Bragg’s case against Trump is utterly incoherent
Alvin Bragg alleges that Donald Trump defrauded voters into electing him president on November 8, 2016.
Alvin Bragg also alleges that the first crime Donald Trump committed occurred on February 14, 2017.
Are you seeing the problem here?
There may not be enough space in the mega-verse to describe the sundry flaws in the Manhattan district attorney’s indictment against the former president of the United States.
It fails, despite its 34 counts, to state a crime. It is time-barred under the statute of limitations.
Bragg is attempting to enforce either federal election laws that a state prosecutor lacks jurisdiction to enforce or state election laws that do not apply to US presidential election.
The DA’s biggest problem, however, is that his indictment is utterly incoherent.
As a standard-issue Trump-deranged progressive Democrat, Bragg naturally cannot accept that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she was a historically bad candidate. Ergo, the election must have been stolen from her.
The thief, Bragg deduces, was Trump, who stole the election by sinister fraudulent schemes.
There’s just one thing: The only schemes Bragg accuses Trump of carrying out prior to the 2016 election are non-disclosure agreements. More darkly stated, the NDAs were hush money deals to silence people who were otherwise poised to reveal information that would have damaged Trump politically.
Yet there is nothing illegal about NDAs. They are a staple of civil litigation and private negotiations. And while some of the underlying information, if revealed, would have portrayed Trump in an unsavory way, none of that information involved illegal activity.
In fact, to the extent anything was even on the edge of a crime, Trump was a victim — the NDAs happened because people made extortionate threats to humiliate him if they did not get their paydays.
As a good woke progressive, Bragg is upset because this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so if embarrassing information about him was kept under wraps prior to Election Day, that simply must be a crime.
But since Bragg well knows, however much it grates on him, that NDAs are not crimes, the DA is left to make up crimes to fit his fever dream of a stolen 2016 election.
He tries to do this by taking a single transaction — Trump’s reimbursement to Michael Cohen of the $130,000 Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels to stay mum about an alleged 2006 fling — and ludicrously slicing it into 34 transactions, each of which he brands as felony falsification of business records.
The transaction in question may have been accounted for inaccurately. It was the reimbursement of a loan from a lawyer, but it was booked to look as if legal fees had been paid.
But no one was harmed by this. These were records of Trump’s own privately-held companies, and even Bragg does not claim that Trump committed tax evasion or cheated someone out of money or property.
Leave all that aside, though.
Even if this bookkeeping amounted to fraud crimes that Bragg could prove (and it doesn’t), the transactions in question could not possibly have had the slightest impact on the 2016 election. They didn’t occur until months later — specifically, from February 14 through December 5, 2017.
What’s more, even if Bragg had jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign finance law (he doesn’t), and even if Bragg were correct that the hush money payments were in-kind campaign contributions that had to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission (he isn’t), the NDAs he alleges happened late in the 2016 campaign cycle.
That means Trump’s campaign would not have had to make an FEC disclosure until several months into 2017. Again, there could not conceivably have been any impact on the 2016 election.
Bragg’s indictment is worse than a partisan hatchet job. It’s idiotic.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.
