According to press reports, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is close to indicting Donald Trump, or at least wrestling with the decision. While Trump has predicted “death and destruction” if he is arrested, his defenders should focus instead on the prosecution’s legal flaws. In fact, at the heart of the case rests a critical — but so far unexplored — defect that should bring down Bragg’s house of cards.
According to leaks from the DA’s office, Bragg intends to seek a grand-jury indictment of Trump for a $130,000 hush-money alleged payoff to porn star Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels). Nondisclosure deals do not by themselves violate criminal law. The DA’s star witness is Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, who was convicted of a federal felony for carrying out the scheme. (Cohen has proven such an unreliable witness that federal prosecutors decided to drop any further investigation into the payoff years ago.) The apparent claim here is that Trump violated the law by trying to account for the hush money as a payment to bagman Cohen for “legal services.”
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