OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Alvin Bragg, the far-left Manhattan district attorney who has landed himself in the middle of a political whirlwind, could be facing even more heat soon.
Earlier this month, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump on 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records related to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump sent a payment to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, allegedly to keep Daniels quiet about an affair the two of them had in 2006. Trump pleaded not guilty to all 34 charges.
Since the indictment, several legal experts have argued they believe that Bragg’s case is exceptionally weak.
Brad Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman, said “Bragg’s decision to prosecute is as common as clay. The criminal case against Donald Trump lacks a necessary element: there is no federal campaign finance violation.”
Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox, wrote: “There is something painfully anticlimactic about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump. It concerns not Trump’s efforts to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States, but his alleged effort to cover up a possible extramarital affair with a porn star. And there’s a very real risk that this indictment will end in an even bigger anticlimax. It is unclear that the felony statute that Trump is accused of violating actually applies to him.”
Mark Stern, a writer for the liberal outlet Slate, published a story titled, “The Trump Indictment Is Not the Slam-Dunk Case Democrats Wanted.”
Left-leaning Politico noted that even Bragg’s allies thought he had botched the indictment.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul took Bragg to task after Trump was indicted, saying Bragg could be forced out of office and into court himself.
“Wonder if DA Bragg remembers Durham DA Mike Nifong who withheld exculpatory DNA tests on the Duke lacrosse players. He was subsequently forced out of office, disbarred, and convicted of contempt of court,” Paul said, referring to Nifong, the district attorney in the 2006 case accusing Duke University lacrosse players of rape. The three players were exonerated and Nifong even spent one day in jail.
“A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power. The DA should be put in jail,” Paul said in a separate statement just before news late last week about the indictment.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared that Congress will take action after Trump appeared in Manhattan on Tuesday for his arraignment in the case brought against him by Bragg.
John Bolton — who served as a national security adviser in the Trump administration and has since come out against Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign — appeared on CNN and blasted the charges filed against his ex-boss, former President Trump, saying the indictment was “even weaker than I feared it would be.”
“Speaking as someone who very strongly does not want Donald Trump to get the Republican presidential nomination, I’m extraordinarily distressed by this document,” Bolton said on CNN. “I think this is even weaker than I feared it would be.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the case is “outrageous.”
“[Bragg] is attempting to bootstrap [a] federal crime into a state case. And if that is the basis for the indictment, I think it’s rather outrageous,” the professor said.
“I think it’s illegally pathetic,” he said. “There’s a good reason why the Department of Justice did not prosecute this case: Because it’s been down this road before. It tried a case against former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards arguing that hush money paid to another woman, who bore a child out of that relationship, was a campaign violation. That was a much stronger case, but they lost,” Turley said.
“Bragg’s betting on a motivated judge and a motivated juror. You couldn’t pick a better jurisdiction…. [But] under Bragg’s theory, he can take any unproven federal crime, revive a long-dead misdemeanor, and turn it into a felony. That’s going to raise concerns for a number of judges. But once it gets to the appellate level, he’s going to have a particularly difficult time,” he said.
