Several legal experts have weighed in on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump, and they were not very complimentary of him, truth be told.
The grand jury indicted Trump on Thursday over allegations he illegally paid off adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal in violation of campaign finance laws, but a federal court district and the Federal Election Commission looked at the same issues and found nothing wrong.
Now legal experts are speaking out about the case as well and it’s not good for Bragg.
“The question to ask yourself in a case like this [is], ‘Would a case like this be brought against anybody else, whether he or she be president, former president or a regular citizen?’ The answer is… no,” Former Whitewater deputy counsel Sol Wisenberg told the New York Post.
“You can debate all day long whether or not… Trump should be indicted related to the records at Mar-a-Lago, whether or not he should be indicted with respect to Jan. 6 incitement of lawless activity… Those are real crimes if they occurred, and he committed them,” he said. “This is preposterous.”
And George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News he believes the case is “outrageous.”
“[Bragg] is attempting to bootstrap [a] federal crime into a state case. And if that is the basis for the indictment, I think it’s rather outrageous,” he said Friday.
“I think it’s illegally pathetic,” he added. “There’s a good reason why the Department of Justice did not prosecute this case: Because it’s been down this road before. It tried a case against former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards arguing that hush money paid to another woman, who bore a child out of that relationship, was a campaign violation. That was a much stronger case, but they lost,” Turley said, referring to federal prosecutors not charging Trump following Cohen’s guilty plea.
“Even if you can bootstrap that dead misdemeanor to something alive, you’re essentially arguing a federal case that the Department of Justice declined. But it’s also a case that requires you to show, if that is the basis of this indictment, that Trump’s only, his sole motive for paying this money or having third parties pay it was for the election,” Turley noted further.
“Bragg’s betting on a motivated judge and a motivated juror. You couldn’t pick a better jurisdiction…. [But] under Bragg’s theory, he can take any unproven federal crime and revive a long-dead misdemeanor and turn it into a felony. That’s going to raise concerns for a number of judges. But once it gets to the appellate level, he’s going to have a particularly difficult time,” he said.
Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, also a former federal prosecutor, agreed.
Soros – backed "King of Woke" Alvin Bragg is trying to turn the United States into a third world Banana Republic.
Retweet if you agree! pic.twitter.com/uRFH7IyXRK— ????Josh Dunlap???? ULTRA-MAGA (@JDunlap1974) March 31, 2023
“I think [Trump] gets out of it if we still have justice in New York, and I do have confidence in a number of the judges in New York. It’s different than some other places,” he told the Newsmax show ‘Greg Kelly Reports.’ “The case is really, really dismissible for about 10 obvious reasons, not the least of which is it violates the statute of limitations.
“The misdemeanor was not intended for nondisclosure agreements which are contracts between people that are perfectly legitimate. There are at least one million of them probably in existence in New York.
“The latching it on to the federal crime of illegal campaign contributions … first of all, it’s been determined that it’s not an illegal campaign contribution. It’s a personal expenditure,” he said.
The former mayor said that it is the “majority opinion of most, the commissioners, lawyers.”
“Bragg, as a state DA, has no authority to latch on to a federal statute in pursuance of another crime,” he said. “They only have authority in the New York State Legislature to be talking about New York crime.”
He also said the judge can and should dismiss the case immediately because it’s “illegal.”
“If the felony that he [Bragg] latches on to is a federal felony, and that’s voted by a state grand jury, they don’t have the jurisdiction to do that,” he said.