OPINION:
Former President Donald Trump is sequestered in a downtown Manhattan courtroom for a second week beginning Tuesday. The good news for the former president’s fans is, even a jury in this deeply Democratic jurisdiction might have second thoughts about endorsing the insubstantial charges laid out by the prosecution.
Until now, District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been cagey about the precise nature of the charges — for good reason. Observers assumed there must have been more underlying the indictment than a bunch of trivial misdemeanors related to bookkeeping. Nope. That’s it.
Mr. Bragg and Biden administration point man Matthew Colangelo are spinning a tale that Mr. Trump’s lawyer made “hush money” payments to naughty film actress Stormy Daniels. Although payments of this sort are legitimate, Democratic prosecutors insist they were recorded in a ledger under an incorrect label.
This misdemeanor isn’t sufficient to achieve the left’s goal of branding Mr. Trump a felon before Election Day. So Mr. Bragg cites New York Penal Law 175.10, which says it’s a class E felony if a person “commits the crime of falsifying business records … when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
What is the other crime? The payment to silence Ms. Daniels, according to the prosecutors, was a “conspiracy” to improve Mr. Trump’s image in advance of the 2016 election, triggering another New York law that makes it a crime to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” That’s also a misdemeanor.
The prosecution is applying legal duct tape to a pair of expired misdemeanors to concoct a felony. If you’re going to charge the leading candidate in the middle of a presidential election campaign with a crime, it ought to be an actual crime. In this case, it’s not.
Last week, David Pecker, who used to run the National Enquirer and related tabloids, testified that he engaged in checkbook journalism, buying the rights to embarrassing tales on behalf of celebrities with the intention of burying the stories.
The tactic is used regardless of whether the claims are true or not to ensure other publications don’t run them. Mr. Pecker had legitimate business reasons to perform this service for politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Rahm Emanuel and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as for famous people who weren’t running for office.
The former National Enquirer executive admitted Mr. Trump told him he didn’t think there was a point in buying stories because they always get out anyway, undercutting the argument that his efforts were solely designed to “promote” the election of Mr. Trump.
Positive stories about Mr. Trump sell magazines, the erstwhile publisher said, and that was the case before he became a political figure. The conduct the prosecution describes as election interference would have taken place whether there was an election or not.
A Rasmussen Reports poll last week found only 42% of likely voters nationwide expect the New York jury to review the evidence fairly, but the poll was taken before details of the contrived prosecution emerged.
It has becoming slightly more plausible that a gutsy juror may yet realize the only people conspiring to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office are Mr. Bragg and his team.
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