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(Photo by Brendan McDermid-Pool/Getty Images)
It’s so fun to pay your lawyers with other people’s money! You just send out a dozen lurid emails a day insisting that “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you!” and watch the money roll in. Then your attorneys can docket pointless motion after pointless motion — sometimes even filing the same motion twice! — for all eternity.
In that vein, Trump’s lawyers once again moved to recuse Justice Juan Merchan last week, a mere 12 days before the start of the trial for creating false business records to cover up the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels in 2016. The motion was “renewed,” by which they mean it “repeated the same stuff we said back in May of 2023, just louder this time.”
The former president first moved for recusal last year on the grounds that Justice Merchan’s daughter works for a Democratic political communications firm which produces targeted advertising an emails which sometimes mention Trump’s criminal woes, from which they inferred that she would financially benefit from his conviction in the case. For good measure, they also whined about the judge being mean to Trump organization CFO Allen Weisselberg during his tax evasion trial.
Prior to that motion, the judge sua sponte consulted the state’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which told him:
[T]he matter currently before the judge does not involve either the judge’s relative or the relative’s business, whether directly or indirectly. They are not parties or likely witnesses in the matter, and none of the parties or counsel before the judge are clients of the business. We see nothing in the inquiry to suggest that the outcome of the case could have any effect on the judge’s relative, the relative’s business, or any of their interests.
We also note that, notwithstanding the strict limits on a judge’s own political activities, a judge’s relatives remain free to engage in their own bona fide independent political activities. A relative’s independent political activities do not provide a reasonable basis to question the judge’s impartiality.
Justice Merchan denied the motion in August, writing that “The speculative and hypothetical scenarios offered by Defendant fall well short of the legal standard” for recusal.
But as the old saying goes … if at first you don’t succeed (and have access to unlimited PAC money), try, try again.
So on the eve of trial, Trump’s lawyers have repeated their motion for recusal because everything is different now.
How is it different? Well …
President Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee and leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election. His success in the primaries, which followed the Court’s ruling on the previous recusal motion, has cemented his status as a political target of [the judge’s daughter and her employer].
Also, one time Justice Merchan gave an interview to the AP where he said he wouldn’t talk about the Trump case, but told reporters that “There’s no agenda here. We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”
Plus, a court spokesman has made clear that the judge’s daughter has nothing to do with an anti-Trump Twitter account using a handle she abandoned and deleted. But Trump and his supporters have repeatedly lied about it, sowing doubt in the public mind, so the judge must recuse to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Obviously!
The District Attorney’s Office was not amused, writing that “Defendant’s rewarmed arguments identify no new law or fact that calls into question this Court’s prior conclusion” and that the entire exercise is “nothing more than his latest effort to delay the forthcoming trial” and “provide an ex-post justification for defendant’s attacks on the Court and the Court’s family.”
“This Court should reject defendant’s dilatory tactic and deny the motion,” they concluded.
Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are doing their level best to make every story obsolete before it’s even published. Even as we type, the New York Times reports that they’ve filed two emergency appeals: One is characterized as a challenge to the gag order and a request to delay the trial set to begin in a week, and the other is a request to change venue. The matters are currently sealed, according to the Times.
We’d call it a last ditch effort, but there are probably seven or eight more ditches to go before this trial gets underway. Keep digging, counselors!
People v. Trump [Case Documents via Just Security]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
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