Legal expert flabbergasted by number of charges facing Trump
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy discusses the Manhattan DA's case against the former president.
Much ink has already been spilt on the egregious heap of due process violations Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has piled up in his prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
There is the fact that he is better understood as an elected progressive Democrat who won office in the Big Blue Apple by vowing to leverage his power against the Democrats’ arch nemesis, not as a good faith law-enforcement official who takes seriously the duty to ensure equal protection of the laws to all Americans.
There is his invocation of trivial business-records misdemeanors against a partisan foe at the same time he is refusing to enforce felony offenses against hardened criminals who prey on New Yorkers.
There are the legalistic gymnastics by which he is brazenly trying to defeat statutes of limitations enacted to protect an accused from defending against stale charges.
WHO IS ALVIN BRAGG? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE MANHATTAN DA
There is his apparent attempt to transmogrify misdemeanors into felonies by alleging a federal campaign finance violation that he has no jurisdiction to enforce, and that the federal prosecutors and regulators who do have jurisdiction declined to prosecute due to lack of evidence.
But let’s hone in on newly emerging prosecutorial misconduct.
If reporting is accurate — and note that the reporting is based on information from Trump lawyers after Bragg’s office advised them of the indictment — then the district attorney has charged a whopping 34 counts against Trump. Thirty-four counts … in a case, again, that federal prosecutors decided wasn’t worth charging at all.
Several members of the NYPD enter Trump Tower in New York on Friday. Former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury, a historic reckoning after years of investigations into his personal, political and business dealings and an abrupt jolt to his bid to retake the White House. (AP Photo/Bryan Woolston)
This is a classic abuse of power. Unscrupulous prosecutors will sometimes camouflage with quantity their case’s lack of quality.
When serious crimes have been committed, prosecutors do not need to run up the score with a high number of counts. A single charge, or a handful of them, provides the court with more than enough years of sentencing exposure. Once convicted, a serious criminal in that kind of case will be incarcerated for a very long time — even for life.
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By contrast, if prosecutors do not have evidence of a serious crime, by loading up an indictment with dozens of charges, they can try to signal to the eventual trial jury that the defendant must be guilty of something. They hope the jurors will assume that, even if the evidence doesn’t seem strong, the government wouldn’t have alleged so many crimes unless the defendant was a truly diabolical criminal.
This is a significant enough due process abuse that, in federal law, the Justice Department has guidance directing prosecutors not to engage in it:
In order to promote the fair administration of justice, as well as the perception of justice, all United States Attorneys should charge in indictments and informations as few separate counts as are reasonably necessary to prosecute fully and successfully and to provide for a fair sentence on conviction.To the extent reasonable, indictments and informations should be limited to fifteen counts or less, so long as such a limitation does not jeopardize successful prosecution or preclude a sentence appropriate to the nature and extent of the offenses involved.
If Bragg is indicting 34 counts over this nonsense, it’s because he doesn’t have one count he would be indicting if he were doing his job right.
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