Alvin Bragg Prepares Criminal Version of AG James’s Civil Annihilation of Trump

O n the bright side for Donald Trump, the case brought against him by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is such a nakedly partisan abuse of power and an affront to the principle of equal justice under the law that it will continue to boost him politically . . . at least for Republican-primary purposes.

On the not-so-bright side, if I were a betting man, I’d wager heavily that the former president is going to be convicted. Having digested Judge Juan Merchan’s 30-page decision and order — and then witnessed elected progressive Democratic judge Arthur Engoron’s imposition of a mind-blowing $360 million corporate death penalty on Trump in a purported fraud case with no fraud victims — I find it impossible to believe any other conclusion is in the offing.

Trump, of course, always provides his opposition with some length of the rope needed to hang him. The Manhattan criminal case is no exception. As regular readers know, I believe Trump should have been impeached, convicted, and disqualified. Given that, I do not and could not support his 2024 bid. The Republican Party having become the Trump Party, I am a politically homeless conservative — I’m all for a big tent, but to have one, we’d need to share core convictions despite differences at the margins, and we just don’t. I am repulsed by the Democrats’ cynical and dangerously norm-busting lawfare campaign against Trump, but I don’t believe everything in that campaign is rigged against him.

All that said, DA Bragg’s prosecution is the most rigged thing I’ve ever seen. For decades in New York, it was the proud boast of prosecutors, whether federal (as I was) or state, that we enforced the law with nonpartisan rigor and prosecuted political corruption with bipartisan seriousness — mindful of distinguishing grave corruption crimes, which demanded prosecution regardless of who committed them, from petty infractions, as to which prosecution would have amounted to punitive partisanship, inviting the other side to respond in punitive kind when, inevitably, power changed partisan hands.

Democrats have killed that tradition now. Like the rest of us, they will live to regret its passing. Like the peaceful transition of power, nonpartisan law enforcement is a vital attribute of a healthy republic.

Bragg is an elected progressive Democrat whose campaign brandished his enthusiasm, as a state lawyer, for suing the former president. He is best known as a poster child for the Progressive Prosecutor Project, the hard Left’s morality play libeling the criminal-justice system as racially rigged. That is, Bragg is the prosecutor notorious for not prosecuting or — when half-heartedly bringing cases against hardened criminals (assuming he hasn’t let them skip town) — for pleading felonies down to misdemeanors.

The contrast in the case of Trump, the Democrats’ archnemesis, is stunning: Bragg has cynically taken what, at most, is a single-transaction misdemeanor falsification of business records — in which no one, including New York State, was actually defrauded and no taxes are alleged to have been evaded — and ludicrously charged it as 34 felony counts for which, in theory, Trump could be sentenced to more than a century’s imprisonment.

This is Trump we’re talking about so, for Democrats, that means “by any means necessary.” You shouldn’t need to be a Trump fan to be offended by this exercise. As ever, it’s not that he did nothing wrong. As ever, his behavior was appalling: In the main, Trump massaged his books — mainly, his personal financial records, such that, as Dan McLaughlin tartly puts it, it’s as if he lied to his own checkbook — to conceal flings with porn star Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Those flings took place while Trump’s then-new wife, Melania, was home with their newborn son.

But as usual, we’re not talking about moral or ethical condemnation, which would be justified in spades. We’re not talking about the umpty-umpth thing Trump has done this month to demonstrate his unfitness for the presidency. Democrats have decided to make L’affaire Stormy into a criminal prosecution. So the point is: You know as sure as you’re reading this that if the culprit were not Trump, Alvin Bragg would never have brought this case — not a chance, not in a million years.

In fact, even Bragg used to believe this case was too ludicrous to bring. His predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., moved heaven and earth in a futile attempt to make a criminal fraud case against Trump but wouldn’t touch the Stormy caper. Bragg, too, realized the fraud proof was insufficient for criminal charges and shunned the Stormy nonsense as beneath him.

Bragg resuscitated the hush-money case strictly because of New York politics: He had been blasted by anti-Trump obsessives in his office for whiffing and then looked on enviously as Attorney General Letitia James, his fellow progressive Democrat and rival in New York political ambitions, scooped up the evidence he’d passed on and — to the wild adulation of progressives — used a monstrous New York civil statute (as opposed to the tougher-to-prove penal statutes Bragg enforces) to weave it into the “fraud” spectacle that Judge Engoron used last week to drop the hammer on Trump’s corporate empire.

Bragg needed a bold move to recoup his standing with the base. He decided to become the first prosecutor in American history to indict a former American president — even if he needed to bend a few laws and spotlight a porn star to do it. That’s why this case was indicted. Rest assured, if similar conduct had been engaged in by Bill Clinton, we wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised, but there would be no criminal charges — and if there were, God help the prosecutor who dared file them. And if the defendant were a gangbanger who had manipulated business records of drug sales, Bragg would be orchestrating an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal and lecturing us about how prosecution would be futile because it fails to address the root causes of crime, blah, blah, blah.

Bragg’s was the first of four criminal indictments of Trump obtained by Democratic prosecutors against a backdrop of civil lawsuits brought against Trump by members of Congress, state attorneys, and activists — all Democrats. It was Bragg’s indictment that, for all intents and purposes, ended the Republican primary contest: It was so unabashedly political and biased that the GOP base went ballistic, rallying to Trump, whose more suitable competitors could get no traction from that point forward. The former president is thus sailing to the nomination on the winds of a two-tiered justice system.

The good news for Trump is that, even if he is convicted, Bragg’s prosecution is apt to continue helping his campaign — as it is fundamentally different from the prosecutions that involve his culpability for the events that spurred the fringiest of his supporters to riot at the Capitol (which horrified the public) and his obstruction of a grand-jury investigation into his recklessly irresponsible retention of classified intelligence (which involves serious crimes).

The bad news for Trump is that Bragg is very likely to get him convicted, which the media–Democratic complex will celebrate as a historic achievement. Sometime in late April or early May, after he has sat in a courtroom for weeks — day in and day out, during critical junctures in the presidential campaign — Trump will probably watch a jury pronounce him guilty of at least one of the 34 charges. (And because of the logic of Bragg’s indictment, parsing a single factual scenario into nearly three-dozen allegedly felonious pieces, if Trump is convicted on one count he will probably be convicted on most if not all of them.)

Bragg’s criminal trial against Trump is now scheduled to begin on March 25. In the coming days, I’ll look at several different aspects of last week’s pre-trial ruling, which illustrate that Merchan is another Engoron — just the judge Bragg needs to do to Trump criminally what James has done to Trump civilly.

Welcome to New York.