Maybe Staten Island Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis should try for a little more subtlety if she wants to tell us she’s preemptively trying to delegitimize a guilty verdict against her Orange God Emperor without telling us she’s preemptively trying to delegitimize a guilty verdict against her Orange God Emperor. If not then she should’ve at least been a little more honest about how Trump failed pre-trial bid for a venue change to her district so they could’ve reaped the economic boost from a swarm of media finally visiting the forgotten fifth borough.

On a related note, on Tuesday election law expert Rick Hasen wrote he’s still largely skeptical about the charges if maybe a little less so now that the cases have been rested. Hasen says the offenses have been proven but his issue is whether they rose to felonies rather than the misdemeanors that some similar cases have been charged under. In his piece however there’s one interesting point Hasen makes about Trump’s appellate options that he might have fucked himself out of. “There are also issues of federal preemption and supremacy. Some of these were ruled on by a federal judge when Trump tried to remove the case to federal court and Trump did not appeal. This raises the question of whether he’s waived his right to keep fighting those issues. In essence, the question is whether you can take a federal campaign finance violation and make it a crime (or an enhancement of a crime) in state court,” Hasen writes (emphasis ours) and holy shit that’ll be so funny if true.

Even better: It’s possible Trump’s lawyers triaged that appeal – that asserted he had been an “officer of the United States” – so they could argue the opposite when he got hit with the 14th Amendment complaints, which they did. That ended up being moot anyway because that specific question about the Section III of the 14th Amendment’s wording never came up in the Supreme Court’s eventual decision to save his fat ass from disqualification. Meaning he may’ve screwed himself for nothing.