With the prosecution winding down in Donald Trump’s Manhattan case, we have to ask, in the immortal words of Peggy Lee: Is that all there is?
It’s become utterly apparent (if wasn’t already) that the key element of any prosecution is missing here: namely, a crime.
Yes, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg developed a totally novel legal theory by which 34 misdemeanor counts of business records falsification, though past the statute of limitations, could be converted into felony charges because they were — allegedly — in the service of covering up another crime.
But Bragg’s team forgot to offer any evidence that the records were falsified.
Or to specify what that other crime might be, let alone to prove it.
His prosecutors have instead resorted to stunts of dubious constitutionality and legal wordplay in their efforts to pretend that Trump’s perfectly legal nondisclosure agreement — the vaunted “hush money” so beloved by lefty media — with porn star Stormy Daniels somehow broke the law.
And the mysterious pseudocrime at the heart of the case is, even in the vague and misty contours we’ve been permitted to glimpse, total nonsense.
It demands Bragg enforce federal election law he has no authority to prosecute — and relies on a totally strained reading of that law to boot.
Since the eyes of America were always going to be glued to the trial, you’d expect the prosecution to have had some cache of damning and hitherto non-public evidence ready to unload against the former prez.
But what they actually had is … Michael Cohen.
Yes, the prosecution is utterly reliant on the testimony of a convicted felon and embittered ex-Trump staffer who couldn’t be trusted to deliver a weather report.
Cohen’s own former attorney, Robert Costello, blew him up last week in front of Congress as having told numerous lies under oath in the Bragg trial, which Costello also testified to during Trump’s grand jury. (Actually, the first grand jury didn’t indict, so Bragg went to a second one.)
This was never a trial, in other words.
From the start, Bragg’s case was nothing more than a political witch hunt.
If the judge doesn’t toss the case as soon as the prosecution rests, we hope even the deep-blue NYC jury will see that — because a victory here means you (or anyone else whose politics Bragg doesn’t like) could be next.