Alvin Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, has had a difficult week, with difficult situations cropping up at every step.
A federal judge rejected a U.S. Attorney’s request to block an ex-prosecutor from testifying at a crucial House Judiciary Committee hearing into Donald Trump’s legal background.
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“The committee and its chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), had subpoenaed ex-assistant district attorney Mark Pomerantz to give testimony about the DA’s investigation into Trump, 76, that culminated in the former president’s indictment in March. Bragg filed suit against Jordan and the Judiciary Committee, claiming the subpoena was an overreach by the GOP-led House and an attempt to influence a state criminal proceeding,” the New York Post reported. “But Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found the subpoena was issued with a valid legislative purpose and that it was not the federal judiciary’s role to dictate how Congress operates.”
“Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law,” Following a hearing in a federal court in Manhattan, Judge Vyskocil wrote in his opinion.
During the hearing, Judge Vyskocil also retaliated at Theodore Boutrous, who represented Bragg, saying: “There’s politics going on here on both sides. Let’s be honest about that.”
The former president of the United States was recently charged by a grand jury in Manhattan on 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents in connection with adult film star Stormy Daniels.
President Trump was accused of having an affair with Stephanie Clifford (also known as Stormy Daniels) in 2006 and later gave her a money to remain quiet before the 2016 presidential election. He entered a not guilty plea to each of the 34 accusations in this case.
Legal experts have all agreed that Bragg’s case is exceedingly dubious and that the reliability of the evidence is being closely examined.
“The question to ask yourself in a case like this [is], ‘Would a case like this be brought against anybody else, whether he or she be president, former president or a regular citizen?’ The answer is… no,” Sol Wisenberg, a former Whitewater assistant counsel, said.
“You can debate all day long whether or not… Trump should be indicted related to the records at Mar-a-Lago, whether or not he should be indicted with respect to Jan. 6 incitement of lawless activity… Those are real crimes if they occurred, and he committed them,” he said. “This is preposterous.”
Even leftist media sites have questioned the lack of substance in Bragg’s legal case against President Trump, despite their vehement opposition to him.
Senior Vox journalist Ian Millhiser 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.”
The leftist publication Slate’s Mark Stern wrote a piece titled, “The Trump Indictment Is Not the Slam-Dunk Case Democrats Wanted.”
John Bolton, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration who has since spoken out against Donald Trump’s 2024 bid, appeared on CNN and denounced the charges brought against the former president, 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,” remarked Bolton on CNN. “I think this is even weaker than I feared it would be.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, a well-known Republican opponent of Trump, said in a statement: “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.”
Professor of law Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University expressed dismay at the “outrageous” issue being discussed while appearing as a guest on Fox News’ interview program.
“[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.
