Free Republic

A Democratic congressman has publicly called on Gov. Hochul to pardon former President Donald Trump after he was found guilty this week of falsifying business records — for the sake of the nation. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) said a Trump conviction only helps his campaign. “Donald Trump is a serial liar, cheater, and philanderer, a six-time declarer of corporate bankruptcy, an instigator of insurrection, and a convicted felon who thrives on portraying himself as a victim. @GovKathyHochul should pardon him for the good of the country,” Phillips declared in a X post Friday.

The judge who presided over Donald Trump’s fraud case closed off many avenues of appeal, leaving him few ways to escape his felony conviction

Donald Trump is wasting no time fighting to get back to the White House. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, 77, is expected to attend a UFC fight Saturday night at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ — two days after the shocking guilty verdict in his Manhattan “hush money” trial, according to the Wall Street Journal. It will be his first public appearance since he vowed that “we’re going to fight” during a fiery press conference in the atrium of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan Friday. ... He’s expected to continue his fundraising blitz next week with a series of...

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is backed by Soros, is now under fire for allegedly leaking sensitive sentencing information about former President Donald Trump to the far-left media. She described them as ‘street fighters,’ who indicated that Bragg might push for a tough one-year imprisonment, primarily to ensure Trump faces the daunting conditions of Rikers Island. “I spent this morning speaking to someone from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. They’re called street fighters. He believes that they will recommend a one-year term in prison. And that is because when you spend a year in prison in...

Estonia considers itself a front-line state, a Nato member where its border guards stare across the Narva River at the Russian fortress of Ivangorod. This tiny Baltic state, once a part of the Soviet Union, is convinced that once the fighting stops in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin will turn his attention to the Baltics, looking to bring countries like Estonia back under Moscow’s control. To help stave off that possibility, Estonia’s government has poured money and weapons into Ukraine’s war effort, donating more than 1% of its GDP to Kyiv. "If every Nato country did this," says Estonia’s steely Prime...

The conviction of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan of 34 felonies produced citywide celebrations. ... The celebrants would be wise to think twice before mounting this trophy kill on the political wall. The Trump trial is a target-rich environment for an appeal, with multiple layers of reversible error, in my view. I am less convinced by suggestions that the case could be challenged on the inability of Trump receiving a fair trial in a district that voted roughly 90 percent against him. The problem was not the jury, but the prosecutors and the judge. Some of the most compelling...

Licensed gun owner Donald Trump will have to turn over all of his firearms in the coming weeks now that he has been found guilty of felonies in the Manhattan “hush money” case. Under New York state and federal law, convicted felons are banned from possessing any type of firearm, and the former president must have his weapons legally passed off to another person or surrendered to authorities by his July 11 sentencing, criminal defense attorney Peter Tilem said. “There is no grace period,” Tilem told The Post. “You are federally prohibited once you are convicted.”…

(At the end of this editorial, I'm offering the opportunity to get a bumper sticker to spread this message) A long time ago, in 2005, I saw something George W. Bush had done, and I remarked: "First we beat the Soviet Union, then we became them." Little did I know that in under twenty years, we would see Soviet-style Show Trials. We just witnessed the most high-profile Show Trial in American history, where the President (and current candidate for a second term) was put through a trial where all of the elements were crafted to ensure a guilty verdict on...

The chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government announced Friday that he is calling on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and prosecutor Matthew Colangelo to testify next month about “the unprecedented political prosecution of President Trump.” “This hearing will examine actions by state and local prosecutors to engage politically motivated prosecutions of federal officials, in particular the political prosecution of President Donald Trump by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote in letters to Bragg and Colangelo. The move comes one day after Bragg secured a conviction of Trump on 34 counts...

A handful of Senate Republicans on Friday vowed to block major Democratic legislation and White House nominees for top positions in retaliation of a guilty verdict against former President Donald Trump on Thursday. Trump was found guilty of 34 felony charges related to falsifying his business records in order to hide a hush money payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump has maintained his innocence, and vowed to appeal the ruling in a speech Friday. The group of eight Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, accused the White House of making "a mockery of the rule...

On Friday’s edition of NBC’s “MTP Now,” NBC News White House Correspondent Mike Memoli stated that “the Biden team has seemed to concede that there’s nothing they’re going to be able to do to fix the inflation problem” and are trying to reframe things to a “stylistic” argument. Memoli said, “Every single demographic, every poll shows the number one issue, cost of living, inflation. And the Biden team has seemed to concede that there’s nothing they’re going to be able to do to fix the inflation problem. So, they’re trying to make this a whose side are you on, who...

After years of trying — in the words of the judge — “to get the damned rascal in this court,” it was a conviction that many welcomed. But those words were not from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, and the conviction was not that of former President Donald Trump. Rather they were from US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, at the end of the 18th century, when America embraced political prosecutions to target critics and opponents. The man on trial then was James T. Callender, a muckraking writer critical of President John Adams. For accusing politicians of corruption, Callender...

The judge donated money — a tiny amount, $35, but in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind — to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the judge earmarked for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” -snip Most importantly, the DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process. That’s not on the jury. That’s on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did. -snip But when you impose...

CNN analyst Paul Begala said Friday on “News Central” that Donald Trump is an “obese flatulent old man with bad makeup and weird hair” when asked for his reaction to the former president’s conviction at the business record trial in New York. Begala said, “Donald Trump needs to pay himself hush money because every time he speaks, he’s losing. He did better during that trial than I thought he would do because he was gagged. And the gag order was perfectly constitutional. Happens in a lot of cases. He hurts himself when he goes on these hysterical rants. Yes, he...

BREAKING: The Trump campaign has raised a total of $52.8 million in the 24 hours following Trump's conviction in New York. The amount means the Trump campaign is raking in over $2 million an hour. The Trump campaign also reported that over a third of the donations came from new donors. "With more than one-third of these donors being new to the campaign, it is clear that more and more Americans are seeing through the Biden election interference and joining President Trump in the movement to save our nation," the campaign announced. Insane.

Alex Soros, the son of left-wing activist and billionaire George Soros, suggested Democrats mention that former President Donald Trump is a “convicted felon at every opportunity” they get. Soros wrote in a post on X that “repetition is the key to a successful message” and that Democrats want American citizens to “wrestle” with having to vote for a “convicted felon” in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

Democratic pollster and former Clinton adviser Mark Penn said Friday during an appearance on Fox News Channel that he believes Judge Juan Merchan will sentence former President Donald Trump to serve some jail time because he's "trying to take him out of the presidential race." "So far, this judge has wanted to take, obviously, wants to take Donald Trump out of the presidency," Penn said during an appearance on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" on Friday. "So, for all this talk that, of course, he's a first time offender and not eligible ... he's convicted of things that could send...

Leftist District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s show trial delivered the Democrat Party’s dream: A felony conviction against their most hated political enemy. The prosecution and the trial also were also littered with legal landmines and “reversible error” that should make former President Donald Trump’s looming appeal a slam dunk, legal experts say. Historical and stunning but not surprising to many who have closely followed left-wing lawfare in recent years, the 12 angry Manhattan jurors after two days of deliberations found Trump guilty on all 34 trumped-up felony counts against him. Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled sentencing for July 11, just four...

What did the Democrats just do to America? In the sham trial, the activist judge, according to a lawyer in the courtroom, covered his mouth to mask his laugh during the reading of the verdict. The smiling Biden DOJ prosecutor who parachuted into New York to get Trump on the bizarre Letitia James victimless value-inflation case with the AG's office then hopped over to Manhattan to prosecute Trump based on the plot of a book written by a disgruntled DA who quit and then was rehired to help manage the case: a district attorney, who, like the attorney general, got...

One show trial down, three more to go. You have every reason to spend the next five months anticipating anything and everything to keep voters from installing Donald Trump back in the White House through a process formerly known in America as a “free and fair election.”Up to and including assassinating the candidate whom every indicator has winning in November.For the first time in our country’s history a former president, who is running for reelection, was just convicted of a crime in what prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s hometown newspaper admitted is a “novel and untested” application of an obscure state law....