The closest allies of former president Donald Trump were not the only ones defending him Thursday after he was convicted by a New York jury of 34 criminal counts related to alleged hush money payments. Many of his fiercest critics said the prosecution was a sham.
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who voted to convict Trump during the 2021 impeachment trial and said this year she won’t vote for him in November, said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.” National Review, a frequent Trump critic, labeled the verdict “horrendous” in an editorial. Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who argued in 2021 that Trump should be convicted following his impeachment trial, called the Bragg prosecution “outrageous.”
The charges allege that Trump reimbursed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen after Cohen paid off porn star Storm Daniels to keep an affair with Trump secret ahead of the 2016 election. Trump denied all of it. According to Bragg, Trump falsified business records in order to cover up another crime. Although falsifying business records is a misdemeanor, it rises to a felony if a second crime was involved. Bragg’s office claimed that the second crime was illegal campaign expenses — paying Daniels.
The problem, Trump’s defenders say, is that Trump was never convicted of illegal campaign expenses.
“Bragg, a state prosecutor, has no jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign law,” McCarthy wrote. National Review’s editorial board criticized Bragg:
“In a case that will eventually be remembered as a textbook instance of selective prosecution, the Manhattan district attorney breathed life into an alleged bookkeeping misdemeanor that the statute of limitations had expired on and, Merlin-like, transformed it into 34 felonies,” the editorial read. “… The idea that it was a violation of federal campaign law is not credible. Paying porn stars for their silence is not a campaign expense. Moreover, Trump would have had to willfully violate the law, and there’s no evidence that he was even thinking of campaign-finance law.”
Bragg has become “the first prosecutor in the history of the country to abuse his office in hopes of damaging an opposition presidential candidate ahead of a national election,” the editorial said.
Collins also criticized New York prosecutors:
“It is fundamental to our American system of justice that the government prosecutes cases because of alleged criminal conduct regardless of who the defendant happens to be,” she said in a statement. “In this case the opposite has happened. The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.
“The political underpinnings of this case further blur the lines between the judicial system and the electoral system, and this verdict likely will be the subject of a protracted appeals process,” she added.
David French, a columnist for The New York Times and a frequent Trump critic, last year noted that Bragg’s predecessor chose not to bring the case. Further, French said, Bragg’s case relied on “federal criminal claims that the Department of Justice declined to prosecute.”
“Should state officials bring a state claim that depends on an accusation of having violated federal law when federal charges were never filed?” French asked. The answer, French said, is no.
“It’s a local district attorney prosecuting a state-level misdemeanor, potentially tying that to a federal felony that was never prosecuted by the federal government,” French told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “So that’s why a lot of folks look at this — and me included — and say that’s a bit of a reach.”
Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Brandon Bell/Staff
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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