Tag: new york

34 REASONS the Bragg-Biden Show Trial Should Have Been TOSSED OUT — Each One Alone Providing Grounds for a Mistrial

1. Unconstitutional Gag Order that prevented President Trump from criticizing the trial, exposing the many conflicts that should have forced the judge to recuse himself, and the railroading of his fundamental due process rights.

2. Judge Merchan’s many, many conflicts of interests – all of which were disqualifying. His daughter, Loren Merchan, is President of Authentic Campaigns, a political consulting firm that hires the likes of the Biden-Harris Campaign, Adam Schiff, Ilhan Omar, and many other far left Democratic lawmakers. Loren’s firm has made tens of millions off these clients – Juan Merchan, through his daughter, had a direct financial stake in the outcome of this trial, a flagrant breach of the canons of legal ethics, both under the ABA and NY State, that under any other judge would have been grounds for a recusal.

3. Judge Merchan’s wife was previously employed by Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State who campaigned on “getting” Donald Trump.

4. Bragg’s Lead Prosecutor was Matthew Colangelo, the former #3 official at the DOJ. We are told Colangelo graciously decided to step down from his prestigious office to work for a lowly state DA’s office – of course, a reasonable inference would be that he was directed to do so by the Biden Regime to persecute his leading political opponent in Donald John Trump.

5. Statute of Limitations (2 years, NY State) had long expired for the business records falsification scheme that served as the primary charge brought against Trump. For this reason, the case was passed over by the DOJ and even Alvin Bragg over seven years because it was so weak. Only once Bragg felt political pressure, externally via Clinton attorney Mark Pomerantz, who previously worked in Bragg’s office, and internally via Colangelo, a Biden lackey, did Bragg buckle under the political weight and press charges.

6. Venue in bright-blue Manhattan, a borough that voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump at almost a 9 to 1 clip, prevented the President from ever getting a fair trial, because the pool of jurors was naturally biased against the 45th President, and could not possibly rule fairly and impartially (8 of the 12 cited the NY Times as their main source of news). Any pro-Trump jurors who were considered chose to self-select out themselves because they claimed they “could not rule fairly.” Case in point: no way in hell is the burden of proof met on any of these charges, and yet the jury pool consisted of two lawyers, who evidently believed just that. No reasonable juror, and especially no reasonable lawyer-juror, would have found that the elements of every single crime brought against Trump met the burden of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt.

7. Election Interference: This was not a new case: it had been circulating in various court systems, federal and state, for years. These charges were only brought this year to interfere with the 2024 presidential race, period. President Trump is now the leading presidential candidate, by every reputable poll, and the frontrunner by significant margins, a gap that has only expanded over time. There is no reason why this case should be brought now, six months before Election Day, unless there was a conspiracy to prevent President Trump from being on the campaign trail in key swing states, like PA, MI, AZ, and GA, which is exactly what occurred.

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Judges Investigate ‘Dreadful’ MDC Brooklyn Prison Abuse Where Inmates Die Begging For Help As J6 Political Hostage Pleads For Emergency Surgery: ‘They Sent Me To Here to Set Me Up’

J6 political prisoner Ryan Samsel is pleading for assistance from prison guards, his attorney, and the American public to get to an emergency room immediately after strange lumps surfaced on the back of his neck while the blood clots in his leg and foot that he developed months ago remain dangerously untreated.

The new lumps may be malignant tumors or blood clots, but getting to a doctor or the life-saving surgery he was prescribed over three years ago, before his arrest for protesting at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is an ongoing and uphill battle.

If Samsel suffers a medical emergency, it could take hours or days before anyone even notices while detained in perpetual lockdown in MDC Brooklyn, the jail system where Jeffrey Epstein allegedly killed himself, and inmates are known to die while begging for help from lazy, abusive prison staff.

And he suspects the notorious medical negligence within the understaffed correctional facility is exactly why the prosecutors and US District Judge Jia Cobb transferred him to the dangerous prison, “to set him up” to die or endure assaults while living on blood thinners.

“I’m on the eighth floor in a high-rise building in the back corner cell and literally in a corner and there is no call button. If I get sick, I might not see a CO for a full day. It’s dangerous here. It’s literally dangerous,” Samsel told The Gateway Pundit in an exclusive interview Wednesday.“ This place is as harsh as where Jeffrey Epstein died.

“They should not put this many inmates in the prison because they are understaffed, and we are constantly locked down. Judge Cobb knew how bad the conditions were in this jail a year and a half ago when she first sent me here.”

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Trump campaign announces $34.8 million fundraising haul after NY criminal trial verdict

Former President Donald Trump on Friday announced a sizeable fundraising haul in the wake of his guilty verdict in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case.

A New York jury on Thursday found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records after a weeks-long trial. The verdict appears to have energized his supporters, however, as the campaign’s donation page crashed, evidently due to the volume of traffic.

The campaign on Friday announced it had brought in $34.8 million in small dollar donations, marking a near-doubling of its single largest day total on WinRed.

“From just minutes after the sham trial verdict was announced, our digital fundraising system was overwhelmed with support, and despite temporary delays online because of the amount of traffic, President Trump raised $34.8 million dollars from small dollar donors,” said Trump Campaign Senior Advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.

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Trump’s Conviction Suggests Jurors Bought the Prosecution’s Dubious ‘Election Fraud’ Narrative

After deliberating for a little more than a day, a Manhattan jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying 34 business records to aid or conceal “another crime,” an intent that turns what would otherwise be misdemeanors into felonies. If you assumed that the jury’s conclusions would be driven by political animus, this first-ever criminal conviction of a former president is the result you probably expected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 9 to 1. But in legal terms, the quick verdict is hard to fathom.

That’s not because there were so many counts to consider, each related to a specific invoice, check, or ledger entry allegedly aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services. Once jurors accepted the prosecution’s theory of the case, it was pretty much inevitable that they would find Trump guilty on all 34 counts. But that theory was complicated, confusing, and in some versions highly implausible, if not nonsensical. Given the puzzles posed by the charges, you would expect conscientious jurors to spend more than an afternoon, a morning, and part of another afternoon teasing them out.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump stemmed from the $130,000 that Michael Cohen, then Trump’s lawyer and fixer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. When Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017, prosecutors said, he tried to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by pretending that he was paying Cohen, whom he had designated as his personal attorney, for legal work.

Cohen testified that Trump instructed him to pay off Daniels and approved the plan to mischaracterize the reimbursement. Cohen was the only witness who directly confirmed those two points, and the defense team argued that jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But even without Cohen’s testimony, there was strong circumstantial evidence that Trump approved the payoff and went along with the reimbursement scheme.

The real problem for the prosecution was proving that Trump falsified business records  with “an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof”—the element that was necessary to treat the misleading documents as felonies. Prosecutors said the other crime was a violation of Section 17-152, an obscure, little-used provision of the New York Election Law. Section 17-152 makes it a misdemeanor for “two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” But prosecutors never settled on any particular explanation of “unlawful means,” and Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the trial, told the jurors they could find Trump guilty even they could not agree on one.

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NYC hotel rates reach record highs as city fills rooms with illegal immigrants

New York City hotel prices have reached an all-time high due in large part to the unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants arriving from the southern border. The city turned to hotels to house the immigrants, many of which are paid to house the immigrants. 

As of late 2023, the average price for a one-night stay at a hotel in the Big Apple was over $300, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the previous year. While that has dipped slightly over the first few months of 2024, the summer tourism season is expected to bring with it another jump in prices.  

City policies, such as the “Sanctuary Hotel Program,” as reported on by the New York Times, also have contributed to the increase by shortening the supply of open rooms. When it was started in 2022, city officials said that the hotels were paid between $139 and $185 a room each night, whether or not the room is occupied. 

As The Times reports, inflation also played a role in the rising costs, even though the rate of inflation has fallen since 2022. 

Despite the high cost of accommodation, the city is anticipating around 70 million visitors this year. Hotel Association of New York City CEO Vijay Dandapani said he believes things will only get better with time.  

“At some point this migrant crisis is going to peter out,” he said, “and … you’re going to have a lowering of rates and it will become more affordable.”  

According to commercial real estate data provider CoStar, over 140 hotels have been temporarily or permanently transformed into shelters for illegal immigrants, bringing with them 16,000 rooms that are no longer available for tourists.  

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Migrants Protest for More Free Government Benefits in New York City

A group of several dozen migrants joined liberal Democrat politicians in New York City on Thursday to protest for even more government benefits for “newcomers.”

The New York Immigration Coalition joined a group of elected Democrat officials on the steps of City Hall to demand more money from the city budget to be dedicated to migrants, according to Caribbean Life.

The activists demanded an array of higher spending, including an additional $109 million for free legal services for immigrants, $5 million for language services, $25 million in support for two city programs for illegal aliens, and an end to policies that evict migrants from shelters after a prescribed time.

Council Member Alexa Avilés, for one, demanded that New York Mayor Eric Adams increase spending for migrants, and added, “Our priorities remain crystal clear: legal services, transfer schools, language justice and more.”

Council Member Shahana Hanif, who has advocated for permanent free housing for migrants, insisted that New York City should prioritize providing “quality education, good jobs, adequate healthcare, and dignified housing, reflect our unwavering commitment to building a city that uplifts all New Yorkers, regardless of their immigration status and no matter when they arrived.”

Hanif went on to claim that Biden’s tidal wave of illegal immigrants are “our new neighbors” who she claims face “roadblocks … when accessing housing, employment, and education.”

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Mayor defends NYPD response after officers seen punching pro-Palestinian protesters

New York City Mayor Eric Adams defended the police department’s response to a pro-Palestinian street demonstration in Brooklyn over the weekend, calling video of officers repeatedly punching men lying prone on the ground an “isolated incident.”

“Look at that entire incident,” Adams said on the “Mornings on 1” program on the local cable news channel NY1. He complained that protesters who marched through Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section on Saturday had blocked traffic, spit at officers and, in once instance, climbed on top of a moving city bus. “I take my hat off to the Police Department, how they handled an unruly group of people.”

“People want to take that one isolated incident that we’re investigating. They need to look at the totality of what happened in that bedroom community,” Adams added.

Footage shot by bystanders and independent journalists shows police officers intercepting a march in the street, shoving participants toward the sidewalk, and then grabbing some people in the crowd and dragging them down to the asphalt. Officers can be seen repeatedly punching at least three protesters, in separate incidents, as they lay pinned on the ground.

A video shot by videographer Peter Hambrecht and posted on X shows an officer in a white shirt punching a protester while holding his throat. Hambrecht said the arrests took place after police told the crowd to disperse.

“They were aware they might get arrested, but many times people use that to justify the beating which is obviously ridiculous,” Hambrecht told The Associated Press in a text message.

Independent journalist Katie Smith separately recorded video of an officer unleashing a volley of punches on a man pinned to the ground, hitting him at least five times with a closed fist.

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Is This Suburban New York Charity a Terrorist Front Group?

At first glance, the Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation (WESPAC) seems unremarkable: a sleepy community organization with just one part-time staffer, a modest office in White Plains, N.Y., and little by way of public events.

But the group raked in $2.4 million in 2022—more than three times as much as it raised in 2020, according to public tax filings. The charity in 2022 spent nearly $1.5 million on “office expenses,” a category the IRS says should only cover “supplies, telephone, postage.”

“This is all very strange, it seems like they’re trying to obfuscate what they’re really spending their money on,” said former IRS tax law specialist and nonprofit consultant Patrick Sternal. “This doesn’t look like a particularly transparent organization, this filing raises all sorts of questions.”

A new lawsuit could point to some answers.

In May, families of the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel filed suit against National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, both of which, the plaintiffs allege, are “collaborators and propagandists for Hamas.” Buried in the suit is a brief reference to WESPAC, which the suit names as the “official ‘fiscal sponsor'” of National Students for Justice in Palestine.

“The financial interactions between WESPAC and its anti-Israel clientele is intentionally opaque to largely shield from public view the flow of funds between and among them,” the lawsuit reads.

Fiscal sponsorships are IRS-designated arrangements in which parent organizations accept donations on behalf of their subsidiaries. Legally speaking, there is no distinction between WESPAC and National Students for Justice in Palestine. If the latter is indeed proven to be a Hamas collaborator, the former would be as well.

The IRS created the “fiscal sponsorship” designation so that established charities could help incubate new initiatives that would spin off into their own independent organizations after a certain period of time. But in recent years, fiscal sponsorships have become a critical tool for left-wing activists and donors such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar to quickly mobilize “grassroots” campaigns on hot-button issues while hiding donors behind the causes.

For decades, WESPAC’s fiscal sponsorship has helped it to avoid scrutiny leveled at similar groups. According to its annual tax filings, WESPAC is just a small charity devoted to “current affairs education.” The group has even managed to remain under the radar as fiscal sponsorships connected to the left-wing Tides Foundation have been linked to a number of illegal protests.

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Public Art Portal Intended to Dismantle Argument For Borders Needs a Border to Protect It

The Portal, a public art installation intended to demonstrate how borders hinder human affinity and connectivity, now needs a border and 24/7 security to protect it from undesirables.

Oh, the irony.

The continuous live video feed, which allows Dubliners and New Yorkers to see each other and interact, has been beset with a deluge of anti-social behavior, including people flashing their private parts and engaging in other lewd, drunken and offensive behavior.

That wasn’t the intention of the artist behind the project, with Lithuanian Benediktas Gylys asserting that, “Portals are an invitation to meet people above borders and differences and to experience our world as it really is – united and one.”

“The livestream provides a window between distant locations, allowing people to meet outside of their social circles and cultures, transcend geographical boundaries, and embrace the beauty of global interconnectedness,” he added.

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He Was Sentenced to a Decade in Prison for Having Unlicensed Weapons

A New York City man on Monday was sentenced to a decade in prison after a jury convicted him of a slew of violent felonies. Most intriguing, though, is that there were no victims because there was no violence.

Dexter Taylor, 53, was arrested in 2022 after police raided his home and found several firearms without the state-required licenses. Taylor, who works as a software engineer, had taken an interest in weapons science and started building “ghost guns”—essentially firearms made by nontraditional manufacturers. Despite Taylor’s hobby being victimless, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez brought a 37-count indictment against him.

“By assembling guns from kits, unfinished parts, or 3D printed components, those who possess ghost guns evade critically important background checks and registration requirements, and because they have no serial number they are untraceable,” he said in a press release at the time. “The surge in ghost guns in our neighborhoods is a major contributor to the violence plaguing our communities and my Office is working tirelessly to stop their proliferation in Brooklyn.”

It’s difficult to know whether or not the latter claim—that ghost guns are at the root of Brooklyn’s gun violence—is true. Beyond dispute, however, is that Taylor did not contribute to those statistics because he didn’t harm anyone. Nevertheless, a jury convicted him of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and violating the prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Many of those charges are violent felonies under New York law, even though they’re essentially paperwork violations.

Especially ironic is that Gonzalez promised to lead “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country.” Ensuring that a man serves substantial prison time for crimes that hurt no one does not strike me as particularly progressive. The decadelong sentence should “send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons,” said Gonzalez on Monday. 

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