Dumb as a bag
of gavels

Little League baseball is nobody’s idea of a legal education, but wisdom can be delivered in strange shapes and places, including the bleecher seats at the Stuyvesant Town housing complex’s diamond on the East Side. It was there some 30-odd years ago, while watching my kid play at being Babe Ruth, that I made the acquaintance of a Wall Street lawyer and fellow parent. We stayed in touch off and on, and now that I’ve moved into a three-month sublet on the Upper West Side, he was one of the first people I called.

“How do you explain Judge Merchan?” I asked him. Like most lawyers everywhere, he is a fount of gossip, much of it caustic, and didn’t mind in the least speculating about the judge who shaped both trial and guilty verdict in Donald Trump’s so-called ‘hush money’ case. His appraisal of the judge was as simple as things get in New York City: “They needed someone to make the conviction happen, and he was willing to do it.”

That’s why, my friend continued, Merchan was specifically slotted to oversee all three Manhattan trials involving Trump and/or his associates, notably that of Steve Bannon. “The smart judges would have run a mile, but Merchan isn’t smart, so they’ve loaded all the Trump cases on him to get the convictions.”

That the guilty verdict would be overturned — eventually — was inevitable on any number of grounds, my friend said, first of all for Merchan’s campaign contributions to Democrats and, second, daughter Loren’s lobbying firm using the trial as fundraiser that is reported to have raised some $90 million for Democrats. That’s the father-and-daughter fund-raisers atop this column. But that reversal, he cautioned, likely wouldn’t come until the case escaped the jurisdiction of Democrat-appointed New York State judges and made it into a federal court.

“Check out the first appellate court he’s likely to face — no sympathy to be found there.”

Those judges — five female ‘diversity’ jurists, all hot from the Democratic clubhouse, are pictured below. — roger franklin