After President Trump was convicted on 34 bogus felony counts last week, elitists in the press and in academia seemed confused by the reaction of us ordinary people to this miscarriage of justice. They asked, “How could these hillbillies question the American justice system and dare to disagree with the Manhattan jury?”
Unlike those maniacally celebrating the verdict, I can describe with particularity the rigged and disgraceful charges– which should be overturned on appeal.
Alvin Bragg was elected to serve as Manhattan’s top prosecutor in 2021, campaigning not on a promise to deliver justice, but to “get” President Donald Trump. Embodying Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, Bragg picked a man, drummed up a crime, and dedicated his city’s resources to the witch hunt.
While refusing to pursue felony charges and jail time for violent criminals, letting repeat offenders walk free only to offend again, and looking the other way when derelicts throw innocent New Yorkers onto the tracks of oncoming subway trains, Bragg rustled up a falsification of business records charge over a nondisclosure agreement from the time period prior to Trump’s first campaign for president.
Under New York law, falsification of business records crimes are typically charged as a misdemeanor unless there was an attempt to cheat the workers’ compensation system or avoid tax payments.
Neither workers’ compensation fraud nor tax avoidance were alleged here, and even more importantly, statute of limitations for this offense had expired in 2017.
Nevertheless, Bragg, using a novel “legal” theory, braided this dead state claim into a felony federal election crime– even though state prosecutors don’t have the power to prosecute federal felonies and the Federal Elections Commission (which does have that power) investigated these charges and declined to pursue them.
The activist prosecutor presented this jumbled case before a partisan judge (a known donor to anti-Trump causes and father to a Democrat activist) who sent the jury to deliberate with instructions that misinterpreted federal law and misstated the constitutional requirement that criminal defendants be found guilty unanimously.
On top of the openly antagonistic prosecutor, nonsensical charges, biased judge, and confusing jury instructions, this trial takes place after the Department of Justice let President Biden off the hook for mishandling classified documents because he’s too feeble.
It’s obviously political. And it’s tyrannical.
When these charges are eventually tossed, I’ll be waiting for the same intellectual experts who celebrated this verdict to reaffirm their love for the American judicial system and its inclusion of an appeals system when those in power who committed ACTUAL crimes are prosecuted. But I won’t hold my breath.
Jeanette Ward represents House District 57 in Casper
