THE CENTER SQUARE—Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Tuesday that his office will oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss his felony conviction in New York. Bragg said that despite plans to oppose Trump’s motion, his office would agree to hit pause on the proceedings pending the judge’s decision on Trump’s motion to dismiss. Bragg also suggested the case could wait until Trump finishes his term in the White House.  “No current law establishes that a president’s temporary immunity from prosecution requires dismissal of a post-trial criminal proceeding that was initiated at a time when the defendant was not immune from criminal prosecution and that is based on unofficial conduct for which the defendant is also not immune,” Bragg wrote in a letter to Judge Juan Merchan. “Rather, existing law suggests that the court must balance competing constitutional interests and proceed ‘in a manner that preserves both the independence of the executive and the integrity of the criminal justice system.'” In late May, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump on all counts in his ‘hush money’ case. Trump was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records for disguising hush money payments to an adult film actress as legal costs ahead of the 2016 election. Under New York state law, falsifying business records in the first degree is a Class E felony with a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Trump and his attorneys want the judge to dismiss the case based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity decision. In July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents and former presidents have absolute immunity for actions related to core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for official actions. The ruling said the president has no immunity for unofficial conduct. Bragg said Tuesday that the case could remain on pause through the end of Trump’s second term. Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the two-way race for the White House. He will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025. “Given the need to balance competing constitutional interests, consideration must be given to various non-dismissal options that may address any concerns raised by the pendency of a post-trial criminal proceeding during the presidency, such as deferral of all remaining criminal proceedings until after the end of defendant’s upcoming presidential term,” Bragg wrote. New York District Attorney letterDownload Originally published by The Center Square. The post Bragg Won’t Drop Trump’s ‘Hush Money’ Sentencing, But May Suspend It for 4 Years appeared first on The Daily Signal.

RFK in the Crosshairs of Democrats, Big Pharma, and Big Food

For years, New York Times reporters used their “reporting” to encourage social media companies to drive conservatives off of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook through blacklisting, censorship, hysterical fearmongering over what liberals consider “misinformation,” even attempts to eavesdrop on suspected gatherings of wrong-think. “Journalist” Taylor Lorenz in particular longed to play social media hall monitor, lamenting in February 2021 that one couldn’t listen in on private conversations taking place within online apps like Clubhouse [remember Clubhouse?]. Now, with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and Trump’s Truth Social, one of those would be monitors, San Francisco-based reporter Sheera Frenkel, whined that the left has no safe sandbox left to play in. Check out this headline deck: “Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right -- If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was the ascendancy of social platforms for the right. That puts Democrats at a disadvantage.” Do violins come that small? After Donald J. Trump won the election this month, his supporters gravitated to a panoply of online destinations to celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of posts lauding Mr. Trump’s victory filled Truth Social, the social platform that the president-elect owns. Speculation about what the new administration would accomplish ran rampant on X, which is owned by Elon Musk. Gab, Parler and other right-wing social media sites were flooded with thousands of memes glorifying Mr. Trump. No similar spaces existed for the left. Meta’s Instagram, Threads and Facebook had publicly de-emphasized politics leading up to the election. Mr. Musk had transformed Twitter into X and shifted it to the right. And no other tech platform had gained momentum as a public square for liberals. But not for lack of trying: Economist turned Democratic hack Paul Krugman has devoted a couple of Times columns to trying to escape Elon Musk. If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right. While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations. The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago. (Decisions strongly supported by the censor supporters at the Times, including Frenkel.) After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Facebook and Twitter booted Mr. Trump and his far-right supporters from their platforms. In response, Mr. Trump and his allies, who accused the tech companies of censorship, flocked to or started their own social media sites that promoted conservative causes. By the time the mainstream platforms allowed Mr. Trump and other right-wing figures to return, they had increased their online followings and influence. Frenkel noted that Facebook and Twitter “removed the accounts of militia groups that had participated in the riot and other far-right supporters of the 'Stop the Steal; movement,” and also froze Trump’s personal accounts, causing conservatives to migrate to Gab and Parler. It seems that once the political censorship slowed, social media becomes a more hospitable place for conservatives. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, became less political. In January 2020, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors that he was “considering steps” to reduce political content on Facebook. Over the next four years, he disbanded the company’s election integrity team, which focused on securing information around elections, and removed tools that allowed researchers and reporters to track misinformation. Frenkel pushed the left’s latest idea of a social media safe space: the X-like platform Bluesky. On Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, lauded Bluesky as a welcoming place. “A thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism,” she wrote. Actually, it sounds like a censorious leftist hellhole. After the post-election influx, the “Bluesky Safety” team reported: “In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports.” Sounds like lefty-on-lefty infighting already. Here's Jordan Schachtel of The Dossier, commenting on Bluesky under the email subject line: “I got banned from BlueSky for committing wrongthink,” wrote: “Far from its corporate media-advertised depiction as a place for joy and friendly conversation. BlueSky is a safe space for seething left-wingers to engage exclusively with their political allies and to rage at their perceived enemies.”

Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York blamed a Jewish lobbying group for the Democratic Party's woes in the election and got nailed with online backlash. Ocasio-Cortez posted the missive on social media in an attempt to steer the liberal in-fighting against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group. 'Scapegoating the Jews for one’s failure is unreflective and a truly pathetic and ugly tactic.' "If people want to talk about members of Congress being overly influenced by a special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats then they should be discussing AIPAC," said Ocasio-Cortez in response to a senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The congresswoman was immediately assailed by those who perceived the criticism as motivated by anti-Semitism. "Unsurprising, but still deeply concerning to see AOC react to the election by blaming @AIPAC for 'overly influencing' Congress and falsely claiming that supporting Israel is 'wildly unpopular.' Scapegoating the Jews for one’s failure is unreflective and a truly pathetic and ugly tactic," responded Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. "Many lessons should be learned from the results of the 2024 election. If the only lesson learned by @AOC is to blame the Jews and Israel, then she deserves to be called out for trafficking in Antisemitism," replied Newsweek contributor Joel Petlin. "There is a critical conversation to be had about AIPAC. But so singularly focusing on them here - when there are a number of special interest groups that operate the same way - plays into dangerous tropes," said Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Ocasio-Cortez has been accused of anti-Semitism before, but she has also been excoriated by the far left for not being sufficiently anti-Israel. In October, the Democratic Socialists of America, the congresswoman's party, said it was going to take a vote to censure her for daring to approve of bills in Congress affirming Israel's right to exist. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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