In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else. As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob. No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.
It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time. It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges. One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo. In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads. Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end. The gambit is all Third World.
Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime. Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy. Think it through. For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money. There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it. Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.
In the Trump saga, where’s the crime? Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal. The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired. When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).
Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would. Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit. The cabal needs a second crime though. How to manufacture one? Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below). Let that sink in. Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime. It can’t be. It’s the stuff of campaigns. Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.
Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality. The whole thing is rubbish. Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling. Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.
And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted. The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team. Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical. Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot? This stinks to high heaven.
It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens. Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world. What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”? Some say democracy is messy. No, that’s too nice. This makes us third-rate, all of us.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/