Mark Alexander covered the strategy behind Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s disgraceful indictment of Donald Trump on Friday. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy offers a number of more specific observations that are well worth reading.

And they say Trump is the norm-breaker.

Alvin Bragg, the elected progressive Democrat who ran for Manhattan district attorney as the candidate most likely to wield his power against Donald Trump, crossed the Rubicon on Thursday. His subordinate prosecutors presented and convinced a grand jury to vote for an indictment that will make Trump the first former president to be charged with a crime in American history.

If reports are to be believed, it is not merely an unworthy exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It is one that will threaten the legitimacy of the justice system — on the public acceptance of which the rule of law hinges.

The indictment is still sealed, but it almost certainly focuses on a crime or crimes related to Trump’s hush money payment to a porn star. The supposed crime is likely specifically related to violations of campaign finance laws.

Bragg typically goes out of his way to avoid charging criminals. Not this time. Falsification of bookkeeping records is a crime, but McCarthy argues that “Bragg would not have brought it against any defendant not named Donald Trump.”

At issue are bookkeeping shenanigans that Bragg would ordinarily not give the time of day. In a nutshell, Trump booked the reimbursement of a loan as if it were a payment of legal fees. Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, laid out $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, to pay Stormy Daniels — the porn star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — to keep quiet about an affair she says she had with Trump 17 years ago. On the books of the Trump organization, the reimbursement was made to look like ongoing legal fees paid in monthly installments in 2017. So trifling is this that it is not clear New York State suffered any financial harm — we’re talking merely about how an expense was described in the accounting ledgers, not about tax evasion.

But it gets worse. Falsification of financial records is just a misdemeanor in New York, which is why it’s virtually never charged. It has only a two-year statute of limitations, meaning that this one is time-barred. To inflate the misdemeanor into a felony, with a five-year statute of limitations that might — might barely — make the indictment timely, Bragg would have to show that Trump falsified his records in order to conceal his commission of another crime. That is, there would have to be some other crime, Trump would have to have known that, and he would have to have acted with the intent to conceal that crime.

Again, if the reporting is accurate — and we won’t know this for sure until the indictment is unsealed — Bragg is arguing that the crime Trump concealed was a failure to disclose an in-kind campaign contribution under the campaign-finance laws.

It would be hard to quantify how outrageous that allegation would be. Campaign-finance violations are federal. When the New York penal law refers to concealing “another crime,” it is plainly talking about another New York state crime. The Manhattan district attorney has no jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign-finance statutes. Moreover, the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission — the federal agencies that do have jurisdiction in this area — looked at the Stormy Daniels hush-money arrangement and opted not to proceed against Trump.

That is because, as a matter of law, it is highly unlikely that the payment — for which Cohen and Trump used their own personal funds, not campaign funds — was an in-kind campaign contribution.

Assuming Trump had the affair — which he denies — the payment was meant to prevent the news from harming his presidential bid and perhaps his marriage. It was not meant to skirt campaign finance laws, as Bragg is trying to prove.

McCarthy concludes:

A democratic republic needs the rule of law in order to survive. The rule of law hinges on the public’s acceptance of the justice system’s outcomes as legitimate. If the American people become convinced that the justice system is a rigged partisan game in which progressive Democrats exploit their control of law-enforcement processes as a weapon against their enemies — even as progressive prosecutors refuse to enforce the laws against actual criminals who prey on society — then the rule of law is dead.

If that happens, then we’re left with the law of the jungle. A two-tiered justice system is no justice at all.

Read the whole thing here.