By Robert Spencer | RedState.com
AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
Juan Merchan, the viciously biased presiding judge in the bogus “hush money” case against Donald Trump, has just dealt a wholly unexpected and yet staggering blow to the leftists who were positively slavering at the prospect of seeing Trump clapped behind bars on Sept. 18. The destroyers of the republic will now have to content themselves with hollering “convicted felon!” at every conceivable opportunity, for Merchan has now set the sentencing for Nov. 26, a full three weeks after what used to be Election Day and is now the formal end of Election Season.
Merchan explained defensively that he postponed the sentencing in order “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching Presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.” He added, “The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” and insisted, again with an unusual degree of defensiveness, that the postponement “should dispel any suggestion that the Court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and or any candidate for any office.”
Good move, Juan, but your explanation won’t fly. You have made no effort to dispel the impression that you’re a partisan hack. In fact, you only fueled it by batting aside the Trump team’s repeated requests that you recuse yourself from the case, given all the clear evidence of your deep and abiding bias. Merchan also demonstrated his bias by entertaining the case in the first place since it revolves around a transaction of the sort that big corporations make on a routine basis without ever running afoul of the long arm of the law.
As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted, Merchan “denied Trump’s defense the right to call former FEC commissioner Bradley Smith, who would have explained” that the claim that Trump paid a porn star to keep silent about their assignation was based on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s “fairy tale that Trump stole the 2016 election by skirting FECA reporting requirements” and was “utter fiction, in addition to being legal nonsense.”
Merchan’s brazen unfairness and rabid partisanship were obvious from the beginning of these proceedings, and he even has ties to Kamala Harris. Merchan, however, dismissed these as “stale and unsubstantiated claims” and stayed on the case. Imagine what would have been the reaction if a pro-Trump judge had done such a thing.
And so while this is a welcome decision, there is no way that it can be seen as Judge Merchan suddenly being overcome by the dictates of his conscience and deciding to do the right thing against all the odds instead of going ahead, as everyone in the world expected, and administering the coup de grace to our tottering republic. It is much more likely that Democrat top dogs calculated that an imprisoned Trump would do more harm than good to their electoral chances, as everyone could then see that the Democrats have become the party of tinpot dictators and banana republics.
Merchan has saved the Democrats from that for now. But it will soon be obvious, nevertheless. If Trump is elected president on Nov. 5 and Merchan still sentences Trump to prison on Nov. 26, as he may very well do, a brand-new controversy will arise about whether it will be legitimate for a prisoner to serve as president of the United States, and even possible for him to do so. The Democrats will have a new talking point in their long list of reasons why Trump must not be allowed to take office again. The “insurrectionist” nonsense didn’t fly, and efforts to revive the Russian collusion hoax hit a big iceberg the other day when Vladimir Putin endorsed Kamala Harris, but if Trump’s address is Riker’s Island on Jan. 20, 2025, it’s a whole new ballgame.
This could still happen. On the other hand, if Merchan really has had an attack of conscience that led him to step back from the brink and avoid sentencing Trump to prison on Sept. 18, he might yet have another on Nov. 26. Could it be that future generations will be hailing Juan Merchan as one of the heroes who saved the republic in its darkest days? It could conceivably happen. The odds against it, however, are astronomical.
