It’s a travesty of justice.
This case was a joke from the very beginning. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who set this entire thing up to become more famous and more powerful. Judge Juan Merchan, who basically gave every benefit to the prosecution and whose jury instructions were unprecedented in their willingness to flout the law.
This was all set up to convict Donald Trump simply so the Democrats could either jail Donald Trump or spend the next few months declaring Donald Trump a convicted felon for purposes of the 2024 election.
The actual methodology by which he was found guilty is utterly uncertain. The reality is there were two crimes alleged: a misdemeanor falsification of business records — which would not have resulted in any possible jail time — but to become a felony that was reliant on other unspecified crimes.
The typical Democratic talking point since early last night is that “no one is above the law.” What was applied here was not the law; it was a unique interpretation of an infrequently enforced statute that had never been used before. At first glance, the statute of limitations had expired, but Bragg convinced the judge that Trump’s time outside of the state, including his four years as president, didn’t count.
…
Trump is facing four years in prison for each of the 34 counts — conceivably 136 years in prison, although some doubt he will serve any time as a first-time offender — for the crime of listing his payment to Michael Cohen as an ongoing legal fee rather than a loan reimbursement. That’s it, that’s the crime.
Mind you, under this same district attorney, Alvin Bragg, “Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no ‘genuine risk of physical harm’ to anyone. . . . Convicted criminals caught with weapons other than guns will have those felony charges downgraded to misdemeanors unless they’re also charged with more serious offenses.”
On the law, though, the case was a bizarre turducken, with alleged crimes stuffed inside other crimes. By the time Mr. Bragg showed up on the scene, the Stormy business was old enough that Mr. Trump couldn’t be hit with misdemeanor falsification of records, because the statute of limitations had expired. To elevate these counts into felonies, the DA said Mr. Trump cooked the books with an intent to commit or cover up a second offense.
What crime was that? At first Mr. Bragg was cagey. He eventually settled on a New York election law, rarely enforced, that prohibits conspiracies to promote political candidates “by unlawful means.” This explains why prosecutors spent so much trial time on David Pecker, the National Enquirer boss. His outfit paid $150,000 in 2016 to silence another woman, Karen McDougal, who also says she had an extracurricular affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg’s argument is that they were all in cahoots, more or less, to steal the election.
…
A help to Mr. Bragg’s prosecution is that the jurors were instructed that as long as they were unanimous that Mr. Trump was guilty of falsifying business records to aid or cover up an illegal conspiracy to get him elected, they didn’t all have to agree about which theory of the “unlawful means” they found persuasive. Perhaps this will be taken up by Mr. Trump on appeal. He will almost certainly argue, too, that the Stormy payoff wasn’t a campaign expense, as Brad Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, has been arguing all along.
We asked the voters in last week’s Harvard CAPS/Harris poll what they would do if Trump were convicted, and they said that a conviction in this case would make no difference. We will see if that prediction is true in the next few weeks. The best that the Democrats can do right now in this case is to say "the jury has spoken."
Partisan statements will only increase anger and cause the boomerang to increase. Many Democrats believe Donald Trump is a criminal, but those voters were already in the Democratic camp. The voters in the middle seem focused not on trials but on issues like inflation and immigration. Ironically, the president’s son is scheduled to go on trial next week.
Our justice system simply can’t operate this way in which pie-in-the-sky piled on charges can be hurled by political advocates to blunt the opposing presidential candidate.
