NY prosecutors absurd case against Trump
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While an indictment was expected this week, the grand jury looking into former President Donald Trump will go another week amid reports of opposition in the grand jury over what is viewed as a “weak” case.
The problem is that Bragg has long been searching for a crime in the criminal code to fulfill his pitch during his campaign that he was the man for voters who wanted to bag Trump.
The falsification of business records in reference to the $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels might have been a possibility, but it lacked two things.
First, it expired as a chargeable misdemeanor after two years — and that was roughly five years ago.
Second, it was a mere misdemeanor that could be brushed off by Trump even if they succeeded.
Prosecutors then created a Rube Goldberg approach and suggested that the misdemeanor was committed to conceal a federal election law violation — a crime that the Justice Department declined to charge.
That theory has been widely ridiculed, even by many on the left. The bootstrapping of a federal crime under this statute appears unprecedented and likely unsustainable.
The reason that the Justice Department likely declined the case was that it had previously tried to show that hush money paid to bury an affair was a federal campaign expense.
It failed in the case of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.
There are a host of reasons why a married celebrity like Trump might pay hush money separate from a presidential run.
Bragg himself scoffed at the theory and stopped the investigation when he came into power.
Two prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, then resigned and Pomerantz took what some of us view as a highly unprofessional and improper step of publishing a book on the case against Trump — a person who was still under investigation and not charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.
The pressure campaign worked and Bragg pushed the dubious theory to a grand jury.
Like Kailasa, the Bragg indictment has an established con man who insisted it exists.
Bragg has Michael Cohen, the former lawyer to Trump. A disbarred lawyer, Cohen is a convicted felon and one of the most repellent figures with a long history of false statements.
Then things got even worse when the lawyer for his star witness came forward with more than 300 emails contradicting his testimony.
Another letter on behalf of Cohen to the Federal Election Commission also surfaced that expressly contradicted his claims.
Finally, and probably most significantly for Bragg, the politics may have turned.
Even Democrats are hard pressed to defend the reported basis for the indictment, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declined to express his support for the effort.
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It is more than passing strange that Democrats like Bragg or so desperate to criminalize Trump rather than deal with him on a political basis. If they do not like his politics, why not attack him on that rather than trying to concoct a criminal case that utterly makes no sense. I suspect they are taking their current route because they do not think they can defeat him on political issues.
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