Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

I haven't studied this case enough to have an opinion anyone needs to take seriously, but on the face of it, I find this disturbing for quite a few reasons. msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

Here's the judgement. ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/19480…
Can someone with more legal knowledge help me make sense of it?

1. He was tried by a jury of his peers, who found him guilty.

2. U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga judge threw out the verdict:
ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/19480…

Here I become confused. As I understood it, such an appeal is to determine *whether a trial was properly conducted.* It is not to determine the defendant's guilt or innocence, a privilege that is properly reserved to the jury of one's peers. Am I right?

This ruling looks very strange to me: It looks like a mix of arguments to the effect the trial was improperly conducted *and* the judge's argument that insufficient evidence had been presented to prove him guilty. Shouldn't determining the latter be the jury's prerogative?

Only on p. 35 does the ruling discuss the reasons it found the trial improperly conducted. They are these:

Along with several other issues that seem to me the appropriate purview of an appeals court. But the first 35 pages seem to be an analysis of a very different sort: Effectively, they amount to, "The evidence wasn't good enough." This is not the role of an appeals court, is it?

Isn't that a judgement for the jury to make?

For what it's worth, I agree with Judge Trenga. The evidence presented. was lousy. I wouldn't have voted to convict based on it. That said, I would have used the *beyond a reasonable doubt* standard.

Given what I know about the issue--a very considerable amount more than most Americans--my strong suspicion is that indeed he was guilty. And a preponderance of evidence suggests it. But that's not the standard we use in a criminal court, is it?

I feel a reasonable doubt that I'm right. I know how I'd bet, but I can imagine other scenarios in which I'm wrong; and I don't think the government's evidence overcame what must be our presumption: innocent until *proven* guilty.

As Judge Trenga noted--inappropriately, as far as I understand, but also correctly, pointed out:

As far as I understand, this is legally right. Even if, like the DOJ, my instincts say that of course he was paid by the Turkish government,

which funnelled the money through Altepkin, they just don't have the receipts. The argument, "Well, of course we don't, duh, it's a conspiracy, they kept it secret" doesn't wash--or shouldn't wash--and we wouldn't want it to.

Anyone could be accused of criminal conspiracy by those standards. They had *no* evidence of this beyond the very strange fact that he was paying a lot of money from a Turkish bank account, was close to the government, and seemed to agree with them.

(For what it's worth, I agree with the Turkish government about this issue, too. Gülen should be extradited: He's a crook at best, the instigator of a coup plot at worst. Americans should be especially sympathetic, now, to how Turks feel about him: If you didn't like Jan. 6,

try imagining that, only with 300 Americans dead and Congress strafed from the air.) But however sympathetic I am to the *goal* of getting him extradited, you can't break US law to do it. And I bet that's what they did. *However,* I'd bet that way because it's the better bet--

not because I'm convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. At least, not by anything I'm seeing in the rulings.

So Trenga acquitted him, and ordered a ''conditional retrial. What does this mean? Has he been acquitted or not? Doesn't acquitted mean, "You are acquitted?'

So why the conditional retrial? Isn't a retrial meant to rectify a *mistrial?* This seems to stem--it seems to me--from the confusion about just what an appeals judge is supposed to do. He's both acquitted him *and* suggested it was a mistrial--both for decent reasons--

but is that how our legal system works? Shouldn't he have stuck to the procedural defects and declared a mistrial?

But then it gets really strange: Why did the federal court reverse not only the acquittal, but vacate the conditional grant of a retrial? How is this possible?

Can someone explain it to me? It sure seems a violation of the *principle* of double jeopardy. Perhaps that's not how things actually work, but shouldn't it be? It's an ancient and foundational legal principle: Non bis in idem.

The district court *acquitted him of all charges.*

Once you're acquitted, rightly or wrongly, they can't try you again, no? And why would the court "vacate the conditional grant of a new trial?" Is it to insist upon the initial jury's right to render the verdict?

That's an argument I could accept, but *it's not an argument they make.* Read it yourself: the legal reasoning is impossibly convoluted. It's as if they were grasping at any semantic straw they could find.

It *definitely* doesn't meet an intelligible standard, at least, for overturning a lower court's verdict. It's a standard that, if used widely, would see half of DC behind bars.

(A point made by @cosmo_globalist @VladDavidzon in another context: claireberlinski.substack.com/p/what-ukraini….)

It leads me uncomfortably to suspect that yes, this verdict is political, not judicial, and that important principles of legal reasoning were overlooked in the desire to teach anyone who worked with the Trump Administration a lesson.

I'm *for* that: But I'm not for doing it this way. If what comes out of the Trump Administration is the politicization of our legal system and our inability to conduct a proper, fair trial, the damage he's wrought is every bit as much our fault as his.