WEBCommentary Contributor

Author: Michael J. Gaynor
Date:  September 28, 2016

Topic category:  Constitution/Constitutional Crises

Lester Holt Is Unfit to Moderate Any Debate, Much Less a Presidential Debate


Holt's pathetic effort to support the Trump's a racist line with a misrepresentation of law was downright DEPLORABLE.

Former Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz effectively refuted NBC's Lester Holt's sly attempt to depict 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a racist for supporting "stop and frisk."

Here's the pertinent excerpt from the first presidential debate:

HOLT: “Stop and frisk” was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.

TRUMP: No, you’re wrong. It went before a judge who was a very against-police judge. It was taken away from her, and our mayor — our new mayor — refused to go forward with the case. They would have won on appeal. If you look at it, throughout the country, there are many places where it’s —

HOLT: The argument is that it’s a form of racial profiling.

TRUMP: No, the argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and that are bad people that shouldn’t have ’em.

Here's the pertinent exchange when Dershowitz was interviewed on Mornings on the Mall:

DERSHOWITZ: There was a district court judge, Shira Scheindlin, who ruled that the NY stop and frisk, as applied, was unconstitutional. she wrote a hundred and some odd opinion, but it didn’t get to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court last word on it was a case called Terry v. Ohio many many many many years ago and the Supreme Court held under certain circumstances at least stop and frisk can be constitutional.

Look, the interesting thing is how it’s applied. In Massachusetts it was applied in a very effective way with the cooperation of some of the leaders of the African American community and it really helped to disarm gang members in parts of the city where the crime rate was very high. But, if it’s used just as a form of racial profiling then it’s done in a way that probably raises constitutional questions.

But, it’s much more subtle and much more complex and a hard issue to raise in the context of a 2-minute answer in a debate.

O’CONNOR: Probably would have been best for Lester Holt to not wade into “fact checking” on that area…

DERSHOWITZ: I think you don’t fact check in your question, you fact check after the answer is given, and I think he made a controversial sub-statement which then, Donald Trump responded to, factually, and they both had some truth on their side.

Dershowitz was too soft with Holt.

Holt flatly stated that "stop and frisk" was ruled unconstitutional in New York.

It wasn't.

The United State Supreme Court ruled "stop and frisk" constitutional in 1968.

Holt ignored that inconvenient fact.

A federal district judge in New York did rule that a constitutionally permissible practice was unconstitutionally applied.

That was not a ruling that the practice per se is unconstitutional and no federal judge can overrule the Supreme Court.

Holt's pathetic effort to support the Trump's a racist line with a misrepresentation of law was downright DEPLORABLE.

Michael J. Gaynor


Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.


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