Posted on 06/13/2024 5:42:10 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
A member of the Federal Election Commission testified to Congress on Thursday that the Manhattan district attorney who led the prosecution of former President Donald Trump overstepped his authority.
Trey Trainor, a Trump-appointed commissioner who once served as FEC chairman, said during a hearing that District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, inappropriately incorporated a federal election campaign law into his charges against Trump.
“Bragg has effectively usurped the jurisdiction that this Congress has explicitly reserved for federal authorities,” Trainor said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “This overreach sets a troubling precedent for politicization of legal proceedings at the state level.”
Trump was convicted of falsifying business records in the first degree, a charge that requires the defendant to have violated another law in addition to the falsification of records.
In Trump’s case, Bragg argued Trump also violated New York election law’s section 17-152. The statute states that it is against the law to conspire to influence an election “by unlawful means.”
Bragg gave the jury three options for what those unlawful means could have been. One of the options was that Trump violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. The other two options were additional falsifications of records or tax violations.
The jury did not have to agree on what unlawful means Trump used to violate section 17-152, only that he violated the overarching state law. In other words, some jurors could have decided Trump breached FECA to reach their guilty conclusion. The jurors did not have to document which of the three unlawful means options they chose to arrive at their guilty verdict, so there is no way to know if any of them used FECA.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
Yet, what can the FEC do about it? Really?
Probably nothing, but it might make it easier to get it to the Supreme Court in a timely fashion.
Why isn’t Merchan being accused of judicial malpractice?
This is stupid. He should have thrown out the case at the outset on that very basis.
My question is, isn’t there a presumption of innocence? The jurors did not vote Trump guilty of the predicate crime so how are misdemeanors past the statute of limitations magically felonies?
Trump’s AG better charge all these people with felonies.
An appellate court, even in New York, is going to have a hard time substantiating this entire trial, let alone the verdict.
It was flawed in so many major aspects, it needs to be thrown out in its entirety.
Bragg’s theory is so loony and complicated, and Merchan’s jury instructions so wrong, that the jury thought they had an excuse to convict the man they hated.
And that’s why that commie tyrant Merchan forbade any defense witnesses.
Wasn’t it the judge, not Bragg, who gave the jury the options in his jury instructions?
The NY judge and prosecutor will never answer for the huge number of crimes they have committed. If they just happen to be found guilty of one of them then all the other crimes will be ruled legally mute. If the USSC rules Trump has immunity and Trump walks. Then the NY gangsters will never answer for anything they did. The court system will consider it all mute.
Just part of the way that our corrupt court system protects itself.
Throw the chubby chimp with the Confederate name in jail.
They know it will all be reversed on appeal.
They just want to be able to call him a “convicted felon” and keep him in jail until after the election.
That is patently clear, but what they did - in a normal world - is criminal.
Ironically, this - not their former bogus mantra against DJT - is, in fact, ‘collusion’.
Check under each of his chins and his other fat rolls for hidden evidence.
Democrats= ‘Who cares about laws and stuff?... It’s Trump’.
I’m certain Bragg will get a strongly worded letter from Congress.
“Judge said before the trial that Trump “should have” paid hush money out of his self financed campaign funds, then reported it as a campaign expenditure to the Federal Elections Commission, thus making private matters public as a legal obligation…..but in fact, it’s illegal to use campaign funds to pay hush money, because hush money payments are not recognized as a legit campaign expense. …so the judge pronounced Trump guilty before the trial because he did not break the law. The crime he was accused of covering up was not reporting the payment to the FEC….and according to the prosecutor, this was “election fraud” and Trump won the election by fraudulent means. Trump’s crime was beating Hillary…..the prosecutor was pretty explicit about this. Trump is a “fraud” therefore he committed election fraud & covered it up because he did not report it . Hard to believe this is the USA. ….and considering how Clinton covered up an affair with Monica Lewinsky WHEN he was president in his Oval Office, & how his 1992 campaign illegally used campaign dollars to prevent “bimbo eruptions”, the hypocrisy is stunning.”——anonymous blog
Not only that, but when Trump's team wanted to bring in an expert on one of the theoretical crimes, the Judge did not allow it!
This is far far worse than just usurping federal authority. It is charging the accused with an anything grab back of possible crimes and not even allowing the accused to address the particulars in their defense.
Bragg and the Judge both ought be impeached and disbarred from ever practicing law again. They are as corrupt as they come.
If they can't prove a second crime, then there is no first crime of falsifying a business record. Without a second crime, the business records were entered appropriately. That's why Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan were desperate to find a second crime at any cost.
This whole case reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "The Drumhead" guest-starring Jean Simmons.
Simmons plays a retired admiral who is called to the Enterprise to investigate a suspected sabotage. She begins reliving her greatest past achievement of discovering a great conspiracy by stringing together apparently random coincidental events into a larger conspiracy aboard the Enterprise that involves its highest officers.
This theme was revisited again in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called "The Voyager Conspiracy." Seven of Nine expands her database by assimilating all of Voyager's ship logs. Overwhelmed by the amount of data, she begins to string together unconnected, but coincidental events into a plot by Voyager's officers to spearhead a Federation invasion into the Delta quadrant.
This is exactly what Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan did in the Trump case. In order to use the NY State law 17-152, they needed to find a predicate crime that was being "furthered" by a falsification of records. In order to do this, they had to find business records that could be alleged to have been falsified in order to further this crime. Which business records these are depended on what they settled on as the crime being furthered.
It was actually Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan who were the conspirators who were concocting a plot against Trump in order to illegally influence the 2024 election.
They started by building a conspiracy where there was none. They took normal business dealings between Trump and David Pecker, and Trump and Michael Cohen, and Cohen and Pecker, and alleged that they were all working in a conspiracy regarding the election, despite evidence that what Pecker was doing was something he's done many times before for many other celebrities, that Cohen was a liar and a thief and was doing many things on his own initiative, and that buying silence is not a campaign finance violation (see John Edwards).
Now that the alleged conspirators were in place, they needed a predicate crime. Of course, influencing the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton lost was the crime, but prosecuting election interference is a federal matter, not a NY state county court matter. They needed a crime that could be prosecuted in a county court, so they looked at financial transactions of the Trump Organization. They settled on the payments to Cohen as "legal expenses," which they were, and alleged that this was a falsification of a business record to cover up a conspiracy, the conspiracy that Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan concocted against Trump.
As a misdemeanor, prosecuting these falsified business records expired several years ago. As legal expenses, these records were never falsified at all and should be immune from prosecution. As a conspiracy, the records were falsified in order to further another crime. This is the reverse-engineering of the crime that President Trump was charged with, was prosecuted for, and was convicted of.
Bragg, Colangelo, and Merchan conspired to create a conspiracy where none existed, to illegally influence an election by means that were previously determined to not be illegal, by falsifying business records that were normal and correct business transactions. As with most constructed conspiracies, they usually fall apart under the weight of their own assumptions, and this was no different. They kept the nature of the underlying crime a secret for as long as possible to prevent Trump's team from investigating it more deeply. They kept the nature of the underlying crime vague for the jury so they would focus on the "conspiracy" and not the facts of the alleged crime. They needed the "conspiracy" to be true in order to convert normal business records into "falsified" business records so they could have something to prosecute in their lowly county court.
The whole thing was a fabrication just like in the episodes of Star Trek that I cited at the outset.
-PJ
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