Fox News on Tuesday oversold spandex-wearing grapple-freak Jim Jordan’s legal acumen and clout by printing a press release laundered as a news article headlined “House Judiciary GOP calls on appellate courts to ‘reverse the verdict’ in NY v Trump in new staff report,” framing it as if it were an appellate brief or something – which doesn’t appear to even contain any actual legal arguments.
From the conclusion of the recycled bullshit embedded in Fox News’s “article,” emphasis ours:
New York appellate courts have been “dubbed the ’13th juror’… because judges are allowed to make decisions based on the facts of the case – not only the law.”204 One former Manhattan assistant district attorney called it “an underappreciated power that the appellate division has” when reviewing cases on appeal. The New York Court of Appeals characterized the intermediate appellate courts power to “review questions of law and questions of fact” as the “linchpin of our constitutional and statutory [appellate] design.” Given that President Trump’s indictment was conceived in legal and constitutional error and the trial exacerbated and compounded those errors, an honest review of the facts and the law will likely lead appellate courts to vacate the conviction and dismiss the indictment with prejudice. This will go a long way in restoring the American people’s trust and confidence in our justice system, although more work is ahead. In the meantime, the Committee and Select Subcommittee will continue our oversight of lawfare and its effect on the rule of law in the United States.
You really have to step back a little bit to appreciate the gap between the lede of the “article” claiming that Jordan’s “findings should prompt appellate courts to ‘reverse the verdict,'” and then the staff report itself simply saying it will all work out because see the previous 45 pages.
It’s actually pretty impressive how Fox works their magic – spinning Jordan’s passivity and impotence, assuring fans that it’ll all be fine in the end because Trump “wasn’t informed of the crime” and other canned lines that went nowhere in the trial court – into an affirmative demand for action. It’s all for the instant “legal experts” who skimmed Turley columns over the last few months to nod their heads at, none of it will be argued seriously in front of an appellate panel (that doesn’t mean it won’t be argued because Trump forces his attorneys to say stupid shit in court all the time).
We didn’t read the whole staff report, let alone the entire article, because we don’t feel like suffering through the same recycled bullshit that dominated the right wing media for almost two months straight this spring. But we also didn’t need to since the point of the headline was just to make it look like Jim Jordan is doing something when restive fanboys are furious with him for overpromising “justice” and underdelivering. In that way the headline kind of did its job, since the average MAGA internet user’s attention span is far too taxed these days to make it through the article and the tedious 45-page “Weaponization Subcommittee” jerkpiece within. Good job, Fox.