Washington Post associate editor and columnist Ruth Marcus took to the pages of the Bezos-owned paper Wednesday morning to decry Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald J. Trump as weak, calling it a “dangerous leap on the highest of wires.”
Describing Bragg’s case as “disturbingly unilluminating, and the theory on which it rests is debatable at best, unnervingly flimsy at worst,” Marcus, a Yale and Harvard Law School graduate, said in her scathing op-ed:
I’m not saying prosecutors will lose this case. They could well win, and I hope they do, because a failure to secure a conviction will only inflame Trump and his supporters in their claims that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them. But the fears I had in the weeks leading up to the indictment about the strength of the case against Trump were in no way allayed by Tuesday’s developments.
The indictment and an accompanying recitation of the underlying facts offers almost nothing in the way of new evidence against Trump. No surprise there — the tawdry details of Trump’s “catch and kill” scheme to suppress damaging information from adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal about their relationships with Trump have already been well-aired.
And her critiques didn’t end there.
“This is not well-trodden legal territory. If I understood Bragg’s argument correctly, there is a certain circularity to saying that a false statement on corporate books becomes a felony, not a misdemeanor, because state election law makes it a misdemeanor to promote a candidacy by unlawful means, such as making false statements.
“Moreover, it’s not at all clear that violating a federal law — even if it could be proved that Trump did so — would constitute the kind of other crime that would allow Bragg to bootstrap Trump’s alleged conduct from misdemeanor to felony. As Joshua Stanton, Norman L. Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer wrote on the JustSecurity website last month, “the only appellate court in New York to have considered the meaning of ‘offense’ … found that it applied only to New York crimes.”
She concludes: “Again, maybe Bragg’s theory of the case will turn out to be solid. Maybe not. But this feels like a dangerous leap on the highest of wires.”
