Former President Donald Trump could have a strong case for dismissing the 34-count felony indictment against him in connection to hush-money payments made to porn star, Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels.
Even analysts who have long opposed the former president politically have been shocked by what they see as the weak legal rationale. New York law gives defendants the right to challenge the “legal sufficiency” of the evidence brought against them by a grand jury. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appeared to suggest that the case was about relitigating the 2016 election during the press conference.
“That is, a scheme to buy and suppress negative information to help Mr. Trump’s chance of winning the election as part of the scheme, Donald Trump and others made three payments to people who claimed to have negative information about Mr. Trump,” Bragg said.
Bragg and his predecessor Cyrus Vance Jr. previously decided against charging Trump with a crime for the $130,000 payment to Clifford two weeks before the election. Vance told CBS News Tuesday that he had decided to drop the case due to pressure from the local U.S. attorney’s office and his respect for the Justice Department’s view the case shouldn’t be pursued.
“The question that keeps smacking us upside the head is whether this case would have been brought against any defendant not named Donald Trump. It’s hard to avoid answering no,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, saying the legal case was “even weaker than we expected.”
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a key figure in the Trump Russia collusion investigation and a known Trump opponent, found the indictment lacking. McCabe dismissed the indictment as an “unimpressive document” and suggested Trump could prevail in a motion to dismiss during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“I have never seen a defendant indicted and actually come away from the indictment with a little bit of momentum,” McCabe said. “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 continued:
“He’s gonna — they’re gonna have a tough time facing motions to dismiss, um, an unimpressive document. And he could have stood in front of that group of supporters this evening and pointed simply to that fact. And highlighted his own claimed innocence and used this as a moment to say, see, rally behind me, this shouldn’t happen to anyone in this country, we’ve debased the criminal justice system, which we all rely on.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley noted that the indictment stacked up with what had been expected for weeks, namely a case built on a weak legal foundation that he believes should be tossed. Turley argued that the New York court should admonish Bragg for “politicizing the criminal justice process.”
“It is a series of stacked counts of falsifying business records for the purpose of influencing the election. The indictment seems to address the lack of legal precedent with a lack of specificity on the underlying ‘secondary’ felony. Bragg has done nothing more than replicated the same flawed theory dozens of times. This is where math and the law meet. If you multiply any number by zero, it is still zero,” Turley wrote on his blog. “The cost, however, to the legal system will be immense. In a single indictment, Alvin Bragg bulldozed any high ground that the Democrats had after January 6th. He has fulfilled the narrative of the Trump campaign by supplying a raw and undeniable example of the politicization of the legal system.”
At the end of the day the decision whether or not to dismiss the charges rests with Judge Juan M. Merchan, who Trump denounced as a “Trump-hating judge” in his post-indictment speech Tuesday night.
MORE: Is AOC a Sellout?
MORE: Hunter Biden Has a Big China Problem
MORE: Kamala Harris ‘Seems to Be An Albatross’
MORE: Pete Buttigieg: Running for President?
MORE: What Trump Getting Arrested Could Look Like
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.
