Reader says trial had one purpose

To the editor:

This is truly an unusual presidential election.

We have an innocent convicted felon running against a guilty unindicted felon.

I was very interested in what the news service had to say about the conviction in Saturday’s paper. It is a shame they only printed part of the story.

They quoted the prosecutor saying, “While the defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at the verdict in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts and law and doing so without fear or favor.”

One wonders how he kept a straight face when he told that whopper.

Democrat Alvin Bragg campaigned for office on finding some way to get former president Donald Trump. That is not the way our criminal justice system is supposed to work. He brought the case in the bluest Democrat district in the country with a handpicked Democrat judge whose daughter was using the trial to fundraise for the Democrats. Any honest judge would have recused himself and granted a change of venue.

The judge used a gag order to unconstitutionally silence Trump while allowing witnesses he couldn’t mention to be on CNN and MSDNC every day running him down.

They had two days of sex talk from a porn star that had no bearing on the actual charge but the judge would not allow the former head of the Federal Election Commission to testify on the actual election law.

The No. 3 person in the President Joe Biden Department of Justice left to help prosecute the case.

The Constitution guarantees a defendant the right to know the charges against him. The specific federal crimes the jury needed to find Trump guilty of were never specified, no elements of the crimes were provided to the jury and no evidence that Trump met any of the elements was ever provided. But they found him guilty of some unknown federal crime anyway. And did I mention that the state court has no jurisdiction over federal crimes?

Even worse, the Supreme Court has ruled that a jury must be unanimous but the judge said they could find Trump guilty of any of four federal crimes and they didn’t even have to agree on which one or even say which ones they used.

The conviction will clearly be overturned but probably not till after the election. And, of course, that was the only reason for this show trial — election interference and being able to call Trump a convicted felon.

Stephen Erwin

Portland