Alvin Bragg was counting playing cards dealt from the bottom of the deck in his criminal trial against Donald Trump.
But Bragg got some bad news.
And Alvin Bragg was left speechless by this judge’s ruling.
Judge Juan Merchan is a Joe Biden campaign donor and a partisan Democrat doing his best to hand Democrat prosecutor Bragg every advantage possible in trying to secure a guilty plea against Donald Trump.
But Merchan knows he can’t go hog wild lest the appeals court throws out a conviction on account of the obviously wrong and biased application of the law.
And to that end, Merchan rejected Bragg’s request to use Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for illegal campaign contributions as evidence that Donald Trump committed a campaign finance violation.
Bragg’s case hinges on bootstrapping misdemeanor falsification of business records charges – where the statute of limitations has already run out – to a felony by arguing Trump was covering up another crime.
In this case, Bragg claimed Michael Cohen paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement was an illegal campaign contribution.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to two illegal campaign contributions – the payment to Daniels and a $150,000 NDA payment to former Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal – who also alleged an affair with Trump.
But there were two big problems.
What Cohen pleaded guilty to in 2018 were tax and fraud charges.
Cohen faced 55 years in prison, so he pleaded guilty to two campaign finance charges in the hopes of a lesser sentence by cooperating with prosecutors at the Southern District of New York (SDNY) who hoped to charge Trump with campaign finance violations for paying Cohen back.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained in National Review that, “On this, the law was not on the SDNY’s side. But the prosecutors did have Cohen over a barrel. So they held the carrot out to him, but made no firm promises: Plead guilty to two campaign-finance felonies (the Daniels and McDougal NDAs), implicate Trump in the underlying schemes, and they’d consider giving him a cooperation agreement.”
But the NDA payments Cohen made were part of a standard business transaction and Trump had free reign to do whatever he wanted with his money so prosecutors dropped the matter without charging Trump.
Bragg resurrected this “phantom crime” – as McCarthy deemed it – to indict Trump.
And Bragg hoped to use Cohen’s guilty plea as evidence that Trump committed a campaign finance crime which would have satisfied the requirement to boost the falsification of business records to a felony.
But as McCarthy also explained, Bragg tried to pull a stunt a first-year law student should know wouldn’t pass muster.
“[A]t the Defendant’s [i.e., Trump’s] request, a lawyer who then worked for the Trump Organization as Special Counsel to Defendant (“Lawyer A”) [i.e., Cohen], covertly paid $130,000 to an adult film actress [i.e., Daniels] shortly before the election to prevent her from publicizing a sexual encounter with the Defendant. Lawyer A made the $130,000 payment through a shell corporation he set up and funded at a bank in Manhattan. This payment was illegal, and Lawyer A has since pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution and served time in prison,” McCarthy wrote.
Bragg was trying to stitch together a campaign finance crime that the feds never prosecuted Trump for.
Bragg’s already trying to criminalize legal behavior.
But Bragg should have followed the fed’s lead and never brought this case because there’s no evidence in the first place.
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