John Yoo

Fox News Totally Flubs (i.e. Lies) About How Jury Biases Would Impact Trump’s Hush Money Trial

Posted by on April 16, 2024 at 1:38 pm. 2 Comments :

On Monday jury selection began for the first ever criminal trial of a former American president. It’s only the beginning of Donald Trump’s legal tribulations as there are three more criminal trials gearing up that could make him the first ever former president felon. The so-called “Hush Money” case – which could more accurately be called the “Election Interference” case – is just the first one out of the gate.

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Trump has been spending these days whining pitifully that he is a poor beleaguered victim of a corrupt judicial system that he says is determined to destroy him. Never mind that he is the cause of his troubles due to his relentless criminal activities and behavior that exhibits a consciousness of guilt. He even issues public confessions admitting that he has done what he’s accused of, but claiming that he’s allowed to under an imaginary doctrine of “presidential Immunity.”

SEE THIS: Felonious Punk Trump Demands ‘TOTAL IMMUNITY’ – Even for Acts that ‘CROSS THE LINE’

Jury selection in high profile cases like these are always complicated as attorneys on both sides seek to assemble a panel that will not be biased against against their client (the defendant or the state). In this particular case that is even trickier because Trump’s supporters are fully indoctrinated cult members who can be expected to deceive the court in order get on the jury and save their Dear Leader from clutches of justice.

To that end, Fox News is contributing to the problem by disparaging the court and encouraging misbehavior by prospective Trump jurors. Fox News contributor Clay Travis actually suborned perjury by advising potential jurors to “do whatever you can to get seated” on the jury.

But that’s just for starters. Fox News also interviewed law professor and Trump toady, John Yoo, who gave an utterly bizarre analysis of the jury selection process, saying that…

“I think it’s pretty extraordinary in the very first jury pool, before you interview anybody, half of the jury pool already says that they’re so biased against President Trump that they can’t serve on the jury…That’s only going to feed into, I think, Donald Trump’s claim that the public integrity of court’s and the prosecutors is to be questioned as biased and unfair against them.”

First of all, it is a flagrant lie that half of the jury was dismissed because they were biased against Trump. The truth is that prospective jurors completed a questionnaire that asked several questions to ascertain whether they had “any” strong opinions about, or association with Trump.

One question specifically asked, “Is there any reason, whether it be a bias or something else, that would prevent you from being fair and impartial if you are selected as a juror for this case?” Judge Merchan also asked for a show of hands of those who believed that they could not be fair and impartial. Those who raised their hands or otherwise indicated an inability to be impartial were dismissed.

Note that none of these inquiries indicated whether a bias was in favor of or against Trump. Just whether any bias existed either way. So, contrary to Woo’s analysis, it is just as likely that supporters of Trump were dismissed for bias as opponents.

But Yoo’s analysis was also flawed logically, in that he asserted that dismissing those who were biased against Trump would disadvantage him. What? Quite obviously the opposite is true. If only people who were biased against Trump were dismissed, leaving him with a jury comprised of his supporters, that would be an enormous advantage for him.

Despite the efforts of the court to ensure a fair trial, Trump and Fox News keep whining that Trump can’t get an impartial jury of his peers in New York. They seem to think that “peers” means political allies. Trump’s team is fixated on smearing the judicial system, this court, and the jurors. And Trump’s press secretary made that clear in an appearance on Newsmax Tuesday morning…

Let’s face it. The Trump team is already convinced that they are going to lose. so they are pulling out all the stops to demean the courts and dismiss the findings of the jury. But they are so frightened by their fate that they have lost all ability to make coherent arguments. So sad.

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Torture Advocate On Fox News Says “ObamaCare Is No Katrina, It’s Much Worse”

Posted by on November 21, 2013 at 1:10 pm. 17 Comments :

Absurd and asinine analogies have been swirling for weeks by critics of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). They have compared it to Watergate, to slavery, to Iraq, and relentlessly to Hurricane Katrina. Their arguments are ridiculous and transparently political.

It is certainly within the realm of reason to oppose ObamaCare and articulate a case for pursuing a different solution to expand access to health care and lower costs for patients, businesses, and government. The only problem with that is that Republicans have no other solution. They are so fixated on repealing ObamaCare that they can’t be bothered with developing a plan that might actually help the American people. And in the process they are resorting to epic levels of overkill in order to characterize a glitchy website as the end of western civilization.

However, it’s one thing to employ hyperbole to advance a political agenda, and another to recruit a notoriously controversial figure to elevate that hyperbole to heretofore unspeakable heights. Yet that’s what Fox News has done by giving former Bush Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, a platform to make grotesque assertions that diminish the tragic loss of life and property in the Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Katrina.

obamacare-katrina

For those who don’t recall, Yoo is the author of the Bush administration’s legal justification for what they euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” but which the rest of the world calls torture. For someone who has advocated the use of barbaric tactics that have been denounced by the United Nations and the World Court, to compare health insurance reform to a natural disaster that took almost two thousand lives is reprehensible.

Yoo is probably the worst possible spokesman for this line of attack, given his resume. And he proves it with his opening argument that favorably differentiates Bush from Obama by saying that “Bush had to respond to unpredictable events,” such as “an act of war in Iraq.” Unpredictable? The act of war in Iraq was a deliberate, preplanned assault on a nation that had done nothing to incite it. The stipulated reasons for the invasion all turned out to be false. And the consequences for Iraq and the United States were costly in terms of both human life and actual expense. Yoo goes on to make this inexplicably inane assertion:

“Obama is hitting the shoals for the exact opposite reason. ObamaCare’s collapse does not result from an act of nature or the attacks of a foreign enemy. Instead, it is a perversely self-inflicted, man-made disaster that replaced the efficiency of the private markets with the tangle, confusion, and ideological bias of government bureaucracy.”

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Once again Yoo falsely implies that the war in Iraq emanated from “the attacks of a foreign enemy.” Then he makes the delusional and unsupported statement that the private insurance markets were performing efficiently. Of course, if they were there wouldn’t have been 48 million people who were unable to get insurance due to cost or rejection for preexisting conditions. There also wouldn’t have been millions more who were paying for plans that provided little in the way of security, and that could be terminated entirely when a claim was filed. But the most grating rhetoric in Yoo’s screed is the repeated portrayal of ObamaCare as a “disaster” on par with, even worse than, Hurricane Katrina.

It is impossible to overstate the idiocy of an opinion that ranks a failed website rollout as inferior to the incompetence that left thousands to needlessly die in a great American city. Yoo dishonors the memory of the victims and insults the survivors. But coming from someone whose most significant professional achievement was to justify the use of torture, perhaps we should not be surprised. Neither should we be surprised that Fox News would embrace this cretin and his inhumane philosophy.