EXCLUSIVE: The indictment that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is currently seeking against former President Donald Trump is based on a crime that was so flimsy it was never viewed as a standalone criminal case, according to three attorneys.
The indictment that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is currently seeking against former President Donald Trump—over his payment to silence a porn star about their sexual affair—is based on a crime that was so flimsy it was never viewed as a standalone criminal case, according to three attorneys who have worked on that investigation.
Bragg, who inherited the investigation from his predecessor, Cy Vance Jr., shut down the wider operation soon after entering the office—and only recently revived this narrow portion as a single case. But New York County prosecutors never considered pursuing the hush money case by itself, because, for one thing, investigators on the DA’s Trump team couldn’t even agree whether Trump committed a serious crime.
And that was quite the risk, because the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York had already chosen not to indict Trump. The DA team’s second version was even more of a stretch. This one involved attaching the business records charge to a bonkers underlying crime: viewing Stormy Daniels’ attempts to sell her story on the eve of the 2016 election as her trying to extort Trump. In his book, Pomerantz acknowledges this is “a somewhat awkward construction” that would act as if “Trump was, in effect, a blackmail victim.” That would turn Trump’s payment into money laundering, he figured.
Joe Tacopina, one of Trump’s defense lawyers on this case, told The Daily Beast he wasn’t surprised that lawyers who have long been close to this investigation have their reservations about making the Stormy Daniels matter a standalone criminal case. “I’ve spoken to two FEC chairmen. It’s not even close. I don’t understand how they could do this. It’ll eventually get tossed aside,” Tacopina said.
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