Rising This Week: People v. Trump
The fight over Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions returns to court on Wednesday.
Donald Trump’s lawyers and the federal government that he controls will try again this week to topple his 34 felony convictions from his New York criminal case by seeking to move the case to federal court.
In its latest effort, Trump’s Justice Department will be continuing its practice of trying to erase his criminal record — and the history that led to it — while prosecuting his enemies under the same charges leveled against him and his supporters.
Trump began his term by pardoning every Jan. 6 rioter, including the more than 600 people charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. More than 170 were charged with using deadly or dangerous weapons. Rioters assaulted police with pepper spray, bear spray, Tasers, PVC poles, flagpoles, metal barricades, brass knuckles and more. Some brought firearms.
In a funhouse mirror inversion, Trump’s Justice Department aggressively deployed the same charge against protesters and politicians involved in mundane interactions with federal immigration officers.
The Jan. 6-related images of assaults on law enforcement were searing. Officer Daniel Hodges screamed in agony as a pro-Trump mob pinned him inside a doorway. Officer Michael Fanone had a heart attack after a rioter shocked him with a stun gun to his neck. At least 140 police suffered injuries like concussions, broken bones and chemical burns. Five officers died.
By contrast, one of the biggest symbols of protests against Trump’s federal agents has been a sandwich.
Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) is still facing criminal prosecution after being seen brushing up against federal agents during a melee that ensued during the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D). The mayor’s trespassing case collapsed, but McIver’s case remains pending.
Grand juries and trial juries have thrown out similar allegations of assaulting law enforcement from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
In arresting Don Lemon, prosecutors turned one of Jack Smith’s charges against Trump on its head: conspiracy against rights, which falls under an umbrella statute known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. Trump earned that charge by conspiring to deprive citizens of their votes across the country, predominantly in racially diverse metropolitan areas like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.
Trump’s former Big Lie lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, now in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, gleefully amplified a social media post declaring a prominent Black and gay journalist as one of “today’s klansmen” for documenting a protest inside a church.
Running parallel to their efforts to turn the allegations against Trump and his supporters against their enemies, the Justice Department’s lawyers have tried to clear their boss of wrongdoing. The government executed a search warrant last week to seize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., where three recounts including a hand count declared Joe Biden the winner of the election.
Fulton County was a hotbed of Trump’s conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, where Rudy Giuliani terrorized election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Trump threatened Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and MAGA state lawmakers joined the ranks of phony Trump electors.
That is to say, the latest development in The People of the State of New York v. Trump is about more than Trump’s criminal convictions. It’s about a Justice Department under his control set on his personal protection and retribution.
That context lurks behind the more narrow issue before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein: Does the Supreme Court’s immunity decision require the transfer of Trump’s state criminal case to federal court?
‘A judicial finger in the constitutional dike’
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, a Bill Clinton appointee in the Western District of Texas, issued a passionate opinion ordering the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his asylum-seeking father Adrian Conejo Arias.
The son’s detention drew national outrage after a bystander photograph captured the child in his blue winter hat and Spider-Man backpack. Judge Biery embedded the picture at the bottom of his opinion and order, which he captioned with two Biblical verses. The second verse that the judge cited was simply: “Jesus wept.”
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Biery wrote. “This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.”
In a once-secret memo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement claimed that an administrative warrant was enough to forcibly enter homes to search and arrest the people living there, but Biery emphatically rejected that power grab.
“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster,” he wrote. “That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.”
The three-page order burns with outrage and indignation.
“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned,” it states.
Biery concluded his opinion with these words:
“With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,
It is so ORDERED.”
In normal times, Judge Biery’s ruling would have represented an extraordinary warning about the peril for U.S. democracy, but judicial jeremiads like these are now common.
Twice in January, two different federal judges quoted the words attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention about the form of government being created: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter from the Central District of California quoted Franklin’s remarks in early January when dismissing the Trump Justice Department’s attempt to seize voter data, and Biery quoted the line here as well.
Senior U.S. District Judge Bill Young of the District of Massachusetts called Trump an “authoritarian” in open court and invoked another famous quotation about whether democracy can survive.
“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Young wrote, quoting Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the bench four decades ago.
District court judges can’t solve every crisis in the United States.
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez found she didn’t have the power to block the immigration surge in Minneapolis, Minn., but she also wrote that she was making “no final determination on the merits of any claims.” Filed by the state of Minnesota, the lawsuit was always a longshot. No court has ever stopped a federal enforcement operation on 10th Amendment grounds. Judge Menendez noted that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her “much more circumscribed injunction” simply protecting the civil rights of protesters, and she said that an order “halting the entire operation” wouldn’t fare any better.
Protesters on the streets of the Twin Cities, citizens across the country calling their elected representatives, and journalists reporting on the federal government’s abuses have stepped in where the courts could not.
With public opinion overwhelmingly against Trump’s federal invasion of the Twin Cities, Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan recently said he may withdraw some federal agents from Minneapolis, and steady pressure could determine whether, when and to what extent that happens.
It’s not just judges. The People also have a proverbial finger on the constitutional dike.
That’s why All Rise News publishes “Rising This Week,” which regularly previews the week’s most significant court hearings together with information about protests and civic engagement. Paid subscribers can view those listings below.
