The Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump is an embarrassment to the American justice system.
Like Trump or dislike him (and as you know, I dislike him), he is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election. Trying the leader of the opposition party on criminal charges is no small matter in a democracy. It should be reserved for very serious crimes – espionage, for example – with irrefutable evidence.
As I wrote Monday, this
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Yet the case only gets worse from there.
Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor in New York. It can only be a felony if some underlying felony is committed and the records are falsified to hide it.
But the prosecutors have not charged Trump with any underlying felonies. Though they have referred to a conspiracy by Trump to influence the 2016 election, they have not specified – not even now, not even with the trial underway – what the alleged underlying felony might be.
And, as I pointed out Monday, the actual underlying charges all relate to business records that Trump and his company created AFTER the election.
But wait, there’s more!
It is not even clear that Trump’s effort to keep Daniels quiet before the election – even if that effort somehow could be legally viewed as part of a conspiracy that extended to the creation of the business records in 2017 – broke ANY New York state laws.
And Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor who made the opening statement against Trump, was a top Justice Department official until late 2022, when he joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office as “senior counsel.”
Going from a top federal post to a local prosecutor’s office is not a normal midcareer move. Then again, if Colangelo had stayed at Justice, he wouldn’t have gotten to help lead a case against Donald Trump, the man that Joe Biden, Colangelo’s top boss at Justice, calls a threat to democracy. Convenient.
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The picture should be clear.
This prosecution is the opposite of one that should be brought against a major Presidential candidate. It is weak, legally twisted, and overtly political. And the prosecution is framing it more or less openly as an way to punish Trump for having won in 2016.
It should never have reached a jury. But – in Manhattan, where local judges come in two flavors, liberal and leftist – it has.
This case is not like the other criminal indictments Trump faces. Those all have flaws, and the Georgia case is particularly troubled, thanks to Fani Willis’s personal antics. But what is happening in Manhattan right now is impossible to square with the rule of law.
Maybe Donald Trump needs to make clear that he will no longer participate in it in the most basic way possible – by giving up any effort in his own defense.
Maybe he needs to fire his lawyers and sit mute and quiet and alone at the defense table until he is convicted, and then dare the judge to sentence him to prison as a first-time 77-year-old nonviolent offender for a business records violation.
This tack is unrealistic, of course, if not outright impossible.
It would go against Trump’s instincts, which are to shout and fight at every opportunity. I am not even sure if the judge would allow him to dismiss his counsel mid-case. And presumably his lawyers would tell him he’s crazy to do so, that he needs to create a record for appeal.
Yet nothing is more powerful than the innocent defendant who refuses to participate in the spectacle of his own humiliation, who simply says: this game is rigged and I will not play.
Donald Trump, quiet and dignified, awaiting a fate he does not deserve.
Wouldn’t that be something?