Why Are Former Prosecutors Negative about Trump’s New York Trial?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns political prosecution and persecution in defense of “protecting democracy.” Katelynn Richardson published an article in The Daily Signal about Donald Trump’s hush money trial. She reminded her readers that prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office did not tell Trump which crime he had committed. 

One year after the indictment and in the courtroom on Tuesday, Bragg’s office finally told Trump the crime with he was charged: “a violation of state election law.” Richardson shared information given by former federal prosecutors.

Former federal prosecutors told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Bragg’s lack of clarity is unfair to the defense, which can’t prepare to argue against a charge they don’t know, and unlike what they’ve seen before.

“I don’t recall ever having a trial where the defense didn’t know what the government was trying to prove,” former federal prosecutor Jonathan Fahey told the Daily Caller News Foundation, likening Bragg’s approach to a “trial by ambush.”

Richardson then summarized the charges against Trump and the situation before the trial. Last April, Bragg “charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records allegedly related to $130,000 paid to keep porn star Stormy Daniels from telling her story of an alleged affair ahead of the election.” The charges are misdemeanors, but Bragg raised “the eight-year-old misdemeanor offenses as a felony” by arguing that Trump was trying to “commit or conceal another crime” that he never specified until Tuesday. Richardson reported as follows.

That is, until Tuesday, when it came out after defense attorneys objected to prosecutor Joshua Steinglass’ line of questioning that they were claiming Trump violated New York Election Law § 17-152. The statute makes it a misdemeanor for any two or more people to “conspire” to influence an election using “unlawful means.”

During opening statements Monday, Matthew Colangelo, senior counsel for the district attorney and a former top official in the Biden Department of Justice, argued that the records Trump allegedly falsified in relation to Daniels’ payment are part of a broader “conspiracy” to influence the 2016 election involving Trump, his former attorney Michael Cohen, and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.

Prosecutors are seeking to demonstrate that conspiracy – which they clarified is rooted in the election statute, though it is not named in the indictment – through witness testimony.

According to Richardson, “former federal prosecutor Andrew Cherkasky said the theory put forward by Bragg under the statute is ‘bizarre.’” Cherkasky continued, “The misdemeanor statute of limitations is expired on this offense, just as it is expired on the underlying offense, raising a significant legal question about the propriety of this approach.”

Cherkasky’s statement continued: “One of the biggest issues in this case is that the prosecution has essentially withheld this theory until trial has started. The defense has complained about this the entire time, but the judge has refused to require identification of the felony escalator at an earlier stage. This amounts to another form of ‘trial by fire,’ which isn’t how the American criminal justice system is supposed to work.”

Richardson spoke to another “expert witness,” John Malcolm, vice president for The Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. Malcolm said he, as a former prosecutor, found “three things about the revelation that ‘amaze’ him.

“First, that Alvin Bragg’s office did not provide advanced notice of the precise allegations in order to enable former President [Donald] Trump’s legal team to prepare an adequate defense,” he said. “Second, that the statutory code section cited by the lead prosecutor (New York Penal Code Section 17-152) prohibits a conspiracy ‘to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means…,’ but Bragg has still not divulged what those ‘unlawful means’ were.”

“And third, and most shockingly, that penal code section is a misdemeanor, which means that Alvin Bragg is claiming that committing a misdemeanor (making a false business entry) in order to conceal the commission of another misdemeanor (conspiring to promote someone’s candidacy in an unlawful manner) can – like magic – be converted into 34 felony offenses,” he continued.

According to Fahey, everything about the case “stinks to high heaven.” He said what lots of other people think, “If this was anyone other than Donald Trump, this would be laughed out of court.”

When liberals, who have never supported Donald Trump, are discussing how bad the case, it must be really bad!