By Arul Louis
New York, Feb 26 (SocialNews.XYZ) US President Donald Trump was in India, but his controversial remarks from 13,000 kilometres away on domestic US issues like Supreme Court Judges and the Democratic Party were reverberating here more than what he had to say about his host nation.
He tangled with the judiciary on Tuesday saying that Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves from cases involving him and lashed out against the head of jury that convicted a friend.
He said at his news conference in New Delhi, Ginsburg should recuse herself because "she went wild" during the 2016 presidential campaign.
"I don't know who she was for - perhaps she was for Hillary Clinton, if you can believe it - but she said some things that were obviously very inappropriate," he asserted.
AGinsburg had called Trump a "faker" in 2016A and said that he said "whatever came to his mind."
As for Sotomayor, he took issue with her critical minority opinion in a case in which the Supreme Court's majority upheld the Trump administration's enforcement of a rule that bars people who would bar people requiring public assistance from immigrating.
"I just don't know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything having to do with Trump or Trump-related," he said.
He said, "Justice Sotomayor said what she said yesterday. You know very well what she said yesterday."
Sotomayor had criticised the administration for repeatedly seeking "extraordinary relief" from a lower court's decision saying "its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow" and took issue with the fellow for granting it.
"She's trying to shame people with perhaps a different view into voting her way, and that's so inappropriate," Trump said.
While those comments by a president against the judiciary created a backlash from law experts and politicians, Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson citing Trump's comments ordered a partially closed hearing in a case involving Trump's associate Roger Stone because of possible threats to the jury.
Trump tweeted, "There has rarely been a juror so tainted as the forewoman in the Roger Stone case. Look at her background. She never revealed her hatred of 'Trump' and Stone. She was totally biased, as is the judge."
After initially ordering a closed hearing, Berman later agreed to allow reporters and the public to listen to hearings from a different room in Stone's appeal for a retrial but not see the jurors saying they were at high "risk of harassment or intimidation."
Stone was convicted of lying to investigators and obstructing congressional inquiry into Russia's role in the 2016 elections and sentenced to 40 months in prison.
Attorney-General William Barr had over-ruled the proposal by the prosecutors in the case to ask for a sentence of seven to nine years, leading to their resignation.
At the same time, Barr complained about Trump's tweets. He told a TV interviewer the tweets and statements "make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we're doing our work with integrity."
Getting into Democratic Party politics, Trump said that the party's establishment was trying to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders, who "looks like he's winning" the nomination to challenge him in the November election.
"They maybe don't want him for obvious reasons, so they put out a thing that Russia's backing him," he said.
On the eve on the intra-party election in Nevada last Saturday to select the party's presidential nominee there was leak to the media that the US intelligence services had warned that the Russians were trying to help the left-wing candidate.
At the same time, Trump said at a meeting of Indian investors that if Sanders becomes the party nominee, the markets "will be down.a
ASanders continues to do well and becomes the Democratic nominee, it will "keep the markets down" for a while. He said the markets may jump around quite a bit until the election.
"When we win, I think the market's going to go up like a rocket ship," he told them, with a warning, "If I dona?t win, you're going to see a crash like you've never seen before."
On a more substantive matter, Trump sent a request to Congress on Tuesday for $2.5 billion to deal with the coronavirus crisis.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in)
Source: IANS
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