The issue with Trump’s indictment
The case of Alvin Bragg, who sued Donald Trump before the February 22, 2022 grand jury for violating state law by faking business records
The prosecutors gave the clearest sign yet that the investigation was over when they invited Trump to testify before the grand jury.
On February 22, 2022, Bragg informed the prosecution team that he wasn’t going to authorize charges against Trump. The prosecutors, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, resigned the next day.
According to multiple sources, the district attorney’s office was rethinking whether to indict Costello after he gave testimony to the grand jury.
They called two additional witnesses. David Pecker, the former head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, appeared on Monday. According to sources, the other witness testified before the grand jury on Thursday just before prosecutors asked them to vote on an indictment of more than 30 counts.
After the indictment, Trump ate dinner with his wife, Melania, Thursday evening and smiled while he greeted guests at his Mar-a-Lago club, according to a source familiar with the event.
This case isn’t just one of the law’s impartial majesty holding someone to account. The prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, is an elected district attorney who ran a campaign for that office boasting that he had helped sue Donald Trump “more than a hundred times.” After looking over the evidence, he is said to have put the case on the back burner, triggering a storm of criticism from his Democratic base. If the reported accounts are correct, he decided to go ahead and pursue the case even if the statute of limitations had expired for violating NY state law by faking business records.
As he tries to get back into the White House, Donald Trump will be facing criminal charges for the first time, stemming from a payment made before the 2016 presidential election.
But then-Manhattan District Attorney Vance’s team had already picked up the investigation into the hush money payments and begun looking at potential state law violations. The Trump Organization, other witnesses and Cohen were all served subpoenas by the summer of 2019.
At the time, federal prosecutors had determined they could not seek to indict Trump in the scheme because of US Justice Department regulations against charging a sitting president. According to a recent book by a CNN senior legal analyst, the prosecutors in New York decided not to bring a case against Trump after he left the White House.
Vance’s investigation broadened to the Trump Org.’s finances. New York prosecutors went to the Supreme Court twice to enforce a subpoena for Trump’s tax records from his long-time accounting firm Mazars USA. The Trump Org. and its long-time chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were indicted on tax fraud and other charges in June 2021 for allegedly running an off-the-books compensation scheme for more than a decade.
Weisselberg pleaded guilty to the charges last year and is currently serving a five-month sentence at Rikers Island. Weisselberg wouldn’t implicate Trump in any wrongdoing, even though prosecutors wanted to flip him to cooperate against him.
At least three career prosecutors were able to remove themselves from the investigation because of their disagreements about the pace of the investigation. CNN and others reported last year that they were concerned that the investigation was moving too fast without clear evidence to support possible charges.
The attorneys were allowed to give evidence to the grand jury by the end of the year, but he did not seek an indictment. Some people close to the man say he wanted to leave the decision to Bragg.
Bragg was elected to office in January 2022. Less than two months into his tenure, two top prosecutors who had worked on the Trump case under Vance abruptly resigned amid a disagreement in the office over the strength of the case against Trump.
The bragg inside-indictment case: the case of Bragg alleged fraud against the Trump Organization, an organization that denies any wrongdoing
“I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating,” Pomerantz wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by CNN.
The prosecutors were working on a scheme to make up business records that would include years of financial statements and payments to silence witnesses, according to people with direct knowledge of the investigation. It was thought by prosecutors that there was a good chance the charge of paying money to an individual would be dismissed by a judge.
“Investigations are not linear so we are following the leads in front of us. That’s what we’re doing,” Bragg told CNN in April 2022. “The investigation is very much ongoing.”
The prosecution against the Trump Organization moved forward last year at the same time that Bragg was investigating Trump. There were two Trump Companies in December. entities were convicted at trial on 17 counts and were ordered to pay $1.6 million, the maximum penalty, the following month.
Cohen was brought to the prosecutors to discuss the case. Cohen had previously met prosecutors in the district attorney’s office 13 times. The January meeting was a clear indicator of the direction prosecutors were taking.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/politics/trump-bragg-inside-indictment/index.html
Bragg is not a psychopath, but a friend of the President who orchestrated the Daniels’ deal with the National Enquirer
Asked about Bragg’s hesitance, Pomerantz said: “I can’t speak in detail about what went through his mind. I can surmise from what happened at the time and what he says since that he had some doubts about the strength of the case.
Behind the scenes, Trump attorney Susan Necheles told CNN she met with New York prosecutors to argue why Trump shouldn’t be indicted and that prosecutors didn’t articulate the specific charges they are considering.
After Trump called for protesters, senior staff from the district attorney’s office, the New York Police Department and the New York State Court Officers met to discuss how to provide security at the criminal court building.
During the downtime, Trump continued to make comments about Bragg that were called a “degenerate psychopath.” And four Republican chairmen of the most powerful House committees wrote to Bragg asking him to testify, which Bragg’s office said was unprecedented interference in a local investigation. The white powder in the envelope was deemed to be nonhazardous when it was to be delivered to the building where the grand jury meets.
The grand jury would not meet again until Monday, March 27, when Pecker was ushered back to the grand jury in a government vehicle with tinted windows in a failed effort to evade detection by the media camped outside of the building where the grand jury meets.
Pecker, a longtime friend of Trump’s who had a history of orchestrating so-called “catch and kill” deals while at the National Enquirer, was involved with the Daniels’ deal from the beginning.
Fareed Zakaria: Donald Trump’s vs. Edwards’ Dilemma: The Real Aspects of Public Protection
Editor’s Note: Fareed Zakaria hosts “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” airing at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET Sundays on CNN. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
On the other hand, Trump is an advertisement for wealthy people. He has disobeyed rules and laws for a long time, convinced that the usual standards don’t apply to him. His company was found guilty of tax fraud, he’s been taken to court countless times over unpaid bills, and he’s even stolen money from his own charities.
Jon Stewart was passionate about his argument last week on “GPS.” Jon was right about the law not paying attention to popularity or political effect of indictments, and that no one can be sure of the long-term effect of indictments.
The misdemeanor is tied to a felony due to it violating federal election laws. But that violation is one that the Justice Department under both Trump and President Joe Biden looked at and decided against prosecution. That is, as many experts have pointed out, a novel legal theory. Trump denies any wrongdoing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/donald-trump-indictment-gps-fareed-zakaria/index.html
Do we really want to prosecute the lying politicians? The case of Donald J. Trump in the Wall Street Journal, “The case of a sitting president,”
Given the circumstances, this case has the feel of zealous prosecutors minutely examining all possibilities to find some violation of the law. This upends the notion in Anglo-Saxon law that you first have a crime and then search for the criminal, rather than first looking at the person and searching to see if he or she has committed a crime.
Republicans believe that this is a turning point in the history of American politics and will lead to indictments against national politicians who they don’t like. Perhaps, but they seem to have forgotten that they have been instrumental in developing this weaponization of the legal system. The Wall Street Journal huffed and puffed last week, “As these columns have made clear, we believe any prosecution of a former President should involve a serious offense.”
Really? The Wall Street Journal filled six volumes with editorials in support of the investigation of a sitting president. For those who have forgotten, Whitewater was a failed land deal in which Bill and Hillary Clinton lost money, which triggered a special prosecutor, who found nothing he could use to prosecute them on that matter, but in the course of the investigation learned that Bill Clinton had had a sexual relationship with a White House intern, which he then used to ask Clinton questions that he figured the president would answer dishonestly — leading to a perjury charge. A serious crime?
The truth is, the Journals standard is the right one and Trump is most likely to be faced with such charges soon. In Georgia, he quite possibly could be` prosecuted for having threatened Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,000-odd votes he needed to win that state in 2020. And then there is the January 6, 2021, uprising in which he could easily be charged by federal prosecutors with an effort to overturn an election.
The rule of law is pursued not simply to punish people but to create a system of self-government that is widely viewed as legitimate. The country will be interested in the case. Trump is most likely guilty after the rumors about the charges are true. But will it create more or less faith in our judicial system and our democratic system? I think it’s possible to try the right man for the wrong crime.
