National Review Online
Friday, May 31, 2024
Well, Alvin Bragg got his man.
In a case that will eventually be remembered as a
textbook instance of selective prosecution, the Manhattan district attorney
breathed life into an alleged bookkeeping misdemeanor that the statute of
limitations had expired on and, Merlin-like, transformed it into 34 felonies.
In his press conference after the jury returned the
guilty verdict Thursday afternoon, Bragg said his office did its work without
“fear or favor,” an Orwellian portrayal of a prosecution that never would have
been undertaken against anyone not named Donald Trump, or if Trump weren’t
running for president again.
Bragg relied on an embarrassingly compliant Judge Juan
Merchan, and a Manhattan jury that took its cues from Merchan, to make up for
the myriad legal deficiencies in his case.
The business-records charge requires not just that a
record is false (Trump’s reimbursement to Michael Cohen was booked as an
ongoing legal fee rather than a loan reimbursement) but that there is an intent
to defraud. There isn’t any evidence that Trump sought to defraud anyone with a
bookkeeping entry that no one would even see.
To transmogrify the alleged bookkeeping offense into a
felony, it had to be in furtherance of another crime, which Bragg declined to
include in his indictment and wasn’t explicit about for most of the trial,
although his prosecutors said it was federal campaign-finance law in their
closing arguments. Still, since Merchan instructed the jurors to take a
Chinese-menu approach to the second offense — they didn’t have to agree among
themselves which of three possible criminal violations Trump committed — it’s
impossible even now to know with certainty what Trump has been found guilty of.
The idea that it was a violation of federal campaign law
is not credible. Paying porn stars for their silence is not a campaign expense.
Moreover, Trump would have had to willfully violate the law, and there’s no
evidence that he was even thinking of campaign-finance law.
All that said, Trump and his team did themselves no
favors by denying the assignation with Stormy Daniels, when the evidence and
common sense strongly suggest it happened, and by denying that he paid back
Cohen, when Trump had previously acknowledged it in public. The prosecution
successfully created the impression that this, on its own, was illegal conduct,
and Trump’s dubious denials played into that impression.
The Trump legal team has plenty of grounds to appeal the
case and may well ultimately succeed, although almost certainly not this year.
The Democrats will make much of Trump’s new status as a convicted felon, and
the case will continue to intrude on the campaign; Trump’s sentencing is set
for a few days before the start of the Republican convention. It’s impossible
to know with certainty how the verdict will play politically, but there is a
strong chance that it will be a wash and soon enough overwhelmed by the larger
issues in the campaign.
There’s no denying, though, that Alvin Bragg has made
history — by becoming the first prosecutor in the history of the country to
abuse his office in hopes of damaging an opposition presidential candidate
ahead of a national election.
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