As the media scrum fades and the facts start to emerge following Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s cryptic indictment of President Donald Trump on bookkeeping charges this week, analysts have raised the charge that he violated the U.S. Constitution with his political agenda against the likely GOP candidate for president in 2024.
A report from Fox News explains it involves the 6th Amendment, which requires that any criminal defendant be told of the accusation against him.
Fox documented that the amendment provides for a defendant to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor…”
However, Bragg’s indictment left most of the details of what he’s charged Trump with obscure and cloudy.
And when he was asked by a reporter to identify what “underlying” crime the indictment involves, he refused to explain.
“The indictment doesn’t specify it because the laws does not so require,” he claimed.
The issue is that Bragg used the odd scheme for his indictment of claiming that a paperwork violation, normally a misdemeanor, actually was a felony because of the crime (unspecified) that it led to.
Then he repeated that scenario 34 times to come up with 34 counts against Trump.
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, however, didn’t mince words. On “Hannity,” he explained that Bragg likely violated Trump’s right to know – specifically – what he’s accused of doing.
“He does [have to name it, via] the Sixth Amendment,” Jarrett said. “[The indictment] is therefore facially defective. It is deficient on its face and it would be susceptible to a motion-to-dismiss.”
Fox reported, “Jarrett questioned whether Bragg slept through constitutional law in his studies at Harvard, envisioning the prosecutor working late one evening in New York City, mumbling that ‘I’ve got to get Trump – What crime? – What crime?’ and that an office worker simply remarked, ‘don’t say anything.’”
Bragg had campaigned for office on the idea, essentially, that he would “get Trump.
Jarrett said what Bragg has done here recalls the words of former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. He said, the “greatest danger to justice is an unscrupulous prosecutor who targets a person and then scours the law books to find an offense he can pin on that person.”
Washington Times editor Charlie Hurt added that Bragg’s effort was “a circus,” “absurd,” ” ridiculous.”
“Alvin Bragg has so embarrassed himself, embarrassed to the legal profession that it really is going to, I think, set the tone for anything else any of these wacko, crazed, lunatic, left-wing, politicized Democrat DA’s want to do to try to destroy Trump,” Hurt continued.