Former President Donald Trump has often complained that Democrats have "weaponized" the nation's justice system against him for overtly partisan purposes, including to not just prevent him from serving a second term in the White House but also bankrupt and imprison him and obliterate his real estate empire and legacy as a businessman.
According to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, Trump has now been proven "right" in such claims by the "pile-on" of multiple "improvisational" criminal indictments and civil lawsuits brought by Democrats for political reasons, the Daily Caller reported.
Those observations from Professor Turley came during a Monday discussion with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow about the recent reports that former President Trump was having trouble coming up with the nearly half-billion dollars necessary to post bond and proceed with an appeal of the absurdly biased ruling from the judge who oversaw the New York civil fraud trial.
"It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that we have a legal system now that is being heavily distorted by politics and you cannot look at all of these cases and see blind justice, you see the opposite," Turley said. "You see a justice that is being weaponized, and in many ways, the Democrats fulfill the narrative of President Trump. He is now right."
"No matter what they thought about it at the beginning, they proved him to be right with this pile-on from Florida to Georgia, to Washington, D.C., to New York and most of the public gets it," he continued.
Last year, Trump was criminally indicted in New York by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged falsification of business records, was twice indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith over his retention of classified documents and alleged efforts to interfere in the 2020 election, and was similarly indicted in Georgia on election-related racketeering charges by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, to say nothing of several additional civil suits and defamation claims.
Turley went on to tell Kudlow, "The reason all of these cases are having problems is in part because they are improvisational. I mean, what Bragg’s doing has not been done in the past, what James did has not happened before and that is creating a series of novel issues and I think the public can see that as well."
"Now, will he have a trial before the election? It’s possible but with this pile-on, it may be becoming increasingly irrelevant to voters," he continued. "I think they have so damaged the image of the legal system both in the federal and state process, that many voters no longer trust these cases or these courts."
"I mean we have to wait to see if New York still has a judge or two that’s willing to say enough," Turley added. "When you are forcing someone to come up with half a billion dollars just to get an appeal? Someone has to say enough. This is not what New York is supposed to be."
Separately, in a post to his blog, Turley wrote Monday about the "odor of mendacity" emanating out of Democrat-run courtrooms across the country, which reeks of "not just selective prosecution but political bias in our legal system. It is becoming harder to deny the existence of a two-track system of justice in the country as commentators and even a few courts raise concerns over the role of politics in prosecutions."
"For years, conservatives have objected that there is a two-tier system of justice in this country. I have long resisted such claims, but it has become increasingly difficult to deny the obvious selective prosecution in a variety of recent cases and opinions," he noted at one point. "I have long stated that the charges against Trump over documents at Mar-a-Lago are strong and based on established precedent. However, the recent decision of Special Counsel Robert Hur not to bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden has undermined even that case."
"In New York, the legislature changed the statute of limitations to allow Trump to be sued while New York Attorney General Letitia James effectively ran on a pledge of selectively prosecuting him. She never specified any particular crime, just promising to bag Trump," Turley said at another point. "Ultimately, James used a law in an unprecedented way to secure an absurd penalty of roughly half a billion dollars, even though no one lost a dime because of the Trump loans."
Likewise, "Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has also come up with an unprecedented way of using a state law to effectively prosecute Trump for a federal offense that the Justice Department has already rejected."
After sharing a few more examples of biased and selective prosecutions, including a federal judge calling out the disparate treatment of Jan. 6 protesters versus those aligned with Antifa or other leftist groups, Turley concluded, "These and other cases have fulfilled Trump’s narrative about a politically weaponized legal system. The fact is that many in cities like New York are thrilled by selective prosecution and biased sentencing decisions directed at locally unpopular figures," while everyone else in America recoils from the stench of such dishonest partisanship in a purportedly neutral justice system.
