All indications suggest that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg rooted his indictment of former President Donald Trump on shaky legal ground.
Donald Trump: The Latest on His NYC Case
The former president made history on Tuesday becoming the first U.S. president in modern history to be arraigned for a criminal offense.
The grand jury handed down a complex 34-count indictment that has been criticized for stretching a single offense into 34 separate crimes.
The Justice Department pressured Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., to drop the case looking into the former president’s payment of $130,000 to former porn star Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. Trump is charged with falsifying business records related to the payment.
Bragg will have a hard time explaining in court why he was charged what should be a misdemeanor as a low-grade felony.
The John Edwards Case
The precedent of former North Carolina Democratic Sen. John Edwards looms large. Edwards was similarly acquitted of six counts of campaign-finance violations due to his having solicited $1 million from wealthy donors to cover up his illicit affair and an illegitimate child in 2012.
Bragg himself dismissed the idea of prosecuting Trump based on the fact the two-year statute of limitations had expired and that it could be brushed off by Trump as a misdemeanor.
Prosecutors tried to create a legal theory whereby the misdemeanor was intended to conceal a federal election law violation. Bragg held to his poistion until after prosecutors Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz resigned and published a book about the case.
Many have argued Bragg rushed to get an indictment against Trump before the grand jury’s term expired at the end of this month. He also embraced the legal theory about the hidden election law violation.
He replied to questions about what laws were used to justify the indictment by a reporter to which Bragg replied:
“So let me say, as an initial matter, the indictment doesn’t specify it because the law does not so require. In my remarks, I mentioned a couple of laws, which I will highlight again now.”
The Case Has Problems
Mark Bedrow, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, called the evidence presented in the indictment underwhelming, telling Business Insider it was “strikingly empty with respect to what crime was being concealed to make what is obviously a time-barred misdemeanor into a felony.”
Antonio Rodriguez, a former Riverside County, Calif., prosecutor similarly told Business Insider he was unimpressed with Bragg’s legal reasoning.
“The reality is, these facts are pretty stale,” he said. “We’ve known about this since what – 2018? Both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels have been interviewed a million times.
“They told their story and there are no surprises here.”
Even some of the ex-president’s chief antagonists such as former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe have been shocked by the weakness of the legal reasoning in the case.
“You saw that today. That indictment landed like a thud, right? Commentators across the spectrum are saying, boy, there’s really not much in here, raises all kinds of questions about the legal theory behind this case,” McCabe told CNN on Tuesday night. “He’s gonna — they’re gonna have a tough time facing motions to dismiss, um, an unimpressive document.”
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett suggested that Trump could invoke his Sixth Amendment rights that require that the crime a defendant faces be publicized.
“He does [have to name it, via] the Sixth Amendment,” Jarrett said. “[The indictment] is therefore facially defective. It is deficient on its face and it would be susceptible to a motion-to-dismiss.
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Jarrett continued mocking Bragg’s rationale for the indictment:
“’I’ve got to get Trump — What crime? — What crime?’ and that an office worker simply remarked, ‘Don’t say anything.’”
