Is it Mere Ignorance or Duplicity? (Part 3)

Ignorance or Neglect of Justice

For the first time in history, a former (and possibly future) president of the United States is now a convicted felon. A jury found that Donald Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, with whom he had an affair, in order to keep the story from hurting his 2016 presidential campaign. . . Many of these [Evangelical] voices defended the former president as fit for public leadership, even after a jury found him liable for doing just what he bragged about in those tapes of yesteryear: groping a woman’s genitals against her will.

Christ Jesus was a convicted felon. Many dissidents in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s German were convicted felons. Such a status has legitimate meaning only if judge and jury are just.

Donald Trump is no Christ Jesus. I am not a Charismatic.

Nevertheless, Alvin Bragg’s and Judge Juan Merchan joint prosecution of Donald Trump was so egregious a juridical travesty on several counts, it is certain to be eventually reversed on the basis of law.

The reversal will likely take place after the upcoming November election. This Realpolitik scheme, which seeks to achieve Democratic electoral victory on false pretenses, assumes that the common rabble are ignorant sheeples who just follow positivist orders without subjecting those positivist orders to their own rational, ethical, and juridical scrutiny.

The Democratic elites might be right. The lack of significant polling movement in either direction, following the conviction, is likely attributable to “my side, right or wrong” partisanship.

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The actual basis, by which Russell Moore deems Trump a convicted felon, is premised upon Trump’s sexual peccadillos, presumably in having an adulterous sexual tryst with a porn star while his wife was pregnant, 18 years prior to this trial. I recall my own repugnance when encountering a female volunteer in Kibbutz Dan in 1979, who claimed she was having sexual intimacy with the male Jewish kibbutznik (who managed the horses), while his wife was pregnant. The foreign volunteer intimated that there was sexual pressure (do ut des), exploiting her love of horses.

Yet, there is nothing under current American law or within the legal codes of most other human jurisdictions, which criminalizes sexual infidelity or sexual deviance. Moore effectively convicts Trump on the basis of the Law of God, which is to be administered on the Day of Judgment.

Considering Moore’s own opprobrium against foreign states which criminalize homosexual sex, Moore is a moral hypocrite.

It certainly appears that Stormy Daniels sought to shake down Donald Trump before the November 2016 election. While the extortion, committed by Daniels, can be deemed criminal, the victim of extortion has never been deemed criminal within any jurisdiction of which I know.

No outside person can reasonably determine whether the tryst actually occurred, and this without consent, according to standard rules of corroborative evidence, especially considering the time that has since elapsed. Succumbing to extortion in these times, wherein many women have made false and uncorroborated claims, is not certain evidence of actual infraction. The mere claim, unsubstantiated, and sometimes anonymous, suffices to bring socioeconomic harm to their hapless victims, while proving to have no legal standing. This is the era of false witness.

The falsification of business records, (the claiming of business expenses over a private matter in internal records), may be a misdemeanor, which under local and state law, operates under a statute of limitations of two years, which ended in 2019. Considering that businesses, especially small businesses, live or die upon reputation, it is arguable, although not necessarily valid legally, that a hush money payment is a valid business expense. Be that as it may.

Mixing and Matching Legal Regimes

However, the joint prosecution of Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan sought to conflate the laws of two distinct legal jurisdictions, local/state and federal and conscript some elements of law, pertaining to a jurisdiction over which they have no authority (re: statute of limitations), in order to alchemize a misdemeanor into a felony.

One principle of justice states that one cannot convict and/or sentence a person, governed under one legal regime and jurisdiction, upon the basis of regulations from another legal regime and jurisdiction. It would be akin to applying elements from Sharia law or the Code of Draco, which has no legal authority in New York, within their court proceedings. This juridical principle is why the goyim are not technically culpable for violating any mitzvot under the Mosaic Covenant. Covenants are voluntary agreements. The Mosaic Covenant is a social covenant, operating under the precepts of social contract theory. There was no representative from any of the nations at Sinai to represent the goyim.

Conflating legal regimes causes incoherence, confusion, and caprice. For instance, under the short-lived Draconian Constitution (c. 621 BCE), every violation of law was punishable by death. Thus, operating on the same principle as Braggs and Merchan, a parking ticket in New York City could, if the Code of Draco was conscripted and thereafter conflated, result in capital punishment. Those, especially Jews, who have been in the forefront of the prosecution of Donald Trump, are digging a hole into which they themselves shall invariably fall.

Mens Rea

Do any judge and jury have omniscient wherewithal to divine the true motives of Trump for these payments: whether for the sake of marriage, family, business, or political reasons, or a mix and match of such motives? Motives are a tricky juridical business. Does not another principle of justice insist upon what can be proved with corroborative evidence, not what one suspects?

What is empirically evident, an incontrovertible falsification in fact, is that political motives cannot possibly undergird those business entries and records. For every one of those business entries occurred after the November 2016 election, according to the extreme left leaning NPR (although I had hitherto heard rumors of this finding of fact from conservative circles).

Unless and until it can be proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that those records were late dated, there can be no case. For it is not the hush money which is prosecutable, but false documentary record keeping.

A Jury of One’s Peers

Sufficient is what has already been argued. Nevertheless, if prosecutors intend to raise the stakes to the Federal level, than the notion of being judged by a jury of one's peers, as it pertains to national figures, should involve a cross-section of Americans from all parts of the nation, not from a select and evidentially prejudicial precinct. Empirical methods which involve selective samples is a common critique concerning academic studies. This principle has been violated in Manhattan.

The Sixth Amendment

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

I will briefly mention another violation of the principles of justice, namely, that the alleged crime(s) be specified prior to the trial so that the defendant can make a reasonable defense. The alleged crime(s) were not specified enunciated until the judge’s instructions to the jury, after, in effect, the trial. Moreover, the judge denied a specific witness for the defense, necessary for rebuttal.

This line of argument has been better developed by others. My take would be derivative.  

Every Ogre Deserves Its Day in Court

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!¹

Donald Trump may be vulgar, sleazy, and immoral. Yet, he seems to intuitively (and frustratingly) know where to draw the line so that he does not technically violate the letter of the laws, even while violating their spirit. However, the juridical principle of scrutability (or transparency) requires that guilt be based upon that which can be proved, including motives.

Insistence in abiding by the strict rules of due process justice protects all citizens from the Kafkaesque caprice of power. Loosening the principles of justice in order to capture the loathsome invariably results in the loathsome, using those same loosened principles, the precedent having been set by the “virtuous,” to consume the “virtuous.”

Evangelicals and the Nature of Justice

Under Russell Moore’s circumscribed and narrow ethical standards, a small subset of the holistic ethical and juridical precepts of the God of Scriptures, Moore disparages Donald Trump and those who support him, while utterly disregarding the principles of justice, principles laid out in Scriptures and, indeed, the principles of natural justice, these being one and the same.

It has long been apparent to me that Protestant Evangelicals have lost all understanding of the principles of justice, whether the justice of means (due process) or the justice of ends (social justice and balance). It behooves one to understand these principles of justice. For the moral/legal legitimacy of the Atonement of Christ to act as substitute for sinful humanity is premised upon the scrupulous satisfaction of the applicable principles of substitution in an exact and exacting divine and natural justice. (This is my next book project, soon to be released.)

One of my many regrets was in praising Moore long ago. I had forgotten that many a person can be principled and precise in the aspersions against the Other, while abandoning those inconvenient principles and that scrupulosity as it applies to themselves or their own.

I suppose I could delete that entry. But I do not delete entries, or even tweets. It reminds me of my intellectual and moral failings, thus keeping me humble. Moreover, one is not inclined to shoot off one’s mouth, so to speak, if one cannot cloak one’s outburst. This becomes a matter of compelled discipline.

1. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, 1960 (emphasis added).