A week before his criminal trial on charges that he conspired to pay a porn star to not publicly mock his weird mushroom dick is scheduled to start, Donald Trump has found a novel legal strategy to try and delay it: He is suing the judge.
Some of you might be asking, is it a good idea to sue the judge presiding over your criminal trial? Might that not greatly piss off the one person who, more than anyone else, holds your fate in his hands?
You ask that because you lack Donald Trump’s imagination. You also lack his shamelessness, his Swiss-cheese brain, his inability to wear a suit that fits, his barrels of bronzer, and his long, long, long experience with our nation’s legal system, which might someday get renamed after him in honor of him spending so much of his miserable life trying to game it.
The papers are still sealed at the moment, but The New York Times reports that Trump is expected to file an Article 78 action, a “special proceeding that can be used to challenge New York state government agencies and judges.” Apparently this action goes to an appeals court, which will be asked to delay the trial so Trump can challenge the gag order the judge, Juan Merchan, slapped on him recently.
Technically, this action is sort of a lawsuit disguised as an appeal. Legal nomenclature is weird.
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A five-judge panel will likely meet this week to consider the action, and with any other defendant you could safely assume it would get laughed out of court. With Trump, who the hell knows, the court will probably order the two men to arm-wrestle for it.
Trump did try the same Article 78 maneuver on Judge Arthur Engoron last fall before the start of his civil trial for fraud, and a New York appeals court did slap that down pretty quickly. So it seems unlikely it’s going to work here either.
Trump also filed a motion trying to get the trial moved out of Manhattan, which he probably should have done months ago if he was serious and which an appeals court judge, in a replay of last fall with Judge Engoron, immediately swatted away. Which, with the white-glove treatment Trump gets from some judges, feels like a major victory.
And this is all while Judge Merchan has yet to rule on the motion demanding he recuse himself that Trump and his crack lawyers filed last week:
Mr. Trump and his lawyers argue that the judge has a conflict of interest, citing his daughter’s position at a Democratic consulting firm that worked for President Biden’s campaign in 2020.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly assailed Justice Merchan’s daughter on social media and posted articles with her picture, leading the judge to expand the gag order to bar Mr. Trump from attacking her.
Attack the judge’s daughter, who has nothing to do with the case, and then demand the judge recuse himself because the attacks on his daughter, Loren, might call into question his objectivity. Are any of you geniuses that S-M-R-T smart? We think not!
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The recusal motion is here and you can read it if you feel like torturing yourselves. It is 35 pages long, and about 34 of them focus on Loren Merchan. (The 35th page is one paragraph, and is just the lawyers reiterating that Judge Merchan should recuse.)
The motion dives deeply into Loren Merchan’s business, Authentic Campaigns, a digital advertising firm that works on Democratic campaigns. This, to Trump and his idiot lawyers, means Loren has “a direct financial interest in these proceedings,” and as a close relative, her father cannot sit in judgment on Trump’s case.
As Steven Lubet at The Hill notes, this interpretation is an insulting distortion of the court rules:
[T]he motion claims that disqualification is required by a court rule when “the judge knows that a close relative ‘has an interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.’” This is a disingenuous misstatement of the rule itself, which limits the relationships mandating recusal to “the judge’s spouse or minor child residing in the judge’s household.”
While an adult daughter is obviously a close relative, it is nonetheless a relationship specifically excluded from the rule on financial interests, which Trump’s motion does not even purport to address.
Trump, of course, can’t imagine children living separate lives from their parents or their income not being dependent on whatever harebrained fraud schemes said parents dream up while sitting on their golden shitter.
It’s a shame Judge Merchan or anyone else has to devote even a minute of time to this frivolous nonsense, but maybe he can take it out on Trump when it comes time to sentence him.
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