But that doesn’t mean that every structural infirmity around the Manhattan district attorney’s case has evaporated. Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.
The following are all undeniable facts.
The judge donated money — a tiny amount, $35, but in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind — to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the judge earmarked for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to “Re-elect Donald Trump, MAGA forever!”? Absolutely not.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office in an overwhelmingly Democratic county by toutinghis Trump-hunting prowess. He bizarrely (and falsely) boasted on the campaign trail, “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times.” (Disclosure: Both Bragg and Trump’s lead counsel, Todd Blanche, are friends and former colleagues of mine at the Southern District of New York.)
Most importantly, the DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process. That’s not on the jury. That’s on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did.
The district attorney’s press office and its flaks often proclaim that falsification of business records charges are “commonplace” and, indeed, the office’s “bread and butter.” That’s true only if you draw definitional lines so broad as to render them meaningless. Of course the DA charges falsification quite frequently; virtually any fraud case involves some sort of fake documentation.
But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.
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Ultimately, the judge in the case — who donated to his defendant’s political opponent in their last election match-up — told the Manhattan jury that they could select from a menu of three options that could be considered the critical, felony-creating ‘other crime.’ These options were not adjudicated at trial, let alone proven. They weren’t spelled out in the indictment. The defense was not able to defend against them. Attempts at educating the jury on the most likely of the options were barred by the Biden donor judge. A top expert’s highly-relevant testimony was preemptively disallowed, and therefore never heard. One of the prosecutors in the courtroom joined Bragg’s legal team from President Biden’s Justice Department, where he’d been serving as the third highest-ranking official. He quit and became an assistant in a local DA’s office, which is unheard of. This man, who was paid thousands of dollars for political consulting by the Democratic National Committee during Trump’s presidency, clearly had a very specific objective in mind. Days before Trump’s conviction, his electoral opponent’s team held a campaign event at the courthouse. These facts — in isolation, and especially taken together — are breathtaking.
More.
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And:
I’ve been so impressed with @eliehonig’s coverage of the Trump trial @CNN. His intelligent, impartial analysis was brave and patriotic, exposing CNN viewers to his skepticism about the trial. His piece on the unprecedented and unconstitutional nature of the trial is a must read: