Mona Charen of the Bulwark writes, “The indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is risky, but nothing about it undermines the rule of law. The risks are political and prudential. The Republicans, by contrast, are chest-deep in contempt for law.” Among the risks, she says, is that the case could be weak. But:
None of that casts any cloud on the lawfulness of what Bragg has done. Trump’s lawyer/fixer went to prison for this crime. There is no question that a crime was committed. Bragg has followed the rules. Trump will get his day in court. He will have every opportunity to argue his innocence to a jury of his peers.
By contrast, Republican officials and officeholders who are rallying around Trump are implicitly and sometimes explicitly endorsing his attacks on the justice system.
The problem with Charen’s argument that a prosecution is lawful and rule-following so long as it goes before a jury, etc., is that it seems to exclude the possibility that there could ever be such a thing as an abusive prosecution.
The fact that Cohen “went to prison for this crime,” meanwhile, is less impressive than Charen allows. As Andrew McCarthy has explained, “Cohen pled guilty because the SDNY had him dead-to-rights on serious fraud charges.” Whether anyone committed a campaign-finance felony is very much in question.
By the end, Charen has argued herself into the view that calling a prosecution a political weaponization of the law, as Speaker McCarthy has done, is worse than the actual political weaponization of the law would be (if she were to concede that it ever happened). That can’t be right.