CV NEWS FEED // CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst and former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig has slammed the prosecutorial tactics of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in the “Hush Money” trial of former President Donald Trump.
In a May 31 op-ed published by New York Magazine titled “Prosecutors Got Trump—But they Contorted the Law,” Honig delivered a sharp criticism of the DA’s assembly of charges against Trump, describing the case as “an ill-conceived, unjustified mess.”
Honig is the author of several bestselling books, including his most recent “Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It,” in which he “exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their own benefit.” Notably, “Untouchable” features an extensive look at Trump’s alleged evasions of justice.
In Honig’s analysis of the historic outcome of the case, in which Trump became the first former president to be found guilty of a crime, Honig begins by affirming that a jury’s verdict is “sacrosanct.”
“By any reasonable measure, the jury of Manhattanites who yesterday found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 charges did its job and did it well,” Honig wrote, adding that “reasonable minds could have come out either way.”
However, “that doesn’t mean that every structural infirmity around the Manhattan district attorney’s case has evaporated.”
Honig continued:
Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. ‘But they won’ is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to ‘win’ now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and fallout later.
Judge Juan Merchan
In the first place, Honig pointed out Judge Juan Merchan’s clear political bias and subsequent refusal to recuse himself from the case. He noted that Merchan donated a small amount, $35, to “a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation, including funds that the judge earmarked for ‘resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.’”
However small the amount, Honig stated, the donation was “in plain violation of a rule prohibiting New York judges from making political donations of any kind.”
“Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to ‘Re-elect Donald Trump MAGA forever!’?” Honig asked. “Absolutely not.”
District Attorney Alvin Bragg
For his part, District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s election was heavily predicated on the anti-Trump messaging he projected on the campaign trail, Honig observed.
Bragg “ran for office in an overwhelmingly Democratic county by touting his Trump-hunting prowess.” Honig also called out the DA for “bizarrely” and “falsely” claiming that he had sued Trump over 100 times.
‘Pushing the Outer Boundaries of Due Process’
Putting aside bias concerns regarding the judge, the district attorney, and the jury itself, Honig centered his criticism of the trial on the prosecution’s legal tactics, which he described as Frankenstein-esque.
“When you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges,” Honig observed:
The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor—in New York, Wyoming, or anywhere—has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever.
Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.
Honig broke down the charges, noting first that falsifying business records is counted as a misdemeanor charge on its own, falling “within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega.”
Bringing forward a mere misdemeanor as the first charge ever against a U.S. president “would be laughable,” Honig pointed out.
In addition, the two-year statute of limitations on misdemeanors for alleged offenses Trump would have committed in 2016 and 2017 has already passed.
The prosecution succeeded in bypassing these concerns by elevating their charges against the former president up to the lowest-level felony, “electroshock[ing] them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations.”
To do so, the DA claimed that Trump falsified his business records “with intent to commit another crime.”
The alleged second was a violation of New York State election law, which entails three separate “unlawful means,” including federal campaign crimes, tax crimes, and falsification of documents – and Honig rebuked the DA for “inexcusably” refusing to specify by what means Trump violated the state election law until right before closing arguments, which the former prosecutor said flouted Trump’s constitutional right to be made aware of the charges brought against him ahead of trial.
“In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else,” Honig concluded:
The Manhattan DA’s employees reportedly have called this the ‘Zombie Case’ because of various legal infirmities, including its bizarre charging mechanism.
But it’s better characterized as a Frankenstein Case, cobbled together with ill-fitting parts into an ugly, awkward, but more-or-less functioning contraption that just might ultimately turn on its creator.
Who is above the Law?
President Joe Biden briefly addressed the jury’s verdict in a series of remarks the next day, stating that “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself,” and that “no one is above the law.” Biden made the remarks just before delivering a speech in which he claimed to be making progress in efforts to end the war in Gaza.
Honig ended his analysis seemingly in response to Biden’s statement, noting that to say “no one is above the law” is “meaningless pablum if we unquestioningly tolerate (or worse, celebrate) deviations from ordinary process and principle to get there.”
“Here, prosecutors got their man, for now at least—but they also contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey.”
The post Senior legal analyst at CNN slams prosecution in Trump ‘Hush Money’ trial appeared first on CatholicVote org.