CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig writing in a Cafe Brief newsletter that was reprinted in New York magazine on Friday presented both the pro and anti Trump ways of looking at the Alvin Bragg case that takes place on April 15 in Manhattan. It is obvious which of the two point of view that Honig thinks is most realistic in “Donald Trump’s Trial Is a Rorschach Test.”
…The crime is a paperwork offense relating to how Trump and his businesses logged a series of perfectly legal (if unseemly) hush-money payments in their own internal records. The prosecution’s star witness is a convicted perjurer and fraudster who openly spews vitriol at the defendant, often in grotesque terms, essentially for a living.
The famously aggressive feds at the Southern District of New York passed on the case years ago, and current Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s predecessor could have indicted before he left office but did not. The charges are either misdemeanors or the lowest-level felonies (depending on how the jury decides the case), and the vast majority of defendants convicted of similar offenses are sentenced to probation and fines, not prison.
Having presented the POV favorable to Trump, Honig then presents what appears to be a rather lame way of looking at the trial from someone hostile towards Trump presenting it as a desperate payoff scheme in 2016 to keep his campaign from collapsing:
…To keep his listing campaign from capsizing, Trump and his team paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged extramarital affair and then labeled those payments “legal expenses.” Already the first American president or former president to face indictment, Trump could soon become the first to sustain a felony conviction, and it’s possible he could lose the 2024 election — and eventually wind up behind bars — as a result.
It’s not hard to discern which of these viewpoints Honig thinks best reflects reality. This is also reflected in what else he wrote:
…Paying hush money is not a crime. In fact, a hush-money agreement, though seedy, is legally no different from any other contract between private parties. So Trump knowing about the Daniels payoff — and he clearly did — is merely a starting point here and insufficient to prove anything criminal.
The charged New York State crime here is falsification of business records. The DA alleges Trump had the hush-money payments fraudulently recorded in his internal books as “legal expenses” (rather than, I don’t know, “hush money to porn star”). If proved, that’s merely a misdemeanor, a low-level crime virtually certain to result in a non-prison sentence. For comparison, under the New York code, falsification of business records has the same technical designation as shoplifting less than $1,000 of goods.
...But it’s not entirely clear whether Trump was involved in the actual logging of those payments in the internal records of his business — remember, that’s the crime. In fact, when Cohen secretly recorded his then-client talking about a hush-money payment to another woman in 2016, Trump seems clueless about the accounting mechanism.
…The received wisdom is that the Manhattan case is the least important, and will be the least impactful, of the four pending Trump indictments. The first part of that proposition is beyond reasonable dispute.
One has to wonder if Donald Trump is guilty of so many massive crimes as those who oppose to him allege, why do the cases against him such as the Manhattan case appear to be so incredibly weak and prosecuted by either corrupt or highly biased or flawed officials while being surreptitiously aided by the Biden administration?
Hopefully, Elie Honig won’t be shunned by his CNN colleagues for his observations about the Manhattan case.