One of the things former President Donald Trump has had going for him in his confused immersion in the world of politics is that his opponents are infallibly worse than he is. Right now, bunches are hooting at him that no one is above the law as if he’s the one guilty of that attempted ascension instead of a blundering, confused, ideologically driven, inept, crime-assisting Manhattan district attorney.
His name is Alvin Bragg, and, with the aid of a grand jury, he got an indictment in a case he has been pursuing with a look of moral anger on his otherwise ambitious face every time he talked about Stormy Daniels. She is an actress in porn movies who allegedly had a sexual visit with Trump, thereby earning $130,000.
The encounter occurred in 2006 but it was in 2016 when Trump was running for president that she tried to sell her story to the National Enquirer and received the big bucks from Michael Cohen instead. A private lawyer for Trump, Cohen turned against him when he did not become a White House lawyer for Trump, or so it is reported.
Helping her as Daniels went public was her attorney, Michael Avenatti, who hinted about running for president himself, appeared regularly on CNN and is now in prison for cheating clients and other misdeeds. The Federal Election Commission looked into whether this was misspent donation money to help Trump win the election and decided it wasn’t. The Justice Department investigated to no avail.
What we have here is a federal law, not a state law within the reach of state prosecutors. Nevertheless, Bragg, while seeing crime increase in New York as his efforts to stop it have been missing, found this motivating. He got deeply involved in the subject despite his predecessor backing up. Like his predecessor, he looked into such matters as Trump maybe making the payments secretly by illegally messing around with business records. Even if true, this activity would be a misdemeanor, not a felony, and legal time limits have run out on virtually the whole package, if not all of it.
Bragg is therefore left with pretty much nothing except a witness, Cohen, an established liar. Some lawyers, such as the well-known legal commentator Jonathan Turley, say It’s pretty hard to see how Bragg finds his way into sticking Trump into prison for felonious conduct in a federal case, but assuming he got there by means of tricks we haven’t learned about and judges willing to accept them, what do we have? The only criminal case in American history against a former president, and, by the way, it would be difficult to show he was paying Daniels to protect his election instead of his marriage.
Alright then, why not transform our ever-weaker democracy into a police state in which those in power are above the law they hardly notice anyway in going after those with less power? In the past, we have had something different, as in the likes of the honorable President Gerald Ford. A Republican like his resigned predecessor, Richard Nixon, he still knew he’d likely fail in the coming election if he stopped prosecution of the man. He did it anyway. And by the way, Trump’s sexual adventures are not all that unusual for presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Warren G. Harding, James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland.
Whether Trump criminally planned the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has not been convincingly demonstrated, but he encouraged and sat and watched some of it on TV while doing nothing. That’s horrendous, and we also have questions about attempted interference in the Georgia vote in 2016 and his possession of classified documents. But the two-year-long Mueller investigation was a farce, as was his House impeachment as a private citizen and now this? It appears at this stage to be as much an assault on America as on Trump.
Tribune News Service
