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Sometimes even Donald Trump has a point. This time, it’s his claim that he has been singled out by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for conduct that would probably not have been charged as a crime against anyone else.
The indictment of the former president in New York is an undeniably historic event — the first ever criminal prosecution of a former U.S. president — but it has also defied many people’s expectations that he would be arrested for a crime related to his time as president. The case, after all, is not about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election or his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, which are both under investigation by the Justice Department. The investigation by the Fulton County district attorney concerning Trump and his allies’ effort to manipulate the 2020 election results in Georgia also still remains underway, and people have been eagerly awaiting the results ever since a special grand jury completed its investigative work in February.
The case brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, instead reportedly charges Trump for events that took place before he was president and uses a highly unusual legal theory based on a highly unusual set of facts — Trump’s payment of hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 election to cover up an alleged affair that the two had while he was married.
At the time of this writing, the charge(s) in the indictment against Trump have not been publicly confirmed, but for weeks, media outlets have reported that the alleged crime at issue would be Trump’s participation in falsifying his company’s business records to obscure the reason for the payment, which was characterized within the company as a legal retainer for Michael Cohen — Trump’s onetime lawyer turned mortal enemy following his stint in prison.
The unusual charge from the Manhattan DA’s office that is apparently at issue has already prompted a broad consensus among conservative politicians and commentators that Trump is the victim of a political prosecution — a “witch hunt,” to use Trump’s preferred phrase. A Trump campaign email sent recently to supporters last week claimed that prosecutors in New York “chose their target first and have been hunting for a crime ever since.”
Before the indictment came down, conservative legal commentator Andrew McCarthy, who is no fan of Trump as a political figure, argued that “it’s undeniable that no one who wasn’t Donald Trump would ever be charged for this.”
Law professor
likewise said on Megyn Kelly’s show that “Nobody in their right mind would believe that Bragg would be going after John Smith or even John Edwards on a case like this. It’s obviously an example of ‘Get Trump’” — the name of Dershowitz’s latest book, in case you missed the promotional tie-in — “and it’s so, so dangerous.”
The claim is likely to be a central part of Trump’s defense, both in the public and legal arenas, and it is not likely to go away anytime soon — particularly since there is good reason to believe that it’s true.
The investigation by the DA’s office was reportedly spurred by news of the payment to Daniels all the way back in 2018 under Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. According to a Supreme Court filing during the office’s fight to get Trump’s tax returns, the office put its investigation on hold at the request of the Justice Department around the time of Cohen’s guilty plea to a variety of federal charges, including campaign finance violations related to the payment to Daniels. Prosecutors in Manhattan picked the investigation back up in the summer of 2019 after they learned that the federal investigation had been closed without further charges.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-trump-seems-victim-witch-231420543.html
The indictment of the former president in New York is an undeniably historic event — the first ever criminal prosecution of a former U.S. president — but it has also defied many people’s expectations that he would be arrested for a crime related to his time as president. The case, after all, is not about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election or his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, which are both under investigation by the Justice Department. The investigation by the Fulton County district attorney concerning Trump and his allies’ effort to manipulate the 2020 election results in Georgia also still remains underway, and people have been eagerly awaiting the results ever since a special grand jury completed its investigative work in February.
The case brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, instead reportedly charges Trump for events that took place before he was president and uses a highly unusual legal theory based on a highly unusual set of facts — Trump’s payment of hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 election to cover up an alleged affair that the two had while he was married.
At the time of this writing, the charge(s) in the indictment against Trump have not been publicly confirmed, but for weeks, media outlets have reported that the alleged crime at issue would be Trump’s participation in falsifying his company’s business records to obscure the reason for the payment, which was characterized within the company as a legal retainer for Michael Cohen — Trump’s onetime lawyer turned mortal enemy following his stint in prison.
The unusual charge from the Manhattan DA’s office that is apparently at issue has already prompted a broad consensus among conservative politicians and commentators that Trump is the victim of a political prosecution — a “witch hunt,” to use Trump’s preferred phrase. A Trump campaign email sent recently to supporters last week claimed that prosecutors in New York “chose their target first and have been hunting for a crime ever since.”
Before the indictment came down, conservative legal commentator Andrew McCarthy, who is no fan of Trump as a political figure, argued that “it’s undeniable that no one who wasn’t Donald Trump would ever be charged for this.”
Law professor
The claim is likely to be a central part of Trump’s defense, both in the public and legal arenas, and it is not likely to go away anytime soon — particularly since there is good reason to believe that it’s true.
The investigation by the DA’s office was reportedly spurred by news of the payment to Daniels all the way back in 2018 under Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. According to a Supreme Court filing during the office’s fight to get Trump’s tax returns, the office put its investigation on hold at the request of the Justice Department around the time of Cohen’s guilty plea to a variety of federal charges, including campaign finance violations related to the payment to Daniels. Prosecutors in Manhattan picked the investigation back up in the summer of 2019 after they learned that the federal investigation had been closed without further charges.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-trump-seems-victim-witch-231420543.html
