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A time-barred crime that’s not a crime. A mysterious secondary crime of unknown origin. A lying witness, a convicted perjurer and a thief. These are the nuts and bolts of the idiotic criminal case filed against former President Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom.
The issue came into full focus during closing arguments Tuesday, when lead attorney Todd Blanche peeled back the veil on this farcical trial, exposing nearly every aspect of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s farcical prosecution.
“President Trump is innocent,” Blanche declared. “He has committed no crime. The district attorney has not met his burden of proof. Period.”
If there is a victim in this sordid saga, it’s Trump. The greedy former porn star Stormy Daniels extorted money from him as the 2016 presidential election approached. The candidate’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, caved in and paid confidentiality eight years ago. There was nothing illegal about that deal, and the evidence that he did it all on his own is compelling.
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Undaunted, prosecutors alleged that Trump Organization accountants falsified private business records when they listed payments to Cohen as “legal expenses” in computerized ledgers, and they invented a series of fictitious crimes, multiplying a time-barred misdemeanor by 34 invoices in a dastardly practice known as “count stacking.”
But as Blanche explained to the jury, “the bookings were accurate.” Cohen was paid for the legal work of negotiating legal contracts and the associated legal fees. The compensation also included providing more general legal services.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg has deprived President Trump of his 14th Amendment due process rights and his right to a fair trial. Is anyone really surprised?
Bragg’s legal theory that voters were somehow deceived to influence the 2016 election is nonsense, Bransh argued. The bookings were made in 2017, rear The presidential election is over. It is virtually impossible to influence an election that is over. In any case, there is no credible evidence that Trump had anything to do with or knew about the accounting practices. Why would he know? He is a CEO, not a bookkeeper.
That alone should be enough for the jury to return a not guilty verdict. Who exactly was defrauded? The voters who had already voted? The government, which received the full amount of taxable income? The Federal Election Commission, which concluded that the money paid was not legally a campaign contribution? The prosecutors never revealed the crux of their case during the trial, because they couldn’t. There was no fraud and no conspiracy. That’s all. Moreover, without a primary crime, there can be no secondary crimes.
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During the trial, the prosecutors never presented any plausible evidence that Trump intended to deceive anyone. Instead, they invented a chimera, a fictitious crime that does not exist anywhere in the law. In a normal trial with an impartial jury, the perverseness of this brazen prosecutorial tactic would be obvious and would quickly result in a verdict of “not guilty.”
But here Bragg and co. are betting their entire fortunes on a biased jury that will be inclined to convict Trump based on their own political views of the defendant, despite scant evidence of guilt. An impartial jury would have no problem quickly acquitting him. It should not have gone this far. No honest prosecutor would have brought such a perverse charge or made the entire case depend on a convicted perjurer.
The defense directly attacked Cohen’s already discredited credibility. In her closing argument, Blanche detailed multiple instances when Cohen lied directly to the jury during his trial testimony. This was in addition to the countless lies he spread to Congress, the bank, the special counsel, the media, his wife, the IRS, the FEC, government lawyers, and the judge in court. His sudden and forced admission of theft on cross-examination suggested he also lied to the prosecutors who called him to the witness stand.
“Michael Cohen is very happy… he’s the biggest liar of all time,” the defense said in a scathing rebuke that will surely stick in the minds of jurors.
Bragg’s resort to habitual lying is incomprehensible, but nothing else. As I said before, the prosecutors knew that their star witness would lie even more once he slipped onto the stand. One can only assume that they wanted him to do so. This is a dangerous act bordering on solicitation of perjury, but Bragg and his supporters don’t care. To them, honesty is for fools. All they care about is twisting the law and distorting the evidence to convict an innocent man for purely political reasons.
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It is an unfortunate advantage that New York prosecutors have the final say over the jury. But that advantage appears to have been squandered. In his rebuttal, Joshua Steinglass tried in vain to rehabilitate the discredited Cohen. It was a foolish attempt. There were too many lies to rationalize, too many dirty schemes to cleanse. The prosecutors sullied themselves by teaming up with a notorious conman. They vouched for what a federal judge recently called a “habitual perjurer.”
All Steinglass can say about Cohen is, “He doesn’t lie.” all “All the time” really? How about most of the time? Whenever his lips are moving? Even when he’s talking in his sleep? In reality, the self-proclaimed “fixer” was impossible to fix. He’s an irredeemable degenerate.
Then, in a sort of turn-of-fight, the assistant prosecutor told the jury to forget about Cohen because there was “a ton” of evidence pointing to a guilty verdict without him. If that was the case, and Cohen’s testimony was unnecessary, why call him to the witness stand at all?
It was a neat sleight of hand, but a feint that might fool the jury.
Judge Juan Melchán, recognizing the obvious weaknesses of their case, appointed himself co-prosecutor in the trial, and his bias was on full display in nearly every decision in the courtroom: he sided with the prosecutors in most objections, rejected the defense’s pleas for impartiality, and manipulated jury instructions to ensure a guilty verdict.
I can safely say that in the history of American jurisprudence, a defendant has never been tried for an unidentified crime. No ethical prosecutor would do that. No fair and competent judge would ever allow it. Because every defendant has the right to know the exact charges against him or her. That right is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and is protected by it.
until now.
In the criminal case against Trump, prosecutors alleged that the defendant falsified personal business records to cover up another crime, one that was never charged in the indictment or revealed during testimony in the five-week trial. Like the suspense thriller “American Psycho,” the twisty plot unravelled in the final scene. Maybe. Sort of.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors finally revealed which of the three crimes Trump allegedly tried to cover up, but even that revelation was riddled with confusion: Steinglass argued he violated state law, which contradicted his earlier telling of the jury that the mysterious crimes were federal election violations.
Let’s not forget that Bragg, as a local prosecutor, has no authority to enforce federal law, or that state laws do not apply to federal elections, nor did he violate any campaign finance laws. The federal government, with exclusive jurisdiction, has refused to prosecute what is clearly not a crime.
It doesn’t matter. Those are the nasty details. The jury is being told to ignore them. But it gets even worse.
Judge Marchan, in a decision that would shock any respectable legal scholar, ruled that the jury did not have to unanimously agree on the secondary crimes that Trump allegedly attempted to commit. In their zeal to wrongfully convict, the judges destroyed fundamental rights embedded in constitutional principles.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a jury’s verdict must be unanimous under the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the Constitution. This requirement is all The High Court has stated that in order for a jury to convict, they must always agree (unanimously) on all the necessary elements of the alleged crime, which is an essential feature of a jury trial.
But in this case it mysteriously disappeared.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg has deprived President Trump of his 14th Amendment due process rights and his right to a fair trial. Is anyone really surprised?
This case wasn’t about criminality or loyalty to the law: it was a grotesque pretext.
Bragg’s plan was to manipulate the justice system by filing false criminal charges to damage or delegitimize Trump’s candidacy for President. This was classic “loafer” behavior, weaponizing the statute not for any violation of the law but because the defendants posed a political threat.
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But the real threat comes from corrupt prosecutors like Alvin Bragg who have abandoned their duty to ensure justice is done. Armed with enormous power, they are writing the laws for themselves. Creating the illusion of wrongdoing to stop Trump from going down is the goal that justifies all means.
Legendary U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “The greatest danger to liberty lies in the insidious encroachments of fanatics,” an expression that fits perfectly with Alvin Bragg, who seeks to suppress it under the guise of the law.
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And where law ends, tyranny begins.
It is the responsibility of the jury to correct obvious injustices.
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