If you read through the conservative internet today, you’ll see myriad articles and videos pointing out that Alvin Bragg’s Statement of Facts and Indictment against Donald Trump are utterly baseless. In a decent system, they would be tossed out of court immediately. However, I’m here to tell you that this is not how things work in progressive/leftist judicial systems. They like going through the motions, but the system always works toward a single leftist end, law and rules be damned.

As I said, lots of lawyers have pointed out that Alvin Bragg’s indictment is so flawed that it should be thrown out on an immediate motion to dismiss. Here are just a few examples from across the political spectrum:

• You Won't Believe the Most Outrageous Claim in the Trump Indictment
• Don’t Indict Trump With This: Now we know what the Manhattan prosecutors have. It’s not enough
• Trump indictment: as bad as we thought

I’m currently editing another essay that points out even more fundamental flaws with the indictment.

But I’m here to tell you, as a veteran of almost thirty years working in a hard-left judicial system, that as long as it’s called an indictment and looks like an indictment, a judge who has already shown himself hostile to Trump will not care about little things like a legally adequate document or fundamental due process.

I spent my entire legal career working in the San Francisco Bay Area. It wasn’t as left-leaning when I started as it is now, but it was already pretty bad.

Image made using Scales of justice by freepik and thumb (CC BY-SA 3.0).

When I got sworn in as a California attorney with the class of 1987, the speaker introduced one of the judges who was conducting that mass swearing-in this way: “And on my right is the Honorable Whatever-His-Name-Was.” He responded by joking, “That’s the first time I’ve ever been referred to as being to someone’s right.” I was a Democrat at the time, so I laughed with everyone else, but it should have been a warning to me about the system in which I found myself.

Indeed, many years later, I worked on a case before that same judge. (I only did civil law, by the way, not criminal.) We represented a bank that was suing someone for defaulting on a loan. The borrower’s defense was that his English was insufficient to understand the loan’s terms. I dug up undisputed California law saying that wasn’t a valid defense. The judge didn’t care. Banks are bad, and he wanted to make sure that bank lost (which it did). Or, as he said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

I worked on a case in which a distant relative of a decedent filed a will contest case. I unearthed undisputed California law holding that a relative that distant lacked standing (i.e., the legal right) to file such an action. The fact that she disagreed with the will had no legal relevance.

The judge memorably said that he really didn’t care about the law. “I think there’s something here.” The case eventually went to trial before probably the only honorable judge in that court. We won. We also won on appeal, and the California Supreme Court dismissed the contestant’s petition. After ten years, we were awarded $1.2 million in attorney’s fees, but it was a Pyrrhic victory because half the people who were sued died.

I could bore you with dozens of other examples, but they’re really all the same: A progressive judge ignores procedures and principles to achieve a predetermined outcome. That blatant leftism, which reduced the law to a mockery, is one of the reasons I’m now a conservative.

What I finally figured out is that, in a judicial system under leftist control, the law is not a set of overriding principles, honed over the centuries, that offer the best ways for fallible humans to achieve something approaching objective justice. Instead, the law, and the procedures through which the law is to function, are simply tools that judges utilize to achieve a preferred leftist outcome. That’s how a judge could openly joke about his politics or admit that he was pushing for a specific outcome before the trial even began, and another judge could openly say he didn’t care at all about the law.

I stopped working as a lawyer a long time ago and, in the interim, the system has only gotten worse. Leftist judges no longer even pretend to interpret and apply the law. Instead, they make it up as they go along. They see themselves as answering a higher, progressive calling.

All of this is to say that it won’t matter how disastrously bad the Bragg indictment is. Trump is now in the clutches of a judicial system that intends to chew him up, make him unelectable, and have him serve as a warning for anyone else who dares challenge the establishment. And an ideologically corrupt judiciary doesn’t care what the law is, provided that its minions go through the motions.