Alvin Bragg, Election Denier

The Trump indictment is Bragg’s version of ‘stop the steal’ regarding the 2016 election.

Y ou knew Donald Trump was going to land in a criminal trial about election denialism. You just didn’t know it was going to be about 2016, not 2020, and that the election denier is Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, not Trump.

That is the untold story about the trial that starts in earnest in New York on Monday, with opening statements expected, followed by witness testimony.

We have spent much time on the manifold flaws in Bragg’s prosecution, including:

• A business-records-falsification indictment against Trump that Bragg, the paragon progressive prosecutor, would bring against no one but a political enemy.
• The impropriety that Bragg, a state prosecutor, is purporting to enforce federal campaign law — without a peep of protest from the collusive Biden Justice Department, naturally — in a matter that both DOJ and the Federal Election Commission (the federal agencies with actual jurisdiction over the matter) decided not to pursue against Trump.
• The fact that Bragg is accomplishing this by making up his own version of what federal law requires, again, without any pushback from the feds — although you can only imagine the howling we’d be hearing if this were being done to a Democrat.
• And the fact that this criminal case, mirroring New York attorney general Letitia James’s outrageous civil fraud case against Trump, involves an alleged fraud scheme in which the state can prove no fraud victims — i.e., Trump is charged with falsifying his records with fraudulent intent, but the state is not claiming that anything or anyone, including the state itself, lost a penny.

Any one of these infirmities — and I’ve just hit the main ones — should be enough to explode Bragg’s prosecution, to say nothing of all of them in concert. But in focusing on the trees, we miss the forest: Alvin Bragg is an election denier.

That’s what this case is about. It is an elected progressive Democratic district attorney’s version of “stop the steal” — the fraud that Democrats claim leaves “our democracy” hanging by a thread. Don’t take my word for it. Just read the Statement of Facts, so-called, that Bragg published in conjunction with the indictment.

By the way, Bragg’s unilateral publication of such a document is in and of itself a tell that something very peculiar is going on here. Normally in a big case, the grand jury returns a narrative indictment, in which the background facts are described in lavish, chronological detail, placing the charges filed — the “counts” of the indictment — in context. But that’s not what happened here. Instead, Bragg had the grand jury file just a bare-bones indictment, which lays out little more than the statutory charge Bragg claims Trump violated 34 times — business-records falsification with an intent to defraud that included commission or concealment of another crime. The grand jury’s indictment does not tell us a story.

Bragg does that in a separate document, described not by the grand jury but by Bragg himself.

The district attorney is nothing if not cagey. He has always hidden the ball regarding the “other crime” he claims Trump was fraudulently endeavoring to commit or conceal. He knows he has no authority to enforce federal law, even though that’s what he’s trying to do — at least his version of what federal law should be. And given that the DOJ and FEC found no offense on which Trump could be prosecuted, Bragg knows he is on thin ice. As I explained in a post on Friday, for his evidence that Trump broke campaign law, Bragg relies in his “statement of facts” on Michael Cohen’s guilty plea to campaign offenses, even though as an experienced prosecutor, Bragg well knows that Cohen’s guilty plea is not admissible evidence against Trump. That’s why even Judge Juan Merchan, who has given Bragg every bounce of the ball in this legally ludicrous prosecution, refused to go along with that one.

But let’s put aside the fact that Bragg is trying to enforce federal law and instead focus on why he is trying to enforce federal law.

Bragg’s theory of the case is that Trump stole the 2016 election. As with election deniers in other cycles, including Trump in 2020, if anyone is guilty of deceiving the public, it is Bragg. Trump won a close election in 2016, just as he lost a close election in 2020. No one but the fringiest of Trump-deranged progressives believes that Trump was not legitimately elected. But Bragg believes it — or at least, just like Hillary’s “Putin did it” diehards, that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

According to Bragg, the tightness of the 2016 election could mean that any failure of compliance with federal disclosure law could have changed the outcome — or, as he more obtusely puts it, Trump “hid damaging information from the voting public” with the effect of “benefitting the Defendant’s electoral prospects.” Bragg thus claims that when Trump agreed with Cohen (then his lawyer/fixer at the Trump Organization) and David Pecker (then CEO of American Media Inc., which published the National Enquirer) to buy the rights to the stories of women who credibly claimed to have had affairs with Trump, they were undermining federal laws that require disclosure of campaign expenditures.

As I’ve detailed, Bragg’s theory makes neither legal nor factual sense. The payments to the women do not technically qualify as campaign expenditures — which is why the federal authorities did not proceed against Trump. Moreover, even if they arguably qualified, there would have been no disclosure obligation until the reporting period after the 2016 election took place — in 2017. That is, the “hush-money” scheme could not possibly have affected the outcome of the election.

This is why Bragg is left to explain the anomaly that, in connection with a claim that Trump stole the 2016 election, the “offenses” he charges did not occur until 2017. Obviously, you can’t steal something in 2016 by actions you don’t take until the next year. If this absurd case had been charged against anyone in America other than Trump, that is a refrain you’d have heard from the media about a zillion times by now.

What I’m talking about here, though, is more basic. Trump says Democrats “rigged” the 2020 election against him by, for example, suppressing unsavory information about Biden-family influence-peddling. That’s exactly Bragg’s theory of how Trump supposedly stole 2016 — information suppression. Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election is fairly highlighted by Democrats as making him singularly unfit for the presidency; Bragg’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election has made him a Democratic hero.

And if we’re going to talk 2016 election, Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, actually was found by the FEC to have violated federal campaign law. In stoking the fraudulent claim that Trump was a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, Clinton’s campaign paid its law firm, Perkins Coie, to hire Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to concoct the story; then it booked the payment as legal expenses rather than opposition research. As a result, the FEC fined the Clinton campaign.

Since Bragg theorizes that Trump, in the same campaign, falsely booked payments as legal expenses rather than reimbursement for a nondisclosure deal, why hasn’t Bragg indicted Clinton? Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t really have a case against Clinton, either — but at least Clinton, unlike Trump, was found by an authorized federal agency to have committed an actionable disclosure violation.

Of course, the question answers itself: Clinton is a Democrat. Bragg sees his job not as enforcing the law evenhandedly but as getting Trump.

But understand: What Bragg is accusing Trump of is stealing the 2016 election.

One last thing: On whose behalf is Bragg bringing this election-theft allegation? Remember, Bragg is without authority to enforce federal law because he is just a county district attorney. Yes, New York County is populous and consequential, but it is just one county. Bragg’s jurisdiction does not even encompass all of New York City, much less the State of New York or, less still, the United States.

Hillary Clinton won New York’s 2016 presidential election by nearly two to one, earning nearly 60 percent of the vote with a popular margin of 4.5 million to Trump’s 2.8 million. In Manhattan, the tally was even more one-sided: Clinton bested Trump by almost 80 points (87 percent to 10 percent), winning about 579,000 votes to Trump’s 65,000.

Bragg’s only responsibility is to the people of Manhattan, not to progressive Democrats across America who are upset that Trump narrowly beat Clinton in the Electoral College. The election in Manhattan was not close. In what conceivable universe did anything Trump did in the way of paying hush money via a legal agreement and then booking the payment as legal expenses have the slightest impact on the 2016 election in New York County?

None, of course. This is a truly abusive case. Remember this, though: Trump is an election denier, and for his trouble, Democrats have indicted him four times and labeled him the most dangerous threat to democracy in American history. Bragg is an election denier, and Democrats have made him their champion.