Thoughts on Trump's Conviction
Thoughts on Trump's Conviction
Yes, it's lawfare. And yes, it's absolutely horrible for the country.
Trump’s campaign raked in more than $52 million in a span of 24 hours after he was convicted on May 30. The fundraising website crashed due to the influx of donations, more than a third of which came from new donors.
I was one of them.
I’ve never donated to a politician before. And I’m certainly not some rabid Trump supporter. Truth be told, I’ve been mostly apathetic about him during his foray into politics.
But he’s grown on me. A lot.
As Martin Gurri put it, Trump has become for the public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: “a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order.”
And yours truly is looking for a club, because I absolutely despise the established order. I’m so sick and tired of watching progressive Democrats destroy the country. Over the past couple of decades, these people captured the whole panoply of American institutional power with disastrous consequences.
Think about it. Think of all the horrible changes that have occurred under the banner of Progress™, changes that have accelerated under the Biden administration. Off the top of my head: The open border policies facilitating unchecked illegal immigration; the deliberate inculcation of historical shame in the public; the creation of the Censorship Industrial Complex; the institutionalization of neo-racism and discrimination against white people; the corruption of science; the defunding and demonization of police forces; the transformation of universities into illiberal social justice factories that poison minds with intersectionality and post-modernism; the flooding of K-12 with radical Leftists posing as teachers who intentionally confuse kids and groom them to lean Left; the weaponization of the intelligence agencies, most notably the FBI; the degeneration of the mainstream media into the DNC propaganda arm, which feeds the public fictitious narratives undermining national unity; the devolution of the military into a fighting force focused on social engineering and diversity initiatives that ruin unit cohesion; the imposition of gender ideology on the public and erasure of women’s rights; the replacement of merit-based hiring and admission standards with DEI policies; and the perversion of the justice system.
The perversion of the justice system.
The show trial that just took place in a Manhattan courtroom, which featured vague charges, flabby jury instructions, and the central testimony of a serial perjurer, is perhaps the most stark example of this perversion and will go down in history as a textbook instance of selective prosecution. Among committed Democrats and their allies, Donald Trump’s conviction is “justice done” because “no one is above the law.”1 But what was applied here was not the law.
With the help of a provably anti-Trump judge — someone who, in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind, donated money to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds earmarked for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy” — the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin “one-cheeseburger-away-from-a-heart-attack” Bragg, quite literally cobbled together a brand new, alchemized legal theory to invent felonies against their party’s chief political opponent. These charges were bespoke—crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.
As Andrew McCarthy has masterfully detailed over the past year, “Bragg indicted based on his own unique interpretation of an infrequently enforced statute that had never been used before and is unconstitutionally vague under New York’s constitution.” Why resort to this penal provision? Because Bragg was lacking what any ethical prosecutor thinking about indicting a former president would have, which is a serious crime that would be charged against anyone, supported by clear, convincing evidence.
The surface level understanding propagated by the mainstream media is that Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for categorizing as “legal expenses” the reimbursements he made to his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for hush money payments to a porn star whom Trump allegedly slept with. The truth, however, is far more complicated, and far more absurd.
“The heart of the case,” Bragg said, is Trump’s “criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” by covering up an affair and hiding negative information from voters.2 But there’s nothing inherently illegal about that,3 and as a state prosecutor, Bragg has no authority over federal election law violations, which have a five year statute of limitations anyway.4 So he instead charged Trump with concealing his reimbursement of Cohen by disguising it as payment for legal services.5 According to the indictment, this was done through phony invoices, checks, and ledger entries, each of which violated Section 175.05 of the New York Penal Law, which makes falsification of business records “with intent to defraud” a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 and/or up to a year in jail.
As CNN legal expert Elie Honig details,6 Bragg was faced with two problems. Number one, De minimis non curat lex: The law is not concerned with trifles, and it would be laughable to bring the first-ever charge against a former president for a misdemeanor offense “that falls within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega.” And number two, the statute of limitations on a misdemeanor in New York is two years, and Trump’s conduct dates to 2016 and 2017.
Ergo, Bragg had to rely on caprice — “page one in the selective-prosecution playbook,” as Andrew McCarthy puts it. Contorting the law, the Manhattan DA inflated the charges up to the lowest-level felony — which has a six year statute of limitations as opposed to just two — by alleging that the falsification of business records was committed “with intent to commit another crime.” According to the prosecution, the “another crime” is a violation of a New York State election-law that makes it a misdemeanor to “conspire to promote the election of any person to public office by unlawful means.” So the other crime is also a misdemeanor, which is only a crime if it involves another crime—in this case, whatever crime makes the election conspiracy “unlawful.” Bragg and his team argued that it was unlawful because it involved three “unlawful means”: a FECA violation; New York tax fraud; and falsification of other business records (which would mean that Trump falsified business records to conspire to steal the election by falsifying business records).
Incredibly, Bragg refused to specify these unlawful means until right before closing arguments, and Judge Juan Merchan was totally okay with this egregious violation of the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial (the indictment says nothing about “another crime”).
Also incredible: the jurors were told that they needn’t agree on what unlawful conduct Trump engaged in to corrupt the election. Instead, Merchan instructed them to pick any of the three Bragg theories that they liked. As long as each juror found one of these menu items, it wouldn’t matter if they all found the same one. The court would still consider that a unanimous verdict.
Nobody knows which menu item (or items) the jurors picked, because, despite this case being a rather big deal as the first ever criminal prosecution of a former American president, Merchan dispensed with the routine procedure of jury interrogatories, which would have documented the jury’s conclusions for appellate courts to review. It also means the defense still has no idea what the jury found, in addition to not being told what Bragg was alleging.
There are other “irregularities” and absurdities concerning this case that I’ve skipped over, like:
No state prosecutor has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. That’s because Congress specifically gave the DOJ and the FEC exclusive enforcement authority over federal campaign law to ensure uniform application nationally of very complicated, constitutionally fraught legislation. To allow any local prosecutor in the country, despite having no federal jurisdiction, to implicate these laws and impose his own version of them is the antithesis of what Congress intended.
There is no evidence of Trump’s intent to commit FECA crimes, or even that Trump gave a moment’s thought to FECA in 2016 when the NDAs were being negotiated or in 2017 when Cohen was being reimbursed. But despite this massive hole in Bragg’s case, Merchan helped him out by declining to instruct the jury on willfulness, the state of mind that Bragg was supposed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict Trump.
No New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public.
Bragg’s office didn’t even bother to prudentially avoid the appearance of undue influence from the Biden administration. Matthew Colangelo, the third-ranking DOJ official under Merrick Garland, was hired to helm the case. As one of the lead prosecutors at the trial itself, it was Colangelo who alleged in opening arguments that Trump was guilty of a “criminal scheme” to corrupt the 2016 election.
Stormy Daniels’ graphic testimony of her sexual encounter with Trump had absolutely nothing to do with how the Trump organization booked NDA reimbursement payments to Cohen eleven years later. Irrelevant and prejudicial, the testimony succeeded in painting Trump in the worst possible light for the jury. Despite approving it himself, Merchan later admonished prosecutors for adducing the testimony and even blamed defense lawyers for failing to object after he’d already overruled their motions to preclude it.
Regarding Alvin Bragg, who explicitly campaigned as the man best qualified to prosecute Donald Trump7: Keep in mind that we’re talking about a progressive DA who treats hardened criminals and recidivists with kid gloves. Under Bragg’s tenure, “Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no ‘genuine risk of physical harm’ to anyone. . . . Convicted criminals caught with weapons other than guns will have those felony charges downgraded to misdemeanors unless they’re also charged with more serious offenses.”
But despite downgrading 60% of all felonies last year,8 Bragg grossly stretched and contorted the law to conjure a multi-count felony conviction of Democrats’ political archrival, potentially resulting in more than a century of prison time, out of a handful of internal, victimless corporate records mis-categorizations from nearly a decade ago which concern unseemly, but not illegal, behavior.
I also want to point out that the Manhattan DA’s office never had any discussions with Trump’s attorneys about a plea bargain. As Tim Rosenberger observed, that’s highly unusual based on precedent and numbers: “In 2019, 96 percent of New York’s felony convictions and 99 percent of misdemeanor convictions stemmed from guilty pleas. In 2019, 57,143 Manhattan felony arrests resulted in only 1,599 prison sentences, an imprisonment rate of less than 3 percent.”
And this trial, which lasted more than six weeks, likely cost New York City $1 million to $2 million, with roughly $50,000 per day in additional security costs. Would the Manhattan DA’s office spend seven-figure sums to chase down false business records from 2016 if the defendant was anyone other than Donald Trump? Is it not significant that despite New York courts being extremely backlogged, with more than 453,000 pending cases and tens of thousands of violent crime victims awaiting justice, this Stalinist Beria-style show trial was prioritized? And given that the median time from indictment to conviction for Manhattan felonies is 683 days, but this case, which was obviously way more complicated than most felonies, was resolved in less than 400 days, doesn’t that at least suggest prosecutorial abuse for the sake of hurting Trump’s re-election chances?
The first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president — and current leading challenger to the sitting president — coming on a single misdemeanor paper crime gerrymandered into 34 separate felonies via a “boutique legal theory” is the sort of thing Americans have come to expect from tyrannical foreign governments. It could not be more obvious that this was the targeting not of an offense, but of a person whose guilt has always been presumed—which, needless to say, is contrary to the presumption of innocence that favors the rights of the accused (including the right not to be investigated at all).
But a blind desire to establish Trump’s criminality for no higher purpose than to advance Democrats’ political objectives has led to the manifest abuse of the American system of justice at the hands of Democratic operatives. And an obsessive hatred of Trump has resulted in far too many among us enthusiastically endorsing the grotesque moral and ethical compromises that produced this outcome.
As someone who genuinely cares about this country, what upsets me most is the childlike glee of norm-obliterating, TDS-afflicted antagonists. These people are incapable of perceiving the big-picture implications of what they’re supporting, incapable of understanding that a prosecutorial strategy focused on confecting innovative crimes to charge political rivals with is a threat to civil liberties in general, incapable of realizing Trump will eventually go away, but every norm broken to “get him” will be permanent.
Or perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps these people find it easy to rationalize the shambles that progressive Democrats have made of our justice system in their rabid jihad against Trump, in large part because the Left, which essentially controls the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life, is able to impose interpretations of political events that all the dominant institutions in our society accept as authoritative.
One thing is for sure: these morons are ignorant of history, which is littered with examples of great nations imploding from within. Civic institutions require the trust and faith of citizens to function. When that trust and faith corrodes, so do the institutions, until everything collapses. The weaponization of our justice system as a political tool is a further and precipitous step down this path,9 likely leading to runaway cycles of vengeance in the form of tit-for-tat political prosecutions.
Moreover, as I pointed out nearly two years ago after the Mar-a-Lago raid, there are comparative lessons to be learned by looking back on other times and places in which similar dynamics to the present have been at work. Writing in the third book of The Peloponnesian War some 2,400 years ago, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides warned that it’s dangerous for the rulers of a democracy to prosecute a political opponent. Specifically, taking revenge in a show trial intensifies polarization among the demos, opens the door to not just bitterness but outright violence, and…increases sympathy for the prosecuted.
Since the verdict was announced, I’ve sensed a shift in sentiment across the country. I could be imagining it, yes. But others have noted it as well. Think back to 2016 and watching Trump’s campaign grow organically. People felt that a vote for him was not only their way of throwing a brick through the glass in Washington, but throwing a middle finger at progressive elites intent on either erasing or replacing everything from merit and our shared sense of history to free speech and biological dimorphism, essentially rebuilding Western thought from first principles while racializing everything. In the face of such idiocy, many Americans rightly balked. “Make America Great Again” was just as much about nostalgia and stopping the Left from bulldozing the country as it was a call to sweep away the ruling order.
That energy seemed to be missing in 2020 because Trump was already in the White House. Today, though? It feels like the same energy is back. Progressive elites have become even more insufferable, and left-wing orthodoxy even more suffocating, but I also think it has a lot to do with Democrats essentially turning the 2024 election into a referendum on their abuse of the justice system. Now you have people who’ve never voted for Trump — people who could have never even imagined doing so — saying they would crawl on broken glass to cast their ballot for him in November. They’ve decided that the brazen lawfare employed by Democrats is more dangerous than anything Trump, and his worst excesses, represent.
Insofar as there is any attempt to corrupt the democratic political process, to me it is in the attempts by Trump’s enemies to deprive people of the chance to vote for him. It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous that is—working to prevent Americans from voting for the candidate of their choice, cutting off one of the only peaceful ways they have to show their anger at the status quo. It’s a recipe for destabilization. The “win at all costs” mentality that now reigns on the Left, no matter the means used and the inappropriateness of those means, is the true threat to our country, and should be held accountable at the ballot box.
It’s reasonable to conclude at this point that some people are in fact above the law, so long as they’re aligned politically with the people screaming about how no one is above the law. And don’t get me started about Tuesday’s Hunter Biden conviction. Him being convicted of a firearms charge is a massive red herring. The DOJ allowed the statute of limitations to expire on his most serious tax charges, buried evidence of the Bidens’ foreign bribery allegations, and attempted to give Hunter a sweetheart deal with broad immunity. David Weiss wouldn’t go after him on the serious tax charges or on FARA because it would lead back to the shady business dealings involving Joe Biden. Instead, they went after Hunter for a much lesser charge, where the evidence was too insurmountable to ignore, so they can scream “nobody is above the law” as they rig the criminal-justice system against the man whom they hate and fear.
Judge Juan Merchan supported Bragg’s weak theory of “election interference,” describing the case, in his summary of it during jury selection, as an allegation of falsifying business records “to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.”
In a 2018 plea agreement, Michael Cohen (Bragg’s main witness), who was Trump’s lawyer at the time and paid Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about the alleged affair, accepted the Justice Department's characterization of that payment as an illegal campaign contribution. But Trump was never prosecuted for soliciting or accepting that purported contribution. Nor was he prosecuted for later reimbursing Cohen in a series of payments. That’s because the question of whether this arrangement violated federal election law hinges on whether the hush money is properly viewed as a campaign expense or a personal expense—a distinction which depends on whether Trump was motivated by a desire to promote his election or by a desire to avoid embarrassment and spare his wife’s feelings. Proving the former hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt would have been next to impossible, as illustrated by the unsuccessful 2012 prosecution of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.
Plus, the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission, the two entities Congress endowed with exclusive authority to prosecute Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violations, thoroughly investigated Trump and determined not to take action because the NDAs were not cognizable campaign expenditures. But Judge Juan Merchan denied Trump’s defense the right to call former FEC commissioner Bradley Smith, who would have explained that the NDAs were not campaign expenditures, and even if the Stormy Daniels NDA on which the business-records charges were based had been a campaign expenditure, there would have been no reporting obligation until after the election. So, Bragg’s fictitious claim that Trump stole the 2016 election by skirting FECA reporting requirements wasn’t just legal nonsense, but...fiction.
Is paying your lawyer to arrange an NDA not a legal expense? Oh, and it seems pertinent to point out that in 2022, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay $113,000 in civil penalties to settle an FEC investigation into whether they misreported campaign expenditures. What was the violation? The Clinton campaign and the DNC paid law firm Perkins Coie to hire Fusion GPS for the opposition research that eventually became the Steele dossier—and reported these payments as “legal expenses” rather than campaign expenditures. For reasons I can’t quite fathom, no state-level DA thought to inflate this violation into a 34-count felony criminal indictment. As Matt Taibbi has noted, “Following the logic of this case, if it’s illegal to try to hide that you had sex with a porn star, it should be way more serious to hide that you were the source of news stories that actually impacted the election — false ones at that.”
It is notable that Honig formerly worked with Bragg in the Manhattan DA’s office.
Politico headline: “This reluctant prosecutor just made Donald Trump a felon”
At the time of this writing, Bragg is in Manhattan criminal court moving to dismiss en masse all burglary felony charges brought against those who broke into Hamilton Hall at Columbia University.
You could argue that we’re already dangerously far along this path, as evidenced by Trump maintaining his lead in every poll amidst dozens of criminal indictments and now a felony conviction—a blaring sign that the people charged with overseeing our institutions have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public. This should be setting off warning bells for anyone who actually cares about the future of this country.
Nice summary of the bullshit. Hoping I can pass this on to low info dems that believe Trump committed 34 felonies.
I made a big donation to Trump after the verdict. I was mostly civil to my liberal friends before the verdict. Today I tell any that justify the verdict to go F themselves that I will call them after the 2024 election to see if there are any shreds of friendship left to build upon.
What pisses me off more than anything is the smugness, righteousness and lack of demonstrated moral foundation of these liberal pricks… many who grew up protesting against the man. They have zero core principles backing them. They are massive hypocrites of the highest order. Any Democrat politician getting 1% of the treatment that Trump gets would result in them putting on black masks and pink vagina hats and burning down whole neighborhoods where poor people live.
I don’t hate easy and I have a rule that I don’t hate in politics… but American Democrats are pushing the limits of what I can tolerate as unworthy of hate.