OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump sat down for an interview this week and detailed his experience after being arraigned in Manhattan, New York, earlier this month.
During an interview Tuesday night on Fox News, the 45th president spoke about appearing in Manhattan last week for his arraignment in the case brought against him by District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 charges regarding allegations that he falsified business records related to adult film star Stormy Daniels’ hush-money case. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in a case involving his purported role in hush money payments to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, allegedly to keep Daniels quiet about an affair the two of them had in 2006.
Trump also revealed that when he was being processed, he said several New York Police Department officers were crying.
“It was a horrible thing because I did nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing wrong. You look at even the pundits and the legal and the legal analysts – Greg Jarret. All of these really talented people. They’re saying he didn’t do anything wrong. So that’s number one,” Trump said.
“Number two, they were incredible. When I went to the courthouse, which is also a prison in a sense, they signed me in. And I’ll tell you. People were crying. People that work there. Professionally work there that have no problems putting in murders and they see everybody,” Trump added.
“It’s a tough, tough place. And they were crying. They were actually crying. They said I’m sorry. They said ‘2024, sir. 2024.’ And tears were flowing from their eyes. I’ve never seen anything like this. Those people are phenomenal. Those are your police. Those are the people that work at the courthouse. They’re unbelievable people,” Trump added. “This is all weaponization. They’re weaponizing our justice system.”
WATCH:
Several legal experts have argued that Bragg’s case is exceptionally weak.
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.”
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.”
Notorious anti-Trump GOP Sen. Mitt Romney issued a statement saying: “I believe President Trump’s character and conduct make him unfit for office. Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda. No one is above the law, not even former presidents, but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law. The prosecutor’s overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said in an interview with Fox News that 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, referring to federal prosecutors not charging Trump following Cohen’s guilty plea.
“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 and 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.
