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“Everything old is new again.” Whether it was Mark Twain, Winston Churchill or Jonathan Swift who popularized this adage, it was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his merry prosecutors. This is a sad truth that has been lost since then.
On the second day of the farce against Donald Trump, they appeared ecstatic to hear from the first witness that the former president’s surrogates used old political tricks during his 2016 campaign. . Please brace yourself.
David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified that his tabloid would promote positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents. His scandal sheet even paid to bury harmful stories about Trump.
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Assistant Attorney General Joshua Steinglass clearly deemed that tidbit of information to be a shocking revelation of political scandal and sleaze, as if no one in the history of American presidential elections had ever gone into it. Ta.
Exceptions include Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, just to name a few.
Oh… and Hillary Clinton.
Consider that Hamilton wrote gross lies about Adams during the 1800 presidential election that were intended to benefit Jefferson. Then-President Adams was comfortable with the slander, and his followers returned the favor by accusing Jefferson of adultery, prostitution, and incest. Partisan pamphlet publishers at the time were happy to publicize their dirty tricks using some of their campaign funds.
From there, public expressions of resentment and secret name-calling developed, infecting presidential campaigns for more than two centuries, and culminating in the most despicable trick ever committed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. reached. Her campaign secretly funded what became known as the “Russia hoax” and a fake document aimed at smearing President Trump.
As with the current Trump case in New York, Clinton used lawyers to funnel money into the case, which she recorded as “litigation costs.” Although she was fined by the Federal Election Commission, she was not charged. of course not.
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Let’s compare President Trump. He is currently on trial for falsifying business records, which the statute of limitations has expired, but he managed to revive the case by linking it to a previously unknown election violation that was not prosecuted because it did not actually exist.
Confused? It should be. And so does Mr. Bragg, who has filed politically motivated lawsuits by perverting the law beyond recognition.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks at a press conference on Thursday, March 7, 2024 in Manhattan, New York. (Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Assistant Attorney General Steinglass announced Tuesday that he was stripped of his authority to pursue federal charges as the underlying crime, and that “other crimes” were violations of state law. In short, it’s a conspiracy to illegally promote Trump’s candidacy. This, too, is just a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations happens to have expired.
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So that’s it. A lapsed misdemeanor is bootstrapped into another lapsed misdemeanor that magically raises it to a felony, even if it never actually became a felony. Remember, he is not talking about a single charge here, but what can only be described as a shameful display of “count accumulation” that no half-hearted, decent prosecutor would ever do. He is on 34 charges.
There are some very minor problems with this novel legal theory.
First, federal law supersedes state election laws in all matters related to campaign contributions. This is among the many reasons why Mr. Bragg’s predecessor declined to press charges against Mr. Trump. The 2016 contest with Clinton was, after all, a federal election. She violated election laws, Trump did not. However, he is on trial for reasons that have nothing to do with the crime.
Second, as district attorney, Mr. Bragg is prohibited under federal law from prosecuting even basic crimes. Only the federal government can do that. They did not do so primarily because President Trump’s payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels did not qualify as legal campaign expenses. In other words, no crime had been committed, regardless of the bookkeeping that took place after the fact.
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Even the liberal New York Times has published several articles questioning Mr. Bragg’s bizarre legal theories. On Tuesday, prominent Boston University law professor Jed Handelsman Sugarman wrote, “I thought the Bragg lawsuit against Trump was a legal embarrassment, but now it’s a historic mistake.” He published a scathing column titled “I think so.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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