Former AG Meese on Trump v. New York

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese, a long-time friend and advisor to CJLF, has filed this amicus brief in the Supreme Court in Trump v. New York, No. 24A666, noted in yesterday’s post. The brief is joined by Professor Steven Calabresi. Gene Schaerr is counsel of record.

The brief discusses long-standing positions taken by the USDoJ Office of Legal Counsel regarding prosecution of sitting Presidents and argues for the case to be dismissed rather than merely stayed.

Part II of the brief is captioned: “Even if the Constitution does not require dismissal here, prudence counsels in favor of dismissing the case in the national interest.” I’m not sure if SCOTUS even has jurisdiction to order a state court to do anything based on prudence rather than the Constitution.

Immunity questions aside, this case has grave issues of prosecutor and judicial bias, quite possibly rising to the level of a due process violation. The WSJ has this quote from Byron York in the Washington Examiner:

So, given the circumstances, it appears [Judge Juan] Merchan has decided to sentence Trump to make a point. But what is the point? Merchan made that clear in his recent decision. “Here, 12 jurors unanimously found defendant guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records with the intent to defraud,” Merchan wrote, “which included an intent to commit or conceal a conspiracy to promote a presidential election by unlawful means. It was the premeditated and continuous deception by the leader of the free world that is the gravamen of this offense.”

That’s pretty close to a confession of bias by the judge. The district attorney campaigned for office on a promise to get one particular person, who is deeply unpopular in his county, and then followed up by concocting an unprecedented case making felonies out of acts that are either not criminal at all or at most misdemeanors. Prosecutors have been booted for vastly less. If the defendant were anyone else, the defense bar, the ACLU, and the pro-defendant academics would all be howling with outrage. We hear crickets instead because and only because the defendant is Donald Trump. And the judge lets him get away with it because he is angry about the 2016 presidential election, a matter not within his jurisdiction.