If the media was half as obsessed with Barack Obama as it is with Donald Trump, a criminal trial involving Leonardo DiCaprio and a former hip hop star would be front page news and getting wall-to-wall cable news coverage.
Alvin Bragg has gone from local prosecutor to national darling in the Democratic Party. The question is how alluring this will be for his prosecutor counterparts in other localities seeking superstardom.
Bragg, the elected district attorney in Manhattan, charged former President Donald Trump for 34 felony counts for alleged falsification of business documents and a campaign finance violation stemming from his hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The most complicated aspect is that Bragg–a state official–wants to prosecute federal charges the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission dismissed.
So, let’s narrow the focus to campaign finance charges. If the Bragg precedent can be used to open investigations for charging process crimes of a cover-up and obstruction at the state level, there may be fertile ground to target former presidents and former candidates.
That’s particularly true since these lawyers can play fast and loose with jurisdictional lines and statutes of limitation.
One story has all the intrigue of a celebrity who is adored by the Hollywood elite, that would of course be Obama. Leonardo DiCaprio is involved too. And it has gained sparse attention. Yet, under the Bragg precedent, Obama could face at least a thorough investigation regarding campaign finance issues.
DiCaprio testified in the trial of ‘90s hip hop artist Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, charged with trying to illegally lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests, including the Chinese government. He allegedly received tens of millions from the Chinese and fugitive financier Jho Low.
DiCaprio testified this month Low told him he planned to donate a massive amount to Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
“It was a significant sum — something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”
That obviously blows through the individual contribution limits, and foreign donations are illegal. Did the donations materialize? There’s no evidence, presently. Did Obama, or prominent people in his campaign, know they might get such funding and not report it?
So, who would be ambitious enough to place Obama under investigation?
Michel’s trial is in Washington, D.C. There aren’t a lot of politicized Republican local prosecutors there. But federal prosecutors said Michel got $21.6 million in payments from Low from foreign entities and then paid that money out to 20 straw donors from June to November 2012.
If any of those 20 straw donors are in red counties or even red states, a Republican county prosecutor or GOP state attorney general could find grounds to indict one of those straw donors–or recipients of the illegal straw donations.
Under the Bragg standard, these elected GOP prosecutors would use lofty rhetoric of following the facts wherever they may lead. That could lead them to subpoena Obama campaign staffers and finally seek to compel Obama’s testimony.
In another potential case, the same FEC that shunned the Stormy Daniels matter that Bragg has indicted Trump for, actually fined the Hillary Clinton campaign over the Steele Dossier that plunged the country into needless two years of investigations, and $32 million wasted on the Russia hoax.
Jurisdiction?
The Clinton campaign headquarters for 2016 was based in Brooklyn. The opposition research firm behind the dossier, Fusion GPS is based in Washington. But the Democrat-leaning law firm of Perkins Coie is an international entity with offices around the world. That includes the states of Texas, Idaho, Wisconsin, and Arizona, where creative Republican prosecutors might seize on the Bragg standard to find a state charge from a federal violation that could lead back to Clinton or her cronies.
And, don’t forget, the origins of the Russia hoax are still under federal investigation. Bragg may have presented Special Counsel John Durham a novel legal theory to pursue.
In 2008, voters in two goofy Vermont towns–Brattleboro and Marlboro–voted in referendums to require local law enforcement to arrest President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney if either entered the towns for “crimes against the Constitution.” The towns didn’t bother looking for jurisdictional justifications.
So far as we know, Bush and Cheney steered clear of the towns, but had they set foot there, any indictment decided by a referendum rather than a grand jury would obviously be unconstitutional.
These towns have so far let Trump off the hook. Who knows for how long? But it seems possible other localities might envy the Bragg indictment and pass their own indict-Trump referendums.
That could prompt some small conservative town in, say, Mississippi to vote for a referendum to indict President Joe Biden. And we would just enter into absurd silliness.
No former president has nobility in the United States. If a viable criminal charge was brought, Trump or any other former president should absolutely stand trial.
The point is that Bragg, in bringing flimsy charges against a former president just for the sake of being the first in the nation to indict, has opened a potential floodgate of partisan prosecutorial abuse.
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Barbara Joanna Lucas is a writer and researcher in Northern Virginia. She has been a healthcare professional, political blogger, is a proud dog mom, and news junkie. Follow her on Twitter @BasiaJL.
