Questions raised about the origins of Stefanik's Trump trial letter

On Friday, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) formally filed an ethics complaint against Judge Arthur Engoron in support of Donald Trump who, along with his Trump Organization, is under siege in a $250 million financial fraud trial.

While some legal analysts think the complaint will go nowhere because it is not grounded in the law, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin claims that may be true, but it will cast a cloud over the trial and its outcome possibly long after it has concluded.

As Rubin sees it, the complaint has all the hallmarks of Trump's legal team pulling the strings by using the New York Republican as a cut-out to go after Judge Engoron.

In her column for MSNBC, Rubin wrote, "... while Stefanik is many things — a Harvard alumna, a former White House aide, and most recently, a mom — she is not a lawyer. But her letter is heavily footnoted, including with cites to New York cases, including some concerning the statute of limitations, and conforms with conventions of legal citation, including the telltale ibid., a fancy, lawyerly way of citing to the immediately prior source."

According to the legal analyst, that affords Trump's legal team a "tactical" advantage.

Add to that, the public may never know if Stefanik has been colluding with the Trump camp.

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As she explained, as a member of Congress, Stefanik "is not subject to the federal Freedom of Information Act," adding, " ... if her letter was drafted or edited by anyone affiliated with the defense, journalists have no way of uncovering that through the kind of public records requests that, for example, have revealed political machinations between and among executive agencies."

The end result, she notes is that Trump lawyers can skip asking Judge Engoron to declare a mistrial —which he will likely slap aside — while the state’s judicial conduct commission, which meets intermittently, takes up the complaint, meaning, "the allegations in Stefanik’s letter could swirl, without any resolution, for some time before the commission can determine whether it warrants investigation or should be dismissed."

That led Rubin to ask, "Will Stefanik’s letter lead to an investigation or even discipline? Or will it simply fuel the MAGA movement’s ire toward an elected judge and his law clerk?"

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