Some Thoughts on The Trump Verdict

... and the blame game it's caused.

As a quick reminder, I don’t think the New York case, in which Donald Trump was just found guilty of 34 felony counts, should have been prosecuted. It was clearly a political decision by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, who ran for office on the issue, and defied prosecutorial norms and the impartial application of the law to pursue charges his predecessor chose not to. That decision required some creative legal wrangling on Bragg’s part to advance misdemeanor offenses (whose statute of limitations had expired) to felony offenses.

Bragg was in the wrong

Bragg did nothing illegal, as far as I can tell, but his actions were cheap and unjust. I say that as someone who believes Donald Trump did everything he was accused of in the indictment. So, I’ve found myself agreeing with much of the criticism Bragg has received, while recognizing that the bulk of Trump’s defenders, who’ve been crying “Lawfare!” for months, don’t believe any of the criminal indictments Trump faces are legitimate.

They’re wrong about that, and they’re also wrong if they believe the jury in the New York trial did something corrupt or even just inappropriate.

The jury was in the right

The jurors didn’t choose this case, and their job wasn’t to decide whether or not it should have been prosecuted. Their civic duty was to determine if Donald Trump was guilty of the legal charges filed against him.

As former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig wrote for Intelligencer:

The jurors sat through six weeks of testimony, they were by all accounts attentive throughout the trial, and they asked precise, insightful questions of the judge during deliberations. Nobody’s truly in position to say if the jury got it right or wrong; they saw the evidence and we didn’t — most of us, that is, including those like me who followed every line of testimony as it happened; there’s no substitute for seeing it play out live. Reasonable minds could have come out either way, and this jury found that the prosecution carried its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury’s work, and their verdict, deserve respect.

I think those attacking the jury, as North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum did shortly after the verdict, are way out of line.

“If those twelve voted for president today, it would have been twelve for Biden and zero for President Trump,” said Burgum.

First of all, that assuredly isn’t even true. The jurors, who both sides picked, were asked before they were chosen where they get their news. One answered Fox News and another answered Truth Social (Donald Trump’s social media website), neither of which are terribly popular with Biden supporters. Three included the The Wall Street Journal in their list of news sources.

Second, it doesn’t matter who any of the jurors plan to vote for. The notion that just because Trump is politically unpopular in New York City, he can’t fairly be judged by a local jury of his peers, is absurd. The fact that even a Truth Social news-consumer agreed that Trump was guilty of all counts should dispel that myth.

Yet, unsurprisingly, the jurors are already being doxxed and targeted with threats, which no one involved in this case should be facing.

Other considerations

For those looking for someone to blame, Bragg is a reasonable choice. For what it’s worth, I think he was acting of his own volition. I don’t believe he was in cahoots with President Biden or the DOJ, nor do I believe that we live in a banana republic, that our legal system is in peril, or that Donald Trump is a political prisoner (or any kind of prisoner). Those insisting otherwise on cable news and the internet, I’m sorry to say, are guilty of the non-crime of political hackery.

If you need someone else to blame, I guess you could also go with the courtroom prosecutors who presented a compelling case, and Trump’s defense attorneys who didn’t.

Or, if you’re feeling a little rebellious, or maybe just nostalgic for an archaic concept called “personal responsibility” (that was once revered on the right), you could possibly even spare some blame for a guy named Donald Trump.

Trump, after all, did break the law.

Trump was (and is) in the wrong

In the run-up to the 2016 election, in an effort to hide a sexual tryst he’d had with a porn-actress (at a time when his wife Melania was at home raising their four-month-old son), he paid the adult entertainer for her silence, and then illegally falsified business records to conceal the nature of that payment. If Trump had chosen a different path, at any intersection in this parable, Bragg would have had no legal basis — manipulative or otherwise — from which to prosecute the former president.

Again, I’m not defending Bragg; I think what he did was wrong. What I’m defending are tenets of good character, and moral and ethical practices. I think they matter in life and leadership, and I think they should matter for those running for, and serving in, public office. Especially high office.

While the New York indictment was clearly politically motivated — with the timing conceivably linked to Donald Trump’s choice to run for president in 2024 — that’s not the case with Trump’s other criminal indictments. They were well in the works prior to his decision to run again, which means he very likely would have had to deal with them regardless of his future involvement in politics. Trump understood this, which is assuredly why he announced his candidacy as early as he did. He wanted to create the public perception (which many on the right have since bought into) that the indictments were timed to hurt his 2024 presidential run.

In reality, even Trump’s lawyers have suggested that his candidacy is, at least in part, a legal strategy to escape the criminal charges (and likely multiple convictions) with a presidential pardon … for himself. It’s the same motivation as Trump’s repeated calls for total immunity for crimes committed by a U.S. president (his remaining charges are all tied to activity he engaged in while still in office).

In other words, Alvin Bragg isn’t the only individual in this story guilty of brazenly defying legal norms and gaming the system.

It would be good to keep that in mind as we approach the next trial and the November election.

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