Georgia Grand Jury Indictment Released Before Grand Jury Indicted Trump
“Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”
By Daniel Greenfield
“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.” – Alice in Wonderland
Last week, I noted how worthless grand jury verdicts were.
The grand jury process is now so routinized in most state jurisdictions that it has become a pro forma proceeding to deliver an indictment for a prosecutor. It is for this reason that most lawyers say, repeating the famous expression of the former chief judge of the highest New York state court, Sol Wachtler, that prosecutors can get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.” According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”
The Georgia rates are not so far different. A reality that was brought home when the Trump indictment in Georgia appeared on the site even before the grand jury appears to have made it.
Rubber stamps don’t get much more rubbery than that.
Rather than address the reality of this, the media is in full swing accusing Reuters of perpetrating a right-wing conspiracy. No seriously, this is what the New York Times is going with.
The source of confusion was a two-page document that Reuters said was available on the court’s website. The document appeared to list multiple charges against Mr. Trump.
Reuters then reported that the document was taken down from the court’s website, and said in an updated article that the news organization “was not immediately able to determine why the item was posted or removed.”
Hours later, the court clerk’s office issued a news release referring to a “fictitious document that has been circulated online and reported by various media outlets.”
“While there have been no documents filed today regarding such, all members of the media should be reminded that documents that do not bear an official case number, filing date, and the name of The Clerk of Courts, in concert, are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such,” the office said in the statement.
Reuters did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
I wonder why. But whom are you going to believe, your own eyes and a respected news agency…or the New York Times?
The Times quotes a Georgia court statement that essentially admits the document was genuine while denying it at the same time with the handy assertion that, “documents that do not bear an official case number, filing date, and the name of The Clerk of Courts, in concert, are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such.”
The simple question is whether the document is fake and not representative of the actual charges. The Times doesn’t bother to comment on it but strongly suggests that Reuters faked the document for some reason. This is the level of posterior protection that validating the lynch mob of clowns requires.
But sure we can trust the media. And the same court system that does this. We can trust them all.