Even after a Manhattan kangaroo court found former President Donald Trump guilty of Frankensteinian charges, Judge Juan Merchan refuses to lift a gag order on the GOP’s presidential candidate.
The highly partisan judge slapped the gag order on Trump in March, barring him from speaking publicly about prosecutors, witnesses, jurors, and others in the trumped-up case against him. In short, Merchan has silenced Trump’s ability to speak out against what the former president has often described as a “witch hunt” against him.
That’s a distinct disadvantage when your political opponent is campaigning on the long list of felony charges against you — charges your political opponent’s agents and allies have brought.
The Silent Treatment
Merchan’s gag order has only been so effective, of course. Trump is not the silent type. He has defied the order multiple times and been fined the maximum $1,000 for each of the 10 violations. That’s chump change to Trump. But the judge also has threatened to imprison the former president for speaking out, insisting that Trump’s criticism of the leftist-led legal process is a threat to the people he’s criticizing.
As Forbes reported, the left’s Public Enemy No. 1 “appeared to push the limits of the order in his remarks on Friday even as he repeatedly noted he was restricted in what he could say…” Trump called serial liar and prosecution star witness Michael Cohen a “sleazebag” without naming his disgraced former attorney.
Trump, too, is being silenced in a separate gag order in the stalled federal prosecution on allegations that he tried to “overturn the 2020 election” — a case led by Biden’s Department of Justice. As Forbes reported, Trump and other parties in the case are prohibited from publicly talking about witnesses “concerning their potential participation in the investigation or in this criminal proceeding.”
“Parties also cannot make public statements about court staff, counsel in the case or their families (with the exception of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who’s leading the government’s investigation) if they’re ‘made with the intent to materially interfere,’” the publication reported.
The gaggers insist the orders are meant to protect the government officials working the case. They just happen to have the added benefit to the people in power of silencing Democrat President Joe Biden’s Republican challenger — on penalty of jail.
‘Darkest’ Doe
Several conservatives in Wisconsin can relate. They went through years of hell during the Badger State’s John Doe investigation, an unconstitutional star chamber led by leftist bureaucrats and highly partisan Democrat prosecutors.
The second wave of the bogus campaign finance violation investigations culminated with a series of predawn, armed raids on the homes and offices of conservative activists. On Oct. 3, 2013, law enforcement agents were ordered to collect “evidence” in what has been described as one of the darkest chapters in Wisconsin history. As the MacIver Institute reported:
Armed police demanded a 16-year-old boy, home alone, open the door so that agents engaged in an unconstitutional investigation could root through his parents’ possessions … [A} suburban Madison mom was awakened by sounds in the darkness. Moments later, her children woke up to armed deputies standing over their beds. On Oct. 3, 2013, the politically driven probe known as ‘John Doe II’ exhibited the full force of prosecutorial abuse, exhibiting why this secret investigation marked one of the darkest chapters in Wisconsin history.
It all started a few years before. A nebulous, secret probe, the John Doe investigations were really just a court-sanctioned cover to go after then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican hated by the left for gutting the outsized power of Wisconsin’s public sector labor unions.
It was launched by Milwaukee County’s Democrat District Attorney John Chisholm and his band of constitution-breaking merry men. The probe ultimately was expanded into a wider statewide net backed by a legally flawed reading of campaign finance law and an abusive state election regulator filled with partisan agents.
Secret Power
The Wisconsin Supreme Court in July 2015 finally ended the overreaching probe, finding that John Doe prosecutors had engaged in a “perfect storm of wrongs.” That ruling, which found sweeping abuses of the victims’ First Amendment rights, was rendered after years of fear and mountains of legal bills.
Targets of the secret probe faced $10,000 fines and six months in jail for saying anything publicly about the raids, the government spying operations that stole their personal and professional emails, the charges against them, or anything related to the case — including their innocence. The John Doe prosecutors, too, faced the same penalties, but details about the alleged illegal activities curiously kept appearing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other corporate media outlets during Walker’s reelection year.
As MacIver reported:
Children subjected to government raids before the break of dawn were told that they and their parents could go to jail if they told anyone about the John Doe investigation.
National Review’s David French wrote about a 16-year-old who was home alone when John Doe investigators came pounding on his door.
‘To his horror, he saw uniformed officers, their guns drawn. ‘Police,’ they yelled. ‘We have a warrant.’ An officer shined a flashlight on a document (he) couldn’t read. Unsure what to do, but unwilling to defy the authorities, he let them in,’ French wrote.
The officers sat him down, read him the entire search warrant, and ordered him not to tell anyone about the raid — not even school officials. He asked if he could call his parents. They said no. He asked if he could call a lawyer. They said no.’
Investigators then rooted through the family’s home looking for evidence of a political crime, French wrote.
John Doe ‘Writ Large’
Ultimately, the corrupt Government Accountability Board, the state’s campaign finance and election regulator that helped drive the John Doe probes, was shut down and the state’s constitutionally suspect John Doe law reformed. Republicans in power, of course, replaced the GAB with agencies populated by some of the same bureaucrats who pushed the John Doe probes.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, was a state senator at the time of the state Supreme Court’s ruling. He was instrumental in leading the reforms of the law and agency that created the unconstitutional John Doe investigations. As Trump was beginning his presidential term among the chaos of the leftists who vowed to take him down, Tiffany offered a prediction that turned out to be shockingly prescient.
“What happened in Wisconsin … is being writ large across the country,” Tiffany told me.
John Doe is alive and well in the government’s prosecution of Donald J. Trump.
