Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks to the media after a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, May 30, 2024, in New York.
When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg first announced his indictment of former President Donald Trump back in early 2023, there was a wave of skepticism from liberal commentators, legal experts, and Trump critics. The case relied on a “dubious legal theory,” wrote Ian Millhiser at Vox. At New York, Jonathan Chait argued the case shouldn’t have been brought because only a political candidate could have committed it (which is true of all campaign finance laws, but I digress), saying it “is like getting Al Capone for paying off his mistress.” At The Atlantic, David Frum made an incredulous-stare argument that it couldn’t possibly be a big enough crime to merit the first-ever prosecution of a president. At Slate, law professor Richard Hasen argued the case didn’t have legal merit.
Yet it turned out that the Bragg case was solid. After just a couple days of deliberation, the jury delivered total victory: guilty on every one of 34 felony counts.
For all the flaws of the criminal justice system, this is how it’s supposed to work. An accused criminal—in this case, one of the most influential and famous people in the world, with an extremely well-funded legal defense—got his day in court, and a jury of random citizens unanimously agreed he did the crimes.
Now, Trump will undoubtedly appeal, and it’s anyone’s guess whether the appellate judges in New York, who as a rule bend over backwards to accommodate wealthy criminals like Trump (or Harvey Weinstein), will bail him out once more. But it must be admitted now that Bragg knew his business and was right to prosecute.
The odd thing about all the anxious liberal hand-wringing is that once the prosecution’s various filings were published, the legal argument in the case was fairly straightforward. As Quinta Jurecic carefully explains at Lawfare, the core of it was that Trump had falsified business records, namely paying back Michael Cohen’s hush-money bribes to Stormy Daniels, which he disguised as payments for legal services. This is normally a misdemeanor, but it is upgraded to a felony if in the service of other crimes—even if they are only attempted—namely, falsifying other business records, tax fraud, and most importantly, violating state and federal campaign finance law.
And the prosecution’s case had Trump dead to rights. Multiple and reinforcing pieces of evidence and testimony proved that Trump knew the purpose of the payments was falsified, and that they certainly constituted a political expenditure. After all, the entire reason for paying Daniels off, as Hope Hicks testified that Trump told her, was to prevent the story getting out and tanking his 2016 campaign.
It’s hard to guess why so many Trump critics didn’t like this case. Part of it is probably what I call “chauvinist cowardice,” a sort of knee-jerk resistance in the Washington establishment to confronting the fact that America is not an exceptional nation, and in fact is extraordinarily corrupt. Part of it is the fact that, as Josh Marshall points out, the case is “by far the poor relation of the family of Trump prosecutions.” It’s sort of unseemly to convict him on this one when the far more damning classified documents case and January 6th cases remain tangled up in federal courts.
But I think the biggest factor is that Bragg seemed to be influenced by politics. Writing in Vox in 2023, Andrew Prokop voiced that sentiment. The case, he declared, “has not inspired confidence in me that this was an apolitical process and a fair-minded effort to assess whether laws were broken—rather than an attempt to ‘get Trump’ for to-be-determined crimes.”
And I suspect politics did play a role here. As legal analyst Michael Liroff pointed out on my Left Anchor podcast recently, it surely can’t be a coincidence that so many cases dating from such a wide span of dates all came to court at the same time. This case involves events from 2016, while the Georgia election interference case is from late 2020, and the documents and January 6th cases are from 2021. It sure looks like once special counsel Jack Smith got his cases moving, other parties that had been dragging their feet starting moving as well, so they didn’t look like pathetic chumps.
But this only reinforces the need for Bragg to have prosecuted. If he—or more accurately, his predecessors; he was only elected in 2021—had been dithering on this case, it’s actually good that someone lit a fire under him.
In a sense, Chait is right that this is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion—but that was a good thing. Gangsters like Capone are such a dire threat to public safety that the most important thing is to get them for something. If his criminal conspiracy is so tight that you can’t get him for organizing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, then by God you hunt around and see if he’s done some other crimes. And Capone did, in fact, fail to pay his taxes. It would have been senseless to let him skate on a small crime because you can’t build a case for a much worse one that he obviously committed.
As an aside, politics saturates every aspect of the criminal justice system. Impoverished defendants get vastly more aggressive treatment than rich white-collar ones because they have no political power.
At any rate, Trump poses a threat to the American republic that’s a million times worse than Capone ever did; that is why he is being dogpiled by prosecutors at every level of government. The fact that the partisan hacks Trump installed throughout the federal judiciary have successfully delayed his federal cases past the election (enabled by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s inexcusable dithering), in a flagrantly corrupt effort to help him escape justice, only makes it all the more urgent he be punished for whatever other crimes he’s done. And again, these were not “to be determined” charges; as the jury agreed, they were genuine and serious.
So Alvin Bragg has delivered the American people an invaluable gift: the truth that Donald Trump is a convicted felon. That just might break through the fog of right-wing propaganda and inert mainstream coverage that made him seem like just another politician. We all owe Bragg a debt of gratitude.
