Former President Donald Trump’s closest aides weren’t the only ones to defend him after he was convicted by a New York jury on Thursday on 34 criminal counts related to alleged hush money payments. Many of the former president’s harshest critics said the charges were a sham.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial and has said she will not vote in his November impeachment trial, said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “brought these charges because of exactly who the defendants are, not any specific criminal offenses.” National Review, a frequent critic of Trump, called the decision “egregious” in an editorial. Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who argued in 2021 that Trump should be convicted at impeachment, called Bragg’s prosecution “outrageous.”
The allegations were that Trump paid off his then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who paid porn star Storm Daniels to keep her affair with Trump secret before the 2016 election. Trump denies it all. Bragg said Trump falsified business records to cover up another crime. Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor, but becomes a felony when a second crime is involved. Bragg’s office argued that the second crime was an illegal campaign expense, namely the payment to Daniels.
Trump’s defenders say the problem is that he has never been convicted of illegal campaign spending.
“As a state prosecutor, Bragg has no authority to enforce federal election laws,” McCarthy said. I have writtenNational Review’s editorial board criticized Mr. Bragg.
“In a case that will ultimately be remembered as a textbook example of selective prosecution, the Manhattan district attorney breathed life into an alleged misdemeanor bookkeeping offense for which the statute of limitations had expired, and, like Marlin, turned it into 34 felonies.” editorial It said: “…the notion that this violated federal election law is implausible. Paying a porn actress for her silence is not a campaign expense. Moreover, Mr. Trump would have had to knowingly violate the law, and there is no evidence that he was even thinking about campaign finance laws.”
The editorial noted that Bragg had become “the first prosecutor in the nation’s history to abuse his power in an attempt to damage an opposition presidential candidate ahead of a national election.”
Collins also criticized New York prosecutors.
“It is a cornerstone of our American justice system that the government prosecutes cases for alleged criminal conduct, regardless of who the defendant is,” she said in a statement. “In this case, the opposite has happened: A district attorney who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump has brought these charges precisely because of who the defendants are, not any specific criminal conduct.”
“The political context of this case further blurs the lines between the judicial and electoral systems, and the ruling is likely to be subject to a lengthy appeals process,” she added.
David French, a New York Times columnist and frequent critic of Trump, said last year: I got it. Bragg’s predecessor chose not to sue, and French said Bragg’s case relied on “federal criminal charges that the Department of Justice declined to prosecute.”
“Should state agencies bring a state lawsuit when no federal charges have ever been filed?” French asked. French said the answer is no.
“This is a state-level misdemeanor prosecuted by a district attorney that could potentially be tied to a federal felony that the federal government has never prosecuted,” French told Ezra Klein. The New York Times“That’s why a lot of people, including me, look at this and say it’s a bit of a stretch.”
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Michael Faust He has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years, and his work has appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, Christian Post, Leaf Chronicle, Toronto Star and Knoxville News Sentinel.
