Opinion
By Jeff Childers
04-15-24
Happy Tax Day everybody! And good morning, C&C, it’s Monday, April 15th. In the U.S., today is an unofficial working holiday, or whatever the opposite of a holiday is, when our federal income tax forms are due, and last year’s income taxes either paid or partly refunded. Well, at least they’re spending our money wisely. Anyway! Your Monday morning roundup includes: it begins! Trump trial number … wait I lost count, nevermind … the latest trial takes off this morning in Manhattan and I provide your pre-trial briefing; followup news from the weekend’s harmless but nerve-wracking strikes against Israel; and Bill Maher’s conservative journey continues slowing drifting toward sanity.
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🔥 Keeping up with the Trump trials is much like cat counting, and trying to report on all the cases is like trying to herd a pack of aloof but somehow still-lovable fuzzy critters around. Either way, it’s that time again, time for the latest in a long series of Trump prosecution events. It’s like Survivor; will Trump be voted off Riker’s Island this time?
The UK Guardian ran a terrifically tedious story yesterday headlined, “Donald Trump’s criminal trial over hush money to begin in New York.” This morning, despite Trump’s legal team’s best efforts to delay it, puffed-up Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will begin his farcical trial of Donald Trump for the victimless crime of “falsifying business records.” This case is even stupider and lamer than the last theory oozing out of New York’s courts about Trump’s undervalued real estate. Behold the genius who came up with this latest idea:
The case’s star witness is a now-disbarred criminal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who used to work for Trump back when people still thought Cohen was a real New York lawyer. And, when I said Cohen was a “criminal lawyer,” I don’t mean he practiced criminal defense. I mean that he was a lawyer who was also a criminal. That’s not a metaphor; Cohen wound up doing time.
And in Cohen’s case, there were actual victims.
Anyway, Cohen will testify that twelve days before the 2016 election, while Cohen was representing Trump, Cohen — not Trump — bought non-disclosure agreements from two … er, female performers, who at the time were going around shopping stale but sordid stories of having once grappled with the President ages ago. The alleged ‘Trump Tales’ were mild compared to other political Don Juans like Bill Clinton, Hunter Biden, or even John F. Kennedy, but Cohen will say he thought it could be politically damaging.
So he paid $280,000 for the two NDAs and the rights to the ladies’ stories.
As a lawyer, I must pause here and note that it would be unusual to the point of disbelief for any attorney to advance any significant amount of money for a client in the way Cohen claims. Lawyers aren’t banks.
Then after the election, Trump paid Cohen eleven monthly retainer checks which do not add up to $280,000, but apparently was close enough for District Attorney Bragg, so he and Cohen now claim Trump was really reimbursing the lawyer for the NDA money Cohen had paid to the two “actresses” (and I use that term loosely).
This is the point where Bragg’s case rockets away from Planet Reality. District Attorney Bragg’s criminal indictment complains not about any of the alleged facts I just mentioned. Bragg doesn’t care about Trump’s sex life, his paying to shut up a couple blabbering strippers, or even Trump’s repeated denials of the encounters (even if they happened).
No, Alvin Bragg’s mental toilet water drained down to just this: On the little memo line of the eleven checks he wrote to Mr. Cohen, Trump put something like, “for legal services.” Which apparently in New York is a major felonious event justifying upending the country. Here’s how the Guardian described the legal effect of Trump not writing something like “for reimbursing an NDA” in the memo line instead:
By casting these payments as compensation for legal work, President Trump “made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise”, prosecutors said. Trump did so “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof … ’
Falsifying business records is only a felony if DA Bragg can prove that the “mischaracterization” was intended to facilitate another crime, which is also a felony. The larger crime Bragg is shooting for here, a crime with which he has never charged Trump, is failing to properly report campaign expenses. Bragg’s theory — if you can call it that — is that Trump’s intent — the intent inside his own brain — when he wrote down “for legal expenses” was to make sure the payments were left off his quarterly presidential campaign finance reports.
I am not making that up; that’s Bragg’s whole case.
Here’s your pretrial quick-reference checklist:
- Prosecutors may have indicted many ham sandwiches, but nobody has ever criminally prosecuted a president or former president before, much less a State District Attorney.
- Inexperienced DA Alvin Bragg has never prosecuted a campaign finance violation before.
- DA Alvin Bragg has never prosecuted a “falsified business records” case before either.
- Bragg’s novel legal theory has never been used to convict anyone else before, not in New York or anywhere else.
- Bragg never even charged Trump with the campaign reporting violation, just the business records thing.
- Bragg stretched the few facts like taffy into thirty four separate criminal counts.
- To convict, Bragg must prove Trump’s internal mental intentions beyond a reasonable doubt.
- DA Bragg is a grotesque, unqualified, woke, Soros-funded, democrat machine prosecutor who is new to the job and ran on a “Get Trump” platform.
- This is Trump’s first … no, second … er, third … oh, nevermind. They’ve sued him a lot. This is the President’s first criminal case of four to go to trial. If it’s not political persecution, then nobody even knows what that is.
- All four criminal cases against Trump, including this one, are founded on victimless process crimes.
In this case, Trump’s team is expected to argue that the payments were personal expenses and not campaign-related expenses, that any alleged misclassification was unintentional, that the prosecution was politically-motivated, and that Bragg cannot prove the necessary intent to prove concealment of an actual crime as opposed to just an embarrassing but perfectly lawful personal expense that celebrities often encounter.
🔥 Missing from any analysis of this case — for that matter, from any of the Trump cases — is the political effect the verdict will have on the nation; regardless whether Trump is convicted or acquitted. Simply because the charges were filed, and the process started, both Republican and democrat citizens have become emotionally invested in the outcome. The hyper-political nature of these tenuous cases against a polarizing former President and current presidential candidate ensures that absent a miracle, one side or the other is certain to feel deeply betrayed by both the verdict and the process.
Alvin Bragg does not appear to be the man who can deliver a miracle. And that’s putting it nicely.
So buckle up, buttercup. I’ll post daily trial summaries so you won’t need to watch unless you’re a glutton for punishment.
🔥 Confirming our theory about the carefully-planned nature of the Iranian attacks against Israel, the Jerusalem Post ran a revealing story yesterday headlined, “Iran informed Turkey in advance of its operation against Israel – Turkish source.” The article’s initial paragraph confirmed that Iran not only warned everybody about the attack ahead of time, but it was also to some extent negotiating its response with the Biden Administration:
Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Turkey that any action had to be “within certain limits.”
In other words, U.S. officials informed Iran its attack on Israel was okay as long as it met certain conditions. The article went on to describe President Blinken, I mean Secretary Blinken’s role in the talks, stamping the Secretary of State’s ugly, ever-present face onto the Iranian attack.
They kept the talks secret. But it might have been comforting for us to know that all the involved countries were discussing agreed limits for the attacks. Regular Israelis — everyday folks just wanting to go about their day and mind their own business — were terrorized all last week by nonstop air raid warnings and now have permanent PTSD now over the weeklong imminent strike status. The rest of us spent the week worrying whether World War III was right around the corner holding a two-by-four and waiting for its chance, and fretting about whether the Rapture could possibly still happen before the fun started.
Our governments have too many secrets. I’ll pen a post about that problem sometime.
🔥 Along those lines, yesterday conservative intellectual and military historian Victor Davis Hanson posted a terrific tweet that could have been an entire column. Hanson seems to have gotten himself on a roll, enumerating the many, many Biden Administration failures, which he titled “‘Don’t” — Or Ten Ways to Guarantee Theater-Wide War.”
Essentially, Davis looked beyond Biden’s bellicose whispering and grandstanding, and argued persuasively that it was actually Biden’s passivity that invited the current Middle Eastern conflict. Hanson cited Biden failures including (but not limited to): the catastrophic Afghanistan pullout, Biden’s hapless incompetence in the teeth of a Chinese war balloon drifting unopposed across the entire American continent for days without interference, his destroying the southern border, allowing the Houthis to win in the Straits of Hormuz, and last but not least, paying billions of Biden bucks buying off Iran and only getting back a handful of hostages.
Presumably, some of those Biden billions were productively used this weekend in the form of Shahed drones and cruise missiles Iran launched against the U.S.’s only Middle Eastern ally, Israel, which fortunately has not yet put two-billion-and-two-billion together. But I digress.
When you put it the way Hanson did, Biden’s foreign policy failures are really starting to stack up. Read the whole thing.
🔥 Finally, last week liberal comedian and news commenter Bill Maher, who’s been showing flashes of frustration with progressive nonsense for some time now, ran a hilarious segment titled “Whoa, Canada”:
CLIP: Bill Maher on liberals going too far (8:03).
Bill began by (apologetically) dumping on Canada, coining the term “zombie lies,” which I suppose is a neat way of describing progressive policy ideas. Maher explained Canada used to be the liberal Mecca — a real-life NPR dream state — where every woke, white, pajama-wearing, liberal 20-something dreamed of living (plus Gaza). Maher’s many complaints ranged widely over themes includes illegal aliens, inflation, debt, the housing crisis, low-quality but expensive healthcare, and transgender “treatments” for kids. Bill wrapped up his argument by appealing to his viewers’ desire to avoid a “far right” Trump Administration — by cooling off the zaniness.
As fun as it is to watch, we’ve cited Bill Maher on this blog too many times to claim this is any kind of new development. But what struck me most about Bill’s latest rant was that he touched so many traditional conservative areas. Like many democrats I know personally, Bill claims to be a progressive, but he lives like a conservative.
I’m beginning to suspect Bill’s political evolution is also a sign some democrats with conservative values may be finally starting to wake up? I’d be especially interested to hear from our democrat converts in the comments: what finally did it for you?
Have a magnificent Monday! Roll on back here tomorrow morning, to find out about the Trump trial’s first day and how the FISA re-vote turned out, and otherwise enjoy your tasty, warm serving of Coffee & Covid.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
