Trump's bad call on the judge in the Trump U case

Leon Wolf:
Donald Trump says, racistly, that Judge Gonzalo Curiel cannot give him a fair hearing in court because he is of Mexican heritage. Specifically, Trump says that the reason Curiel (and presumably all other persons of Mexican heritage) cannot be trusted to give him a fair hearing is because he, Donald Trump, is so tough on the border, since he’s promised to build a wall.

Here is what we are learning about Gonzalo Curiel: I don’t know what kind of judge he is and maybe he really is liberal. I have seen no evidence offered of that other than the fact that he has ruled against Trump and his lawyers, but maybe it is true.

One thing we DO know is that Curiel is kind of a badass, and has done more to actually fight border crime than Donald Trump could ever dream of. Curiel, in fact, was so hated as a prosecutor by the Mexican cartels that they tried to have him assassinated:

For much of a year, Gonzalo P. Curiel, then a federal prosecutor in California, lived officially in hiding.

He hunkered down for a while on a naval base and in other closely guarded locations under the protection of United States marshals. Even his siblings did not know exactly where he was at times.

The reason: In a secretly taped conversation inside a San Diego prison, a man accused of being a gunman for a Mexican drug cartel said that he had received permission from his superiors to have Mr. Curiel assassinated.

How gung ho was Curiel to put cartel members behind bars? He notoriously argued in court that information that was (almost certainly) obtained by torture in Mexico should be admissible in U.S. Courts to help convict these thugs....
...
If Trump were not so rich, he would be a terrible client.  He is making the work of his lawyers much harder with his attacks on the judge.  Trump's contempt could cause serious repercussions in a trial.  If Trump had any evidence that Judge Curiel was acting on some political bias, his lawyers could file a motion for recusal which could be appealed.  That they have not suggests Trump just sees any adverse ruling as bias.  There is a big difference between a disagreement on a point of law or procedure and bias.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more