A 12-person Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts in what was an enormously risky case to bring, with unfairly high stakes. Let’s be honest with each other. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was convoluted, and the jury convicting Trump shows that he got lucky in this case.
Like some grotesque legal version of Frankenstein’s monster, the case morphed into an amalgamation of all of the cases pending against Trump.
The stakes were so high because it appears the so-called hush money case will be the only criminal prosecution pending against Trump that will be tried before an election that might put him back in the White House. Because it’s the first and maybe the only one we’ll see, the Manhattan case, clearly the weakest of the four criminal cases brought against Trump, became a symbol of all of the criminal cases that Trump faces.
Like some grotesque legal version of Frankenstein’s monster, the case morphed into an amalgamation of all of the cases pending against Trump. It was at once, according to prosecutors, a documents case and an election interference case. But one case should never have been seen as a referendum on whether the criminal justice system can hold Trump to account.
That’s why today’s verdict feels like a catastrophe averted for those who believe in the rule of law and have been screaming from the rooftops that our former president threatens it.
Trump should be punished for any criminal acts he committed, no matter if they happened before, during or after he was president. But the federal and state charges that he sought to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power and the other federal indictment that says he unlawfully retained classified documents make better, stronger cases. It’s unfortunate that the case based on the accusation that he paid money to an adult film actress to keep her quiet about an alleged affair in the run-up to the 2016 election may be the only one that’s fully prosecuted.
The jury convicted him of all 34 counts despite of how convoluted the case was.
Jurors were first asked to find that Trump falsified business records. That is, they were asked to find that when Trump made the payments in question to his fixer Michael Cohen, he was not, in fact, paying Cohen for legal fees as Trump’s documents indicated but repaying Cohen for the hush money payments that Cohen made to Stormy Daniels to stop her from sharing her story of an alleged affair with Trump.
But by itself, the falsification of business records is a misdemeanor. So to kick this up to a felony, prosecutors needed jurors to keep clearing hurdles. The second hurdle jurors were asked to clear was to find that Trump falsified those records “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” While prosecutors didn’t need to prove that this other crime was committed, to win a conviction, they did need to show that the records were falsified with the intent to commit and conceal that crime.
So what is that other crime? Here Bragg’s office pointed to a New York state election law that prohibits promoting an “election of any person by unlawful means.” But this prompts the question: What are those “unlawful means?”
Which brings up the third hurdle.
Prosecutors needed to clearly lay the path for jurors to make their ways across the legal forest to the end of the road: a conviction. But the path they laid out for jurors in this case was neither clean nor tidy.
Third, prosecutors pointed to a violation of federal election law as those “unlawful means.” Specifically, prosecutors argued that the payments Cohen made to Daniels should be seen as a contribution to the Trump campaign, which was both over the contribution limit and undisclosed.
Prosecutors needed to clearly lay the path for jurors to make their ways across the legal forest to the end of the road: a conviction. But the path they laid out for jurors in this case was neither clean nor tidy.
Any one of the other three criminal cases should have been the first to go to trial. But thanks to Judge Aileen Cannon’s foot dragging in the classified documents case, District Attorney Fani Willis’ questionable ethical behavior in the Georgia election interference case, and questions of the scope of presidential immunity in the federal election interference case, we may have just seen the single occasion in which Trump is tried in criminal court.
We know that in any criminal case, prosecutors need to prove to all twelve jurors, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant committed criminal behavior. This is a high bar — and it should be. When criminal defendants are convicted, we can take away their liberty. We want to be sure we’re right before we incarcerate someone.
Bragg’s office met that burden in this case.
Even though the jury did convict him, there are still real legal issues that Trump will bring up on appeal. There may, for instance, be some question as to whether prosecutors can use the violation of a federal law to show actions by “unlawful means” under the New York state law. We could also ask the flip side of this question: Should the alleged violation of a state election law be used against a presidential candidate?
The hush money trial may be our only answer to the question of whether the criminal justice system can withstand the behavior of someone like Trump. That’s too bad. It is only one trial, and one trial cannot be a test of the entire criminal justice system. Add to that the fact that this was a complicated and serpentine case that most prosecutors probably wouldn’t have brought at all.
