. Despite the conviction, the illegal alien’s identity was not revealed.
Even in the most egregious criminal cases, ICE refuses to name illegal alien suspects. For instance, a 20-year-old Brazilian national was arrested by the agency this month after he was charged with raping a child in Milford, Massachusetts. The man’s name was not provided.
“This is yet another shameless attempt by the current administration to hide the disastrous impact of its immigration policies,” Wilcox said:
Not including the names of criminal immigration violators is effectively flushing their cases down the memory hole so that watchdog groups will have a more difficult time holding this White House accountable for their destructive actions. The American people deserve transparency on this matter. [Emphasis added]
The case is Immigration Reform Law Institute v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, No. 24-cv-1101 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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