Literary Corner: Mother Teresa

 

Mother Teresa

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

It’s a disgrace. Mother Teresa
could not beat those charges.
These charges are rigged.
The whole thing is rigged.
The country's a mess
between the borders
and fake elections and
you have a trial like this,
where the judge is so
conflicted he can’t breathe.
He’s got to do his job.
It's not for me,
that I can tell you.
It's a disgrace. And I
mean that. Mother Teresa
could not beat these charges.
But we'll see. We'll see how we do.
It’s a very disgraceful situation.

Actually, I've been trying to give some thought to this—to the idea of Mother Teresa, learning that adult film star Randy Jackhammer has been pitching a story to the National Enquirer, "My One-Night Stand With Mother Teresa", recounting their years-ago tryst, with some vivid detail, even anatomical. Which did not happen, as far as I know, but if it did. 

That's not a crime, but you can imagine her not wanting folks to know about it, given her public standing as a holy mother and administrator of a large-scale Roman Catholic charitable operation in India, and you can imagine her offering Randy $130,000 or so to sign a non-disclosure agreement and keep the story to himself, especially if the story was true, and that's not a crime either.

Now suppose Mother Teresa wants to hide the traces of this transaction from inquiring eyes, and gets her lawyer to front the money and send it to Randy's lawyer, and then she'll pay the lawyer back some months later, when the inquiring eyes are busy with something else, and there's nothing illegal about that, but what if the lawyer registers a new company as a "real estate consulting company to collect fees for investment consulting work he does for real estate deals", but instead of using it to collect fees for investment consulting work, work that he isn't actually doing, he uses it as a way of laundering the money before getting it to Randy? And what if, instead of writing her lawyer a $130,000 check, she gets him to send her a series of invoices for legal work that he actually hasn't done, and pays them in a series of $35,000 checks adding up to more like $260,000, to cover the income tax he would have owed if he had done the imaginary work, along with some other money with which we need not concern ourselves?

Now we're talking about actually illegality, though it's still only misdemeanors under New York State law, for making false financial statements, for the lawyer and Mother Teresa and her lawyer alike. 

But to get to a felony, and the possibility of jail time, you need more. Specifically, under New York State law, a prosecutor has to be able to show that the false financial statements were filed in the furtherance of some other crime. And who would accuse Mother Teresa of a crime?

As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican’s investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)

OK, Hitch, you can sit down.

What I mean to say is, Mother Teresa never led a presidential campaign in the United States. She couldn't run for the office herself, as a native of Albania, and she showed no interest in supporting somebody else's run. She never even considered, for instance, violating

N.Y. Elec. Law § 17-152: Conspiracy to promote or prevent election. Under that statute, “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”

(Yes, if you commit a misdemeanor in furtherance of a misdemeanor, that can be a felony.)

This is something Trump indubitably did, first in his 2015 agreement with publisher David Pecker, as established in Pecker's testimony in the ongoing trial—

In testimony this week during Trump’s trial in New York City, the former CEO of the National Enquirer’s former parent company explained in stunning detail how he agreed to act as “eyes and ears” for Trump’s campaign, purchasing the rights to stories in order to suppress them, and even outright fabricating negative stories about Trump’s opponents.

—and later in the catch-'n'-kill discussion over the article proposed by Playmate Karen McDougal.

The connection in these events between Crime 1 (conspiracy) and Crime 2 (falsification) is just too obvious to ignore. The felony was created by the two crimes interacting.

Mother Teresa, problematic as she might be, has nothing whatever to do with it. She is invoked simply as an example of virtue whose existence, somehow, demonstrated that Trump shouldn’t be tried for his crimes. and there’s really no reason to think that.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.