by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
I’m serious. Democratic prosecutors in New York are bringing a fundamentally corrupt case against Trump. Maybe he needs to stop legitimizing his tormentors.
The Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump is an embarrassment to the American justice system.
Like Trump or dislike him (and as you know, I dislike him), he is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election. Trying the leader of the opposition party on criminal charges is no small matter in a democracy. It should be reserved for very serious crimes – espionage, for example – with irrefutable evidence.
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As I wrote Monday, this indictment is the opposite.
Trump faces 34 felony counts for the way he classified internal accounting entries. Prosecutors are relying on hyper-aggressive legal theories and making the case a referendum on Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, which was wildly unpopular in New York. They are almost openly telling the jury to punish Trump for having won.
So what, if anything, can Trump do at this point?
The case against Trump fails on every level and twists the purpose of the statute being used against him beyond recognition.
Laws against falsifying business records are clearly meant to protect people outside a business who rely on its profit-and-loss statements in deciding whether to lend or invest in it. They’re also meant to protect the business itself from employee theft.
Those rationales don’t apply in this case.
No one stole from the Trump Organization. Trump did not plan to show the records to anyone else, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. He wasn’t trying to overstate his revenues or hide losses. He paid Michael Cohen $420,000 in 12 installments in 2017, partly to cover Cohen’s $130,000 payment in 2016 to the porn actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed Trump had an affair with her.
Trump called the $420,000 payment to Cohen “legal services.” Maybe he put it that way because he was embarrassed and didn’t want to think about Daniels anymore. Maybe he thought that “legal services” broadly fit the definition of what Cohen had done. Who cares? Trump misclassified an expense in his own records.
That’s the entire underlying crime the state is alleging.
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(Don’t take it from me. Take it from the New York Times op-ed page.)
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Yet the case only gets worse from there.
Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor in New York. It can only be a felony if some underlying felony is committed and the records are falsified to hide it.
But the prosecutors have not charged Trump with any underlying felonies. Though they have referred to a conspiracy by Trump to influence the 2016 election, they have not specified – not even now, not even with the trial underway – what the alleged underlying felony might be.
And, as I pointed out Monday, the actual underlying charges all relate to business records that Trump and his company created AFTER the election.
But wait, there’s more!
It is not even clear that Trump’s effort to keep Daniels quiet before the election – even if that effort somehow could be legally viewed as part of a conspiracy that extended to the creation of the business records in 2017 – broke ANY New York state laws.
And Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor who made the opening statement against Trump, was a top Justice Department official until late 2022, when he joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office as “senior counsel.”
Read More @ alexberenson.substack.com
