Alvin Bragg’s indictment has been criticized relentlessly by voices on the right. Mark Levin, for example, ripped Bragg to shreds Tuesday evening, citing the lack of an underlying crime and the abuse of the justice system to target Trump and conservatives.
While it may have been expected that Trump supporters and even some of his enemies on the right would scrutinize the indictment, what’s really telling is that voices from the far left have also been critical.
The unsealing of the indictment was predicted to be an opportunity for the left to praise Bragg’s precision and attention to detail in building the case against Trump. However, it turned out that they saw the same flaw as pundits and experts on the right: there is no real substance to the charges. Those who were eager to see Trump held accountable were left disappointed as the indictment failed to meet their expectations.
It’s actually quite remarkable that some of the staunchly anti-Trump pundits aren’t impressed by Bragg’s weak indictment.
At the notoriously anti-Trump network CNN, legal analyst Carrie Cordero told Jake Tapper she found the indictment “underwhelming.”
“Is it what you thought it would be and are you unimpressed?” Tapper asked her.
“It is what I thought it was going to be in terms of the payments that were made; the falsification of the records is really tied to the payment that was made to Stormy Daniels. In terms of a case that’s being brought against a former president, it’s a little underwhelming,” Cordero said.
“There’s not more violations, tax violations,” Cordero continued. “There’s not an incredible new set of facts that we didn’t know about publicly. It’s really the facts of this case, as they have existed for basically almost seven years.”
“There is something painfully anticlimactic about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump,” writes Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox. “It concerns not Trump’s efforts to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States, but his alleged effort to cover up a possible extramarital affair with a porn star. And there’s a very real risk that this indictment will end in an even bigger anticlimax. It is unclear that the felony statute that Trump is accused of violating actually applies to him.”
Related: Why The Left Went After Trump
Mark Stern, who writes for the left-wing rag Slate, lamented that the indictment was “not the slam-dunk case Democrats wanted.”
“These charges will be difficult to prove,” Stern observed. “There can be no doubt that the district attorney faces an uphill climb. They tell the story of a complex conspiracy to illicitly alter the course of the 2016 election—potentially, a powerful tale of corruption that persuades both the jury and the public of this prosecution’s necessity. But Bragg’s legal theory is, if not convoluted, a fairly confusing effort to patch together disparate offenses into one alleged crime, carried out over 34 illegal payments. This is not at all the slam-dunk case that so many Democrats wanted.”
And then there’s former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by Trump, and who was also underwhelmed by Bragg’s case against the former president.
“If I had to characterize [how I feel about the case], it’s disappointment. I think everyone was hoping we would see more about the direction that they intend to take this prosecution — what is the legal theory that ties that very solid misdemeanor case, 34 counts of misdemeanors, to the intent to conceal another crime, which is what makes it a felony? It simply isn’t there,” he said. “At the end of the day, if all of our legal friends read this indictment and don’t see a way to a felony, it’s hard to imagine convincing a jury that they should get there.”
Despite these criticisms, there are still many who support the indictment and believe that Trump should be held accountable for his alleged crimes. That said, Bragg’s indictment of Trump has come under fire from both sides of the political aisle. If some of Trump’s more ardent critics who would love to see him behind bars can admit that the indictment was weak, that tells you all you need to know.
