Donald Trump will not go to jail or be put on probation for being convicted of 34 charges that never should have been brought against him by a prosecutor who could never articulate the criminal conduct that led to those charges and sentenced by a judge who claimed that Trump's election put him above the law.
Partisan hatred and revenge drove this prosecution. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought charges against Trump for falsifying his business records to hide payments made to pornstar Stormy Daniels.
Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. But in order to bump the charges up to a felony, Bragg claimed that the records were altered for political purposes and that Trump tried to hide the payments because they would have damaged him so severely that he would have lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
"We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate," Bragg said in a January 2024 interview with NY1. "It's an election interference case."
The business records that Bragg said Trump altered to get elected were dated from Feb. 14, 2017, to Dec. 5, 2017. That's right. Bragg was making the case that the falsified records allowed Trump to defeat Clinton after the election was already held and Trump was in the White House.
Did that stop the media from claiming that Trump "interfered" with the election?
Unfazed by that temporal difficulty, NPR reported that "former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election." A Washington Post editorial likewise asserted that the jury had found Trump "guilty of felony falsification of business records in order to influence the 2016 election."
A New York Times editorial claimed Trump had been convicted of "falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." It said the verdict "establishes that Mr. Trump committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election."
These outlets are not run by gibbering idiots (well, not in the classic sense of the word "gibbering"). Presumably, the editors and writers were aware of the "temporal difficulty," as Reason's Jacob Sullum wryly notes. This is exactly what Bragg was counting on.
Bragg was undeterred by the fact that his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had decided against charging Trump with state crimes based on the Daniels NDA after concluding that none of the options was legally viable. Bragg was determined to get Trump one way or another. The resulting case was so vague, complicated, and confusing that it remains unclear exactly which version of Bragg's theory the jurors accepted. But they apparently were swayed by the prosecution's claim that Trump somehow had committed "election fraud," even though he was never charged with that crime.
In the second-most anti-Trump state in the union in what is arguably the most anti-Trump city in the world, finding "12 good men and true" to sit in judgment on the former president was well nigh impossible. Trump's legal team requested a venue change, which a New York appeals court summarily denied.
Readers of this site know that I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But I'm a much bigger fan of the rule of law. And it's frightening to me what was done to Trump in the name of "justice" when a fool could see how partisan the prosecution was.
From beginning to end, from top to bottom, the whole process was a corruption of the criminal justice system by hyper-partisan Democrats wanting to not only absolve Hillary Clinton of losing to Trump in 2016 but also damage Trump's 2024 prospects irreparably.
It didn't work. The federal appellate court will probably toss the 34-count conviction. But Alvin Bragg will almost certainly go on abusing his power as DA in service to his singular concept of "justice."
Others will not be as fortunate as Donald Trump.
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