For many years this case, involving alleged bookkeeping issues in recording payments to ‘Stormy Daniels’ to buy her silence, had lingered unprosecuted for so long that the charges, low-level misdemeanors, no longer could be brought because time had expired.
But then along came Alvin Bragg, a Left-wing prosecutor who ran for office on the promise that he would do what prior prosecutors had failed to do, to get Donald Trump. The case was politically motivated from the start. To get Trump at all costs to try to stop his presidential campaign.
Yet to get the case to court, Bragg had to turn the charges into felonies, with longer time limits. So he invented a novel and untested legal theory, maligned even by liberal legal commentators, that the bookkeeping issues were to illegally influence an election – his own 2016 winning election.
There is nothing illegal about paying money to buy silence. It happens every day in court cases and business deals, where money is paid for non-disclosure agreements. And there is nothing illegal about politicians hiding their dirty laundry, happens every campaign. The bookkeeping issue was the hook to turn lawful political activity into a crime.
This case born in politics then turned into a circus. The trial judge, whose family had strong political ties to Democrats, issued ruling after ruling hamstringing Trump’s defense. The prosecution was allowed to play hide and seek with its legal theory of criminality, so much so that Trump never really knew what he was defending until the very end.
Then the judge issued jury instructions that seemed to fly in the face of our jurisprudence, by allowing the jury convict on felony charges without unanimous agreement as to what were the specific illegal acts to influence the election.
If you insist on charging a former president and clear front-runner in a presidential election, then you better be sure those charges are clear, concise, and legitimate. This was certainly not the case here. The jury was drawn from one of the most heavily Democrat jurisdictions in the country. So the likelihood of Trump prevailing always was slim.
A politically motivated prosecution by Democrat prosecutors presided over by a politically connected Democrat judge in a politically Democrat jurisdiction against the likely Republican presidential nominee in an election year. It smells rotten because it was rotten. The whole thing stinks.
