There are a ton of flaws in the record-keeping case against former President Donald Trump by the Manhattan District Attorney and former Justice Department lawyer Alvin Bragg, but there's one big head-shaking flaw that even Trump detractors can't get over. The issue is over the timing of the 34 alleged "crimes" for which Trump stands trial.
Tuesday is Day 2 of the trial, and jury selection has gone apace. See my post about this nearby.
Day 1 was filled with motions, and the jurors went through a questionnaire with 42 questions, mostly aimed at whether they favored Trump. No questions about Democrat Joe Biden, whose former DOJ prosecutor has been tasked to the case, appeared on the questionnaire, even though the trial is implicitly political.
On Day 1 Trump was told if he didn't show up in court he could be arrested. Matt has a piece on that here. Trump had asked for a day off to watch his son Barron graduate from high school. On another issue, Judge Merchan told Trump that he'd think about whether he could campaign on the court's weekly day off on Wednesday. Isn't it nice that a local judge can determine whether a presidential candidate can campaign? That's the feature, not a bug, of this trial's timing.
Also on Day 1, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that she thought that Trump might have nodded off to sleep in court. Late-night "comedians" thought the idea was hilarious. There were no photos since cameras are not allowed in the courtroom.
But now on to the head-shaking issue in the case. Bragg's legal theory is that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. Yes, really. Clinton won nearly two to one in Bragg's state of New York, but there's something even more odd going on here than the fact that he bases his state case on other states' electoral outcomes.
Related: Here's the REAL Reason the Soros-Bought NYC Prosecutor Put Trump on Trial. Try Not to Laugh.
The founder of the Article III Project and Trump supporter, Mike Davis, wonders how someone could steal an election if all the alleged "crimes" happened in 2017 — after the election. All 34 charges are stated to have happened after the election, according to Bragg's indictment.
Davis, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and a former U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer, says Bragg's theory is garbage.
"What Alvin Bragg is trying to say with his bogus legal theory is that when [Trump] booked these in 2017, it was somehow a campaign benefit... [and] campaign finance violation from 2016. It is a laughable legal theory," he said in a radio interview.
"[Bragg's] theory is that back in 2016 President Trump allegedly paid off a nuisance claim to make someone go away, which businessmen do all the time, and then Trump's bookkeepers and accountants booked it in 2017 allegedly," he added. He says that makes no sense.
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy says the same. The conservative legal writer says that the one payment before the election to Stormy Daniels, which she used to extort money from Trump, was made in October 2016. But "even if you accept that it was a campaign finance expense, which it wasn't under federal law, but let's say for argument's sake say that it was, the next reporting period after October of 2016 would have been in 2017 when Trump was already president."
"Even if you buy the theory that Trump had to disclose this it wouldn't have to have been disclosed until 2017, so election theft is ridiculous," he muses.
Worse, McCarthy claims, "The other thing is that it's not a campaign expenditure under federal law and the two authorities under federal law which have authority, which Bragg doesn't, to investigate this, namely the Justice Department and the Federal Elections Commission, both investigated Trump under this, including under the Biden Administration and decided not to bring charges or enforcement action."
The underpinnings of this case, that this is an election offense, "Simply doesn't meet the technical definition of what a campaign expenditure is," McCarthy says.
Neither believes Trump will get a fair trial in Manhattan considering that the case has gotten this far and Judge Merchan's bias in the case. David says about Merchan extending the statute of limitations that these "felony charges would be barred [but] they're blaming COVID."
Related: Jury Questions in Trump's NYC Trial Are Designed to Exclude Religious Supporters
"There's no chance in hell that Trump is going to get a fair trial with these Democrat prosecutors and these Democrat judges and these Democrat juries and these Democrat witnesses and other operatives in these Democrat hell holes like New York, D.C. and this jury pool [is] 85% against Trump," the attorney said.
To underscore the political nature of the charges and trial, "This is the Soros-funded Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, who is downgrading violent felony charges against people who are pushing old ladies down the stairs at churches and punching kids in the face," Davis told a radio audience.
"He's not going after those violent criminals; they're downgrading them to misdemeanors at best and sometimes letting them go while they're trying to upgrade these bookkeeping misdemeanors that are, at best, clearly time-barred beyond the statute of limitations to go after Trump," he added.
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