In Merchan’s court, Trump stands convicted, not of petty business-records infractions, but of stealing the 2016 election.
I was mesmerized by the Blehar blast at the Trump trial. (It’s really time for Jeff to come out of his shell, don’t you think?) And he’s right: It would be a travesty for anyone, let alone a former American president and de facto major-party nominee to return to the presidency, to be consigned to Rikers Island, Attica, or some similarly squalid New York hoosegow over a “crime” — I guess I should say 34 “crimes” — that the Democratic district attorney manufactured before the Democratic judge guided the jury to its guilty verdict.
Brother Jeff inhabits the real world. In that shrinking space, Trump was found guilty of trivial business-records infractions which should have been time-barred by 2019 and regarding which the district attorney can point to no fraud victims — just like the Empire State’s Democratic attorney general could point to no fraud victims in her civil-fraud case against Trump before the Democratic judge found him liable for over half a billion dollars in damages (on which interest continues to accrue even as the appellate process snails along).
Alas, people who see Bragg’s case that way, the way Jeff and I see it, are narrative-challenged.
Having followed the case closely from the start, and even been through the looking-glass during the trial’s last weeks, I must tell you: That’s not the way it played in the courtroom.
In New York, the actual charges alleged by the grand jury were, and remain, a nearly irrelevant afterthought. The case is framed by Bragg’s narrative. From the very beginning of his opening statement to the jury, Bragg prosecutor Matthew Colangelo — who transferred to the DA’s office from the top echelon of the Biden Justice Department — echoed Bragg’s fairy-tale “statement of facts” in projecting the defining allegation: Trump led a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election.
For the partisan prosecutors and their complaisant, partisan judge, this is not a business-records case. It was a plot to “corrupt” the 2016 election by illegally burying politically damaging information. This is not a joke. Bragg is a committed, unabashed election-denier. In his closing argument to the jury last week, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass speculated to the jury that the “illegal” non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Stormy Daniels may have been what put Trump in the White House — that in such tight race as the 2016, this might very well have been the difference.
Mind you, none of this makes any sense. NDAs are not illegal. Steinglass conveniently omitted that, just four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Trump’s pals at the National Enquirer had paid Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 to remain silent about her alleged affair with Trump. Patently, it is pure cuckoo to maintain, as the DA does, that following the early October 2016 revelation of the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, Trump could afford no more bombshells about his sexual escapades. Indeed, in Manhattan — the only piece of American real estate over which Bragg actually has jurisdiction — Trump’s “conspiracy to steal the election” was so devastatingly effective that Hillary Clinton won by nearly 80 points. Yet, because Judge Merchan dutifully precluded Trump from calling former FEC commissioner Bradley Smith as an expert witness, the jury also never learned that, even if the Stormy NDA payment had been a cognizable campaign expenditure under federal law (it was not), the Trump campaign would not have had to disclose it until after the election.
The NDAs had no effect on the race. Trump didn’t steal the election; he won because Hillary was a historically awful candidate — who, coincidentally, actually did violate federal campaign law, although Bragg elected not to prosecute her for “conspiring to steal the election.”
It is also worth observing that the great conspiracy statute cited by Bragg (although he took pains to keep it out of the indictment against Trump) is a misdemeanor. I point that out not just because it, too, was subject to New York’s two-year statute of limitations — i.e., Bragg couldn’t charge it as a standalone offense because the time to charge lapsed five years before he sought an indictment. Rather, I want you to imagine the New York State legislature as it contemplated the following question: If someone plotted to steal an election for the presidency of the United States and thereby acquired the most important and powerful office in the nation and the world, how should we punish that?
Anyone think the answer would be: Let’s make it a misdemeanor!
The question answers itself. But that doesn’t matter. The formal charges don’t matter. All that matters is the hidden crime that Bragg refused to spell out in the indictment. In Bragg’s telling, in media-Democrat complex commentary, and in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, Trump stands tried and convicted of a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election. By that “crime,” he became this nation’s illegitimate president and tormented progressives in New York and across the world for four years before inciting what Merchan describes as Trump’s “federal insurrection matter.”
It is for that, Judge Merchan will be told, and will proclaim, he is sentencing Trump. Not for petty business-records chicanery but for the worst, most consequential crime in the history of the United States.
You really think a faithful Democrat is going to impose a no-jail sentence for that?