By David French / The New York Times
I’ve long been a skeptic of Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump. As a legal matter, I think it’s the weakest of the four criminal cases against Trump, and there is a very real chance the conviction will be overturned on appeal. At the same time, however, the MAGA argument that Trump’s trial and conviction are somehow proof that America is now a banana republic is absurd.
A case can have weaknesses without being an affront to the rule of law. And in Trump’s case, even the weakest elements are supported by prior prosecutions brought by Democrats and Republicans.
For example, the Obama Department of Justice prosecuted former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards for accepting campaign contributions intended to cover up an affair with a woman named Rielle Hunter. The case ended with an acquittal on one count and a hung jury on five others.
The Trump Department of Justice prosecuted Michael Cohen for his specific role in the same hush-money scheme at issue in Trump’s trial. That case ended with a guilty plea. While it is absolutely true that the Biden Department of Justice didn’t choose to prosecute Trump for his role in the hush-money scheme, it remains rather interesting that the department didn’t charge the principal after it convicted Cohen, the lower-level employee who acted on his behalf.
Neither the Edwards nor the Cohen case definitively establishes the validity of the election-law elements of the case against Trump. Cohen’s guilty plea isn’t a court precedent, and since the Edwards case ended without a conviction, there was never a chance to test the prosecution’s legal theory on appeal.
But if you think that Bragg was completely out on a limb tying Trump’s bookkeeping fraud to a federal campaign finance violation, remember that prosecutors from two different administrations have filed federal cases using the same legal theory. Bragg did not make up his argument. He was riding the coattails of prosecutors who came before him.
At the same time, the debate over the Manhattan hush-money case is playing out at the exact same time as Hunter Biden, the president’s son, is standing trial for serious federal crimes in a case brought by his father’s Department of Justice. That’s a strange way to run a banana republic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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