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May 21, 2024, 7:17 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
An Attack on Justice Merchan Is an Attack on the Rule of Law
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No fair-minded person sitting in the courtroom of the Trump felony trial can doubt that Justice Juan Merchan is a wise, impartial and fair judge. He proved it again on Tuesday when he held an important “charging conference” to determine how he will instruct the jury before it begins deliberating next week.
That’s why I was so appalled to see House Speaker Mike Johnson standing outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse last week denouncing the trial as a “travesty of justice.” Echoing Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called the judge “corrupt” and the whole thing “rigged,” the speaker said he was “disgusted” by the trial, though he clearly knows almost nothing about it.
This kind of talk is not only wrong, it’s a threat to the integrity of the American judiciary, which, for all its faults, is the crown jewel of our constitutional system. Johnson, second in line to the presidency, is using some kind of authoritarian playbook when he assaults another branch of government. When an independent judiciary dies, so does democracy.
Inside the courtroom, my go-to guy is Judge George Grasso, retired from the New York bench, who is attending the trial as a spectator.
“This judge is evenhanded,” Grasso told me at the end of the day. “He makes rulings sometimes for the benefit of one side, sometimes for the other. He’s very careful on the facts and everyone has the opportunity to be heard. Even if he’s decided already,” Grasso said, referring to pretrial motions, “he’s willing to listen.”
I got up to leave but Grasso, a former deputy New York police commissioner, wasn’t finished yet, adding: “To attack him is to attack the rule of law.”
Merchan’s Solomonic nature was in evidence Tuesday as he discussed with lawyers for both sides how he will instruct the jury.
On the critical issue of “accessorial liability” — how responsible Trump should be given his distance from the Trump Organization’s bookkeeping department — Merchan said he would instruct the jurors that they “need not to be unanimous on whether the defendant” is liable on each element of the case, though they do have to be unanimous on the overall verdict. This was a win for the prosecution. So was his ruling that the jury will be instructed that “intent to defraud can extend beyond economic concerns.”
At the same time, Merchan seemed to be leaning toward the defense in limiting how far the prosecution could go in pushing accessorial liability. When the district attorney’s office sought to broaden the concept, Merchan said that would mean a “material change” in the state statute and he would not use it in his instructions. And he reserved judgment on the extent to which Trump’s violations of tax laws can be brought into the case.
We won’t know until later this week exactly what the judge’s instructions to the jury will be. But we do know this: When you trash a judge like Merchan, you’re trashing America.
May 21, 2024, 5:08 p.m. ET
Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist
The Viral Defiance of Jasmine Crockett
Why, exactly, was Marjorie Taylor Greene’s dig at Jasmine Crockett’s fake eyelashes so upsetting?
The two members of the House Oversight Committee tore into each other last week in a verbal assault that was widely seen as a new low for personal relationships in this polarized Congress. Greene began the descent by saying to Crockett that her “fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
For Crockett, it was about much more than a rules violation for attacking another member’s physical appearance. For her, it was an insinuation of inferiority.
As Crockett told me, “It triggered me because MAGA is constantly on social media doing all these wild memes about my lashes and talking about my nails.” She continued, “They call me ghetto trash and D.E.I. hire.”
Greene, in that moment, became the personification of her online harassment, Crockett said.
“I interpreted that as not, ‘oh girl, you don’t need to wear lashes because you’re more than enough and you’re beautiful,’” she said, “I interpreted that as, ‘you’re basically like, oh, you ghetto piece of trash.’”
So, Crockett shot back with her one insult about Greene’s appearance, asking the committee chairman, “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”
The alliteration became a viral sensation. People made songs about it. Crockett herself is making apparel featuring the phrase, and she moved to trademark the term.
Crockett has gained a reputation for producing such moments. But the incident also speaks to the nature of the modern Congress, in which spectacle generates its own form of power, in which being a social media clip star is just as important as being an advancer of legislation.
This is not to defend Greene in any way. She is a bully who has proved to be a bona fide stunt queen, exploiting outrage for personal advancement. I think Crockett was right when she told me, “People have really been waiting on someone to put her in her place, because she’s been so out of place and so outlandish this entire time.”
And yet, going toe to toe and tit for tat with someone like Greene is also to descend into chaos, and ultimately into indecorous absurdities, because that is precisely where Greene is most comfortable.
Even Crockett concedes that the clipbait-ification of Congress is a bad thing, saying, “I really dislike that social media and virality is playing a part in legislating.”
But she offered an explanation for her own actions: “I don’t try to create these moments, but I think that what’s happening is that Democrats have been craving someone who would be responsive in the moment to misinformation and disinformation and do it in a very forceful way.”
In her view, it is the motivation that matters most: standing for truth vs. standing for institutional and societal degradation.
The problem is that the country has been lied to so often and for so long that many people can only see their party’s representatives on the noble side of that equation.
May 21, 2024, 1:20 p.m. ET
Zeynep Tufekci
Opinion Columnist
Scarlett Johansson’s Voice Isn’t the Only Thing A.I. Companies Want
When OpenAI introduced its virtual assistant, Sky, last week, many gasped. It sounded just like Scarlett Johansson, who had famously played an artificial intelligence voice assistant in the movie “Her.”
On the surface, the choice made sense: Last year, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, had named it his favorite science fiction movie, even posting the single word “her” around the assistant’s debut.
OpenAI approached Johansson to be the voice for its virtual assistant, and she turned it down. The company approached her again two days before the debut of Sky, but this time, she said in a blistering statement, it didn’t even wait for her official “no” before releasing a voice that sounds so similar to hers that it even fooled her friends and family.
In response to Johansson’s scathing letter, OpenAI claimed that the voice was someone else and “was never intended to resemble hers,” but it took Sky down anyway.
The A.I. industry is built on grabbing our data — the output that humanity has collectively produced: books, art, music, blog posts, social media, videos — and using it to train their models, from which they then make money or use as they wish. For the most part, A.I. companies haven’t asked or paid the people who created the data they grab and whose actual employment and future are threatened by the models trained on it.
Politicians haven’t stepped in to ask why humanity’s collective output should be usurped and monopolized by a handful of companies. They’ve practically let the industry do what it wants for decades.
I am someone who believes in the true upside of technology, including A.I. But amid all the lofty talk about its transformational power, these companies are perpetuating an information grab, a money grab and a “break the rules and see what we can get away with” mentality that’s worked very well for them for the past few decades.
Altman, it seems, liked Johansson’s voice, so the company made a simulacrum of it. Why not?
When you’re a tech industry star, they let you do anything.
May 21, 2024, 11:14 a.m. ET
Serge Schmemann
Editorial Board Member
Why the Crash in Iran Was Almost Certainly an Accident
When the first reports came out on Sunday that a helicopter carrying the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, had gone down, the first question on most minds was probably, “Who did it?”
That’s not a far-fetched question. Only last month, several senior Iranian officers were killed in a drone strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, Syria — a hit broadly attributed to Israel, though Israel rarely acknowledges such things. And in 2020 the United States acknowledged responsibility for the drone strike that killed Qassim Suleimani, a powerful Iranian general.
This time, however, the United States and Israel were quick to say: Not us. Washington even expressed “condolences” after it was confirmed that Raisi had died. Iran was equally quick to declare that the crash, in foggy mountains, was indeed an accident and even reportedly asked the United States for help in locating it.
None of that reflected a change of heart or a disavowal of targeted killing as a clandestine tool or any regret outside Iran over the death of Raisi and his foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, who was also killed in the crash. Both were full-blooded members of the Iranian theocracy, dedicated to its ruthless suppression of any dissent and its proxy wars, especially against Israel. Raisi, in fact, was discussed as a likely successor to the 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian exiles were reported to have celebrated their deaths in London and elsewhere.
But Iran, already deeply enmeshed in the Israeli conflict through its support for Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen, only recently risked getting into a major direct war with Israel by launching a massive wave of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for the bombing of its Damascus embassy. Accusing Israel or the United States of the killing of the Iranian president would have risked a far more fateful exchange, which no one wanted at this juncture.
Besides, Raisi and Amir Abdollahian probably did not figure high on the American or Israeli enemies list, even if the president was a candidate for supreme leadership. However repugnant, both were tools of the theocracy, not architects of the nuclear, regional or domestic policies that they brutally enforced.
The broad consensus in the immediate aftermath of their deaths was that nothing much would change. There were plenty of other hard-liners lined up to succeed Khamenei, including his son Mojtaba Khamenei, and none of them suggested a promising future for Iran. The only immediate question was how many — or, more accurately, how few — Iranians would show up for the “election” of the next president picked by the supreme leader.
A correction was made on
May 21, 2024
:
An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the drone strike that killed Qassim Suleimani. It was 2020, not 2000.
How we handle corrections
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May 21, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
Romaissaa Benzizoune
Opinion Editorial Fellow
For Kendrick and Drake, Family Matters
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Weeks after the rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake began — triggered by competing claims to greatness — listeners are still electrified. There’s a general agreement that Lamar won, whether because of his masterly storytelling, triple entendres that stretch the horizons of meaning, or flow that feels like the sonic equivalent of an ice bath.
There’s also the fact that some of his most successful, emotionally resonant bars argue that his opponent has failed as a father, son and romantic partner. In one of the catchiest verses in “euphoria,” Lamar accuses Drake of knowing nothing about raising a son. He also raps as a sort of warning, while using coded Canadian slang for “bro”: “It can get deep in the family, crodie / Talk about me and my family, crodie? / Someone gon’ bleed in your family, crodie.” Days later, Drake dropped “Family Matters,” in which he questions why Lamar hasn’t married his fiancée. Drake accuses Lamar, without providing evidence, of abusing her.
Lamar counters with the tragic “Meet the Grahams,” a point-by-point takedown through a series of vignettes addressed mostly to Drake’s family members: his son, Adonis; his mother, Sandra; and an unnamed baby girl that Lamar claims is Drake’s daughter.
These digs are so provocative because the rich and powerful are beholden to few things other than family.
Family motifs carry hip-hop and rap. Rappers are obsessed with whether the women they’re involved with are wifey material. Are they capable of mothering, or are they just hos? The rapper Future, notorious for having seven baby mamas, apparently dreams of domestic bliss. Lil Wayne, Offset, DaBaby and Lamar have all featured family members on album covers. Artists grapple meaningfully with family, whether that family abandoned them or supported them on the come up.
In her 2022 book “Abolish the Family,” Sophie Lewis criticizes family as a norm that “makes a prison for adults — especially women — out of their own commitment to children they love.” But because there is no alternative, family is sacred; this is especially true for Black people.
The traditional family is an untouchable symbol. Women, who bleed more for it, are its figureheads. This is why attacking your competition’s family members — especially his partner or mother — becomes the most potent way to dismantle the honor of a man who appears to have everything.
It’s hardly Drake’s fault that Kendrick Lamar did it better.
May 20, 2024, 7:24 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
A Tongue-Lashing for a Defense Witness Isn’t Great News for Trump
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Eight times a day during his felony trial, a former president of the United States must stand and honor 12 jurors and six alternates as they walk past, eyes straight ahead or down, casting no glances at him. It’s inspiring to watch these ordinary citizens as sovereign soldiers for justice.
On Monday this calm processional was disrupted, as jurors were forced to hurry out after a witness for the defense mocked the authority of the court. Moments later, Justice Juan Merchan ordered the courtroom immediately cleared, and reporters fled in a frenzy.
The reason for all of this was the testimony of Robert Costello, an astonishingly arrogant former federal prosecutor who has defended the likes of George Steinbrenner and Leona Helmsley, borrowing a little of his nasty affect from each.
Michael Cohen testified earlier that Costello and Rudy Giuliani were assigned by Donald Trump to open a back channel to Cohen to keep him in the Trump fold.
Costello testified before a friendly House subcommittee last week that Cohen was a liar. This apparently impressed Trump and — presto! — Costello was the first important witness the defense called after the prosecution rested.
On direct examination, Costello did next to nothing for the defense beyond landing a few more mostly irrelevant blows on Cohen.
On cross-examination by the prosecution, however, you could almost see steam coming out of Costello’s ears. The temerity of this lowly local female prosecutor asking him questions! Merchan ruled earlier that Costello could testify only on certain subjects. When Merchan sustained several objections from the prosecution and struck a couple of Costello’s answers from the record, Costello decided to play judge.
He muttered “ridiculous” and “strike it” after disliking a question. An enraged Merchan excused the jury and said sharply, “I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom.” He continued, “You don’t say, ‘Geez,’ and you don’t say, ‘Strike it.’ And if you don’t like my ruling, you don’t give me side-eye and roll your eyes.”
Merchan apparently didn’t want reporters to hear the rest of his tongue-lashing and cleared the courtroom.
None of this was good for the defense, which struggled all day to build on Thursday’s success in making Cohen seem he was lying about the purpose of his calls to Trump in late October 2016. Cohen looked bad admitting he passed $20,000 in cash in a paper bag to Red Finch, a tech firm that uses algorithms to rig online polls. But Trump looked even worse by directing Red Finch to cheat his way onto CNBC’s list of the most famous business leaders of the 20th century. Classic Trump.
Jurors may conclude that the whole bunch of ’em are liars and reasonably doubt every word out of all of their mouths. At this point, that may be Trump’s best hope of avoiding conviction.
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May 20, 2024, 3:39 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
When Michael Cohen’s Lies Help the Case Against Trump
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Is it possible to use a lie to illuminate the truth? If the lie is told by the serial liar Michael Cohen in the right context, the answer is yes. Credit the prosecution in the Trump felony trial for pulling off this tricky maneuver.
On Monday, we finally got closer to a key factor in this case: campaign finance law. To convict Donald Trump of a felony, the jury must find that he falsified business records (or directed that they be falsified) with “the intent to commit another crime.” Trump need not be found guilty of any of those other crimes — in this case, it could be tax fraud, intervening in an election or violating campaign finance laws — in order to convict him. But he needs to have crime in mind in at least one of those areas.
Late in the morning, Susan Hoffinger — a prosecution lawyer on her game — drew Cohen’s attention to a letter written by his lawyer, Stephen Ryan, after the Stormy Daniels hush-money story broke in The Wall Street Journal in 2018. At that time, Cohen was still in Trump’s camp, telling the world that he had paid the $130,000 to Daniels on his own. In his letter, Ryan wrote, “The payment in question does not constitute a campaign contribution.”
Hoffinger asked, “Was that a true statement?” Cohen, in his new, polite incarnation, replied, “No, ma’am.” This told the jury: Here goes Cohen, lying again. In other words, because Cohen was such a known liar, it is more plausible than not that he was lying when he said the payment was not a campaign contribution, to protect Trump and himself.
After a sidebar, Justice Juan Merchan turned to the jury and repeated instructions he had already given, during direct examination of Cohen, when the subject of his 2018 guilty plea in the criminal case that sent him to jail for 13 months came up: “Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea is not evidence” of Trump’s guilt.
The judge was basically saying to the jury, “I know you may think these two guys both intended to commit this other crime, but you can’t use Cohen’s guilty plea to convict Trump.”
As Norm Eisen, an expert on campaign finance law, told me during a break, “The jury will listen to the judge, but that’s like saying, ‘Don’t look at the elephant.’”
To emphasize the point further, Hoffinger asked, “Did Mr. Trump approve the substance of these false statements by you?” This brought another “Yes, ma’am.”
The prosecution caught another break when Merchan refused to allow Bradley Smith, a Republican and former chair of the Federal Election Commission, to testify about his conservative interpretation of campaign laws. The judge said if he allowed that testimony — which the defense desperately wants — he would have to let the prosecution call an expert witness with his or her opposing interpretation. Merchan concluded that as judge, it was his job — and his job alone — to interpret how campaign finance law should be regarded by the jury.
All in all, this was an unsexy but significant win for the prosecution.
May 20, 2024, 11:14 a.m. ET
Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
Israel’s Denial of Gaza Aid May Lead to an Arrest Warrant
The decision on Monday by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for leaders of Hamas and Israel probably will not result in anyone being put on trial immediately for crimes against humanity. But it does further tarnish Israel’s invasion of Gaza, add to the isolation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and raise questions about President Biden’s steadfast support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
It’s no surprise that the prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking to arrest Hamas leaders for their rampage of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping on Oct. 7, which clearly constituted war crimes. Those protesters making excuses for Hamas should read Khan’s statement and understand Hamas’s brutality.
The allegations against Netanyahu seem to focus on the Israeli government’s decision to throttle aid, including food assistance, to civilians in Gaza and thus cause starvation. The very first allegation listed by the prosecutor against Netanyahu is “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”
That has always seemed to me a part of the Israeli operation in Gaza that is particularly difficult to justify. My view is that Israel absolutely had a right to strike Gaza militarily after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, to destroy Hamas leadership and to try to recover hostages. I have argued that the military operation should have been far more restrained, calibrated to target Hamas officials rather than to level entire neighborhoods, but bombing targets in Gaza was not inherently wrong or unlawful.
What has seemed utterly indefensible has been the constraints placed on aid entering the territory, so that Gaza is teetering on the edge of famine — even as trucks filled with food are lined up at Gaza’s border, waiting to enter. That is what seemed to galvanize the International Criminal Court.
A panel of international experts convened by the International Criminal Court unanimously backed the prosecutor. “Parties to an armed conflict must not deliberately impede the delivery of humanitarian relief for civilians, including humanitarian relief provided by third parties,” the experts said.
I’m not an expert in international humanitarian law, so I’ll leave it to others to argue about whether a prosecution of Netanyahu is justified. But the court’s efforts underscore the moral stain of the starvation in Gaza, in which the United States is complicit.
America’s highest-priority response needn’t be a flurry of legal arguments, but instead could involve a far greater effort — using all the leverage we have — to persuade Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and to ensure that the aid is actually delivered to starving children. Whether or not one agrees that starving children is criminal, it is unconscionable. And preventable.
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May 20, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
Patrick Healy
Deputy Opinion Editor
The Dangerous Political Headwind Facing Biden
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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
All eyes will be on Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan this week. His lawyers are expected to wrap up their cross-examination of Michael Cohen on Monday, and then will reveal if Trump is going to testify in his own defense before heading to closing arguments, probably on Tuesday. As much as Trump might be tempted to take the stand, he knows very well the lies he has told about Cohen, Stormy Daniels and his business records over the years — lies he could get caught telling under oath. The risk of testifying is enormous for a born liar, and Trump wasn’t born any other way. I don’t see him taking that chance.
For me, this trial has underscored two things: The enthusiasm and loyalty that the Trump base feels for their man, and the dangerous political dynamic that President Biden faces this year. That dynamic, as I see it, is this: Many Americans want change, and while they may respect Joe Biden, they don’t want Joe Biden anymore. Even the Trump criminal trial hasn’t been enough to make Biden look good by comparison, if the latest polls are any measure. My colleague Ezra Klein has a great new column about why this may be, but whatever the reason, the Biden campaign has big choices to make.
The biggest choice to me: His campaign has been focused on getting people to respect Biden — by portraying him as a defender of democracy, a champion of a normal America, a trusted ally to the less fortunate, a more decent man than Trump — rather than on making people want the Biden presidency to continue. He gave a good speech Sunday at Morehouse College in Atlanta about manhood and faith, but given his weak polling in that battleground state, I was surprised he didn’t make a stronger case for why people should want him in office for another four years.
He then headed to another battleground, Michigan, where he is also struggling in the polls. Based on his speech at an N.A.A.C.P. dinner there, I’m sure there was a lot of respect for him in the room, but what’s he doing that’s new or especially persuasive to make more Black voters and others want him for another four years?
On Tuesday, Biden heads to New Hampshire, another traditional battleground where he is polling strongly. As Trump gets closer to a verdict on that day, I’ll be watching New Hampshire to see if Biden and his team demonstrate any new thinking to make the case for why Americans should want another four years of his presidency.
