In Brief: The Case Against Trump Should End in ‘Not Guilty’
There is still debate among legal experts as to the specific crime that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is alleging.
Jonathan Turley, an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School, has been a keen observer in the lawfare waged against Donald Trump. In a substantial article in the New York Post, he explains why District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not proven the crime.
Trump’s lawyers are defending a former president who is charged under a state misdemeanor which died years ago under the statute of limitations. It was zapped back into life in the form of roughly three dozen felonies by claiming that bookkeeping violations — allegedly hiding payments to Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about a supposed affair with Trump — were committed to hide another crime.
But what is that second crime?
Even liberal legal analysts admitted that they could not figure out what was being alleged in Bragg’s indictment. Now, after weeks of trial, the situation has changed little.
Bragg cast a wide net, and Judge Juan Merchan has been as favorable to him as possible. That the trial is set in Manhattan doesn’t help Trump with the jury pool, either. And yet.
A classic closing pitch by lawyers is to use a physical object like a three-legged stool. If any leg is missing, the stool collapses.
In this case, the government needs to show that there was a falsification of business records, that the records were falsified to conceal another crime, and that Donald Trump had the specific intent to use such “unlawful means” to influence the election.
Even a cursory review of the evidence shows this case does not have a leg to stand on.
Those three legs, Turley says, are falsification of records, the secondary crime, and criminal intent. He goes on at length to explain the problem with each leg, but we’ll excerpt just the key point about each.
It is not clear that there was such falsification or that Trump has any knowledge or role in any falsification. …
In addition to being a married man, Trump was the host of a major television program subject to a scandal clause. He was also an international businessman. Given all of those interests, it is impossible to claim absolutely that the campaign was the reason for the NDA, which was chump change for a billionaire. …
The entire basis for the alleged criminal intent is [Michael] Cohen, a serial perjurer.
Yet even Cohen did not offer a clear basis for showing a criminal intent to use unlawful means to influence the election.
Turley concludes:
In the end, this three-legged stool is the very thing that all of us must stand on when accused. Who on the jury would want to stand on this stool with their own liberty at stake?
In the end, the defense needs to be honest with these jurors. The question is whether hatred for this man is enough to ignore the obvious injustice in this case. They may have come to this case with little doubt about Donald Trump, but the question is whether there is not any reasonable doubt about the crimes alleged against him.
In the end, we are all standing on that wobbly stool when the government seeks to convict people without evidence or even a clear crime. If we allow a conviction, it is more than a stool that will collapse in this Manhattan courtroom.
