Turley also celebrated the Supreme Court decision “that states are not going to be able to unilaterally cleanse their ballots, not just of Trump.”
It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley. As I’ve previously written, (h/t to a colleague at Crooks and Liars) “legal analyst” Jonathan Turley is not actually paid for legal analysis but to put forward serious-sounding legal rationales for Fox propaganda. So, I always find it partly amusing, but frightening overall, to watch this constitutional law professor twist himself into a pretzel promoting what he surely knows is not just undemocratic but outright dangerous to our democracy.
On Fox & Friends this morning, Turley discussed Trump’s post-Super Tuesday lock on the Republican nomination and how that may affect his legal troubles and vice versa. Turley tacitly acknowledged that Trump’s campaign of grievance leaves something to be desired and that he did something terribly wrong on January 6, but buried it all with anti-Democratic punditry.
TURLEY: There's that old expression, right? - that generals too often prepare to fight the last war instead of the next war. So, I think that one of the questions is, is [Trump] going to pivot now?
The Democrats have given him in some ways a political favor with all of these charges, right? They bulldozed any moral high ground they had after January 6, with a ballot cleansing and all of the lawsuits and the astronomical damages. I think the public gets it. I mean, there is a certain victimology that is brought into this campaign that is real, right, is legitimate.
The question is whether he can sort of stand tall in front of that storm, you know, I think that he has to be able to offer something other than you know, this is a way to throw a grenade into the establishment. He has that, I mean, I think that we saw that in 2016.
But I think that what we're really going to see with Haley's departure is this vacuum that is now that he's standing alone, now that he will most certainly be the nominee, will he offer something beyond the fact that we have to fight what they're doing or what they have done? And I think he's started to see that but we're waiting for some details.
Actually we know plenty of details. Turley completely ignored Trump hoping to be “a dictator on Day One,” his plan to round up immigrants and put them in, essentially, concentration camps and his autocratic plan to install loyalists and eliminate a lot of checks and balances on presidential power. Not surprisingly, none of the four Fox & Friends cohosts, including "tough journalist wannabe" Ainsley Earhardt, enlightened their viewers about any of that either.
Instead, Turley feigned ignorance about Trump’s planned attack on democracy and the Constitution.
TURLEY: You know, he's gonna have a new administration. You have a new attorney general, a new secretary of state, what is the mandate he's gonna give them? I think that's what a lot of people want to want to hear.
Rather than discuss the plans that would surely horrify at least some Fox viewers if they fully understood them, cohost Lawrence Jones quickly steered Turley into bashing the criminal trials coming up. Nobody seemed to care about how serious the 91 felony charges against Trump are. “Don’t [the judges] have a duty to let the candidate run his race and not be in court? Do you see a change in some of these judges?” Jones “asked.”
Sure enough, Turley took the hint.
TURLEY: Well, I think that is really the difficult question here. The Supreme Court handed down what I consider to be one of the most important decisions of the history of that institution. It told American citizens and and they took that to heart yesterday that they will choose their next leader, that states are not going to be able to unilaterally cleanse their ballots, not just of Trump. Many Democrats have called for the removal of up to 200 Republicans from ballots. So that's not going to happen.
Trumpists are hard at work scrubbing Democrats from voter rolls in swing states. But nobody said a word about that, natch.
So Turley continued by pre-delegitimizing Judge Tanya Chutkan, presiding over Trump’s Washington, D.C. election interference case, as unethical and biased:
TURLEY: But the real question is what these trial judges are going to do. Judge Chutkan in D.C. said, “I'm not going to consider at all that you're running for president.” And that surprised a lot of us because if this, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on immunity and sends that mandate back to the district court, and she decides to put the pedal to the metal, and actually hold a trial before the election, that trial could conceivably go through the election.
Turley went on to call it “really shocking” that special prosecutor Jack Smith also doesn’t think the DOJ’s so-called “60-day rule” of not taking action against a candidate 60 days before an election applies to the case. Turley made it sound as though Smith and Chutkan are going rogue and thumbing their noses at DOJ policy. Which is not what happened.
FACT CHECK: As ABC News explained, the so-called “60-day rule” is not a rule at all, but sort of a general expectation, and more importantly, is probably understood “to relate to ‘investigative steps’ or prosecutorial decisions.” Furthermore, it does not apply to the federal judiciary.
In other words, Smith and Chutkan have good arguments that it’s not applicable to the two federal cases against Trump brought last summer. Turley could have argued against their reasoning but he didn’t. He chose to smear them as cavalierly violating Trump’s rights if Chutkan goes forward before the election.
TURLEY: I think that the really shocking aspect is that Smith filed with the court and said, I don't consider myself bound by that long-standing policy. And I am just, I am not going to be restricted by that. The question is whether the trial judge in D.C. is going to say, "Look, okay, enough. I mean, I gave you one of the fastest tracks." I've seen - like I practice in D.C. I've never seen a case like this, get scheduled for trial in this speed. As a criminal defense attorney, my hair would catch on fire if a judge said, “You know what, I'm going to give you a couple of months pre-trial, and we're going to rush this thing through."
…
You know, there's all this talk about how much money the Trump campaign has. Every time he shows up in a courtroom, he's on all the networks and the optics are good for him. Because every time he's on it's a different city. It's a different case. And I don't think the American people like that. I think that they feel like the establishment, once again, is putting a thumb on the scale, and I think that will get worse as it goes forward.
I’ll bet the American people don’t want an insurrectionist or a classified document thief back in the White House. But Turley knows his job is not to inform viewers but to help elect Trump.
You can watch it below, from the March 6, 2024 Fox & Friends.
The reality is that Turley has been shamelessly deflecting for Little Trump for years, and his latest antics are only the most current examples we have.
Turley is understandably afraid of what will happen when Little Trump is actually being tried in court for his multiple felony crimes. And Turley is even more afraid of what will happen with voters when they are informed that the GOP is trying to support a man who is soon to be a convicted felon.
So Turley is supporting the various games that Little Trump’s unpaid attorneys are playing to try to run out the clock and keep any of the prosecutions from getting to trial before November.
What’s actually happening is that Little Trump’s hush-money trial in NYC will begin in two weeks. His RICO trial in Georgia looks like it’s going in the summer, after the judge bats away the nonsensical attempted smears that Right Wingers flung at the DA there. The Supreme Court will hear Little Trump’s outlandish claims of total immunity in another month or so and give their opinion likely in June, which will set up the DC January 6 trial to go by late summer. And that doesn’t even get into the stolen documents case.
Whether Turley likes it or not, the wheels of justice are not going to stop turning just because Little Trump wants to pretend he’s being persecuted rather than being prosecuted.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a4b98bb3947d42af9ec83d7db
Trump is out on bail in the Georgia election rigging criminal case.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/us/trump-bail-georgia-election-case.html