Trump's defenders testing out new talking point since courtrooms aren't buying what he's selling: columnist
Reacting to a Manhattan jury agreeing with writer E. Jean Carroll that Donald Trump both sexually assaulted and then defamed her, Republicans are closing ranks and arguing that the former president can't get a fair trial because all juries are biased against him.
That is the opinion of Salon's Amanda Marcotte who wrote that after a continuous string of legal setbacks for the former president in rulings by judges and appeals courts, Trump is finding no relief when his case goes before a jury.
That, in turn, has his biggest supporters complaining that the jury system is rigged against him and therefore, as Marcotte wrote, thay "have no credibility."
In her column, she succinctly summed up, "After years of attacking voters and election systems as illegitimate for rejecting Trump, denying the legitimacy of the jury system is only the next logical step for Republicans."
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Case in point, she noted, was special counsel John Durham taking two cases to court during his investigation, both of which flopped in front of juries despite the fact that "federal prosecutors have around a 97% conviction rate," which has only incensed the former president's avid fans even more.
In his final report, Durham complained about the juries by writing, "Juries can bring strongly held views to the courtroom in criminal trials involving political subject matters, separate and apart from the strength of the actual evidence and despite a court's best efforts to impanel a fair and impartial jury."
According to the Salon columnist, no one is buying Durham's spin on his own failure to put together an ironclad case.
"Yes, it's true that politics can prejudice a jury. But it's a massive stretch in these two cases. The defendants aren't famous politicians, nor were their cases touching on major culture war hot buttons. It was just 'lying to the FBI' charges, and Durham failed to prove it. The only person getting political up in here was him," she accused before adding, " Whining is the lingua franca of Trumpists faced with facts that run against their conspiratorial narratives, of course. This flavor of whining, however, is doubly sinister, because it's a member of the DOJ leveraging his status to discredit the jury system, simply because these two juries wouldn't be snookered by him. Worse, in doing so, he's helping stoke what is quite likely to be a growing MAGA assault on the foundational concept of due process."
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