Tag Archives: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg

The Case Is Falling Apart In A Trial That Should Never Have Happened

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On Sunday, The New York Post posted an article about the murder trial of Daniel Penny that is taking place in New York. As you remember, Daniel Penny is being tried for the subway murder of Jordan Neely in May 2023.

The article reports:

On Friday, the defense rested in the Daniel Penny trial, leaving many observers to ask what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was thinking in pursuing this case.

Over the course of the second-degree manslaughter trial, Bragg’s prosecutors tried to sell the narrative that the Marine vet overreacted and behaved “recklessly” when he restrained Jordan Neely on that F train back in May 2023.

But a host of prosecution witnesses, Penny’s fellow passengers, knocked massive holes in that tale, as one after another veteran subway rider described how terror-stricken they felt while trapped in the train car with the angry, unstable, threatening Neely.

One woman said she “was scared s–tless” by Neely’s behavior and recalled him yelling: “I don’t give a damn. I will kill a motherf—er. I’m ready to die.”

She stuck around after the ordeal to thank Penny for defending her and everyone else in the car that day.

Another, a high school student, said she was “so nervous” that she feared she “was going to pass out,” and said she didn’t hear other passengers’ warning to Penny to let go of Neely during the struggle.

The article concludes:

Closing arguments begin Dec. 2; it’s hard to think the jury will need to deliberate long.

It’s Bragg and his team who’ll have to put in time figuring out why they took such a weak case to trial.

There are some real questions in my mind as to how New York is making decisions regarding who to let off for crimes committed and who to put on trial. It seems to me that Daniel Penny is the least of New York’s worries as far as criminals are concerned.

Adding To The Circus

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Most Americans have figured out at this point that the New York City trial of President Trump is actually a campaign donation to the Biden campaign. No one seems to be quite sure exactly what the President is charged with, and a lot of the testimony doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the case. Well, now there is a new twist.

On May 13th, The Federalist reported the following:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s paralegal testified on Friday that his office deleted from their evidence three pages of phone records between convicted liar Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson without notifying former President Donald Trump’s legal team, according to reports.

Trump attorney Emil Bove questioned paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider on Friday about three pages of 2018 phone records between Davidson and Cohen that Bragg’s office had deleted, according to CNN. Additional phone records between Daniels manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard regarding Daniels’ claim about her alleged affair were also deleted, according to The Epoch Times.

The altered call records were submitted into evidence, but Bragg’s office did not tell Trump’s team that three pages were missing, The Epoch Times reported.

The article also notes:

Trump’s defense also made a motion for a mistrial, which Judge Juan Merchan denied. Merchan also kneecapped Trump’s team from defending the former president by limiting what former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith could say when testifying about campaign finance-related issues, noted Steve Roberts and Oliver Roberts in The Federalist Friday.

Is there an honest person somewhere in the New York State legal system that will end this travesty?

Down The Rabbit Hole With The Trump Trial

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On Friday, Byron York posted article at The Washington Examiner about some of the insanity surrounding the New York trial of President Trump. A number of laws have been ignored in order to proceed with this trial, and Byron York lists a number of them.

The article reports:

Yes, we know that Trump is charged with falsifying business records of payments made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 and 2017. But falsifying business records is a misdemeanor with a two-year statute of limitations, meaning prosecutors would be prohibited from charging Trump with that crime after 2019, which was five years ago. They obviously missed that deadline by a mile.

We also know that New York law allows falsifying business records to be upgraded to a felony if the alleged falsification was done with “intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” In that case, the statute of limitations extends to five years, which would have allowed prosecutors to charge Trump as late as 2022. Prosecutors missed that deadline, too.

Trump was indicted in 2023. How did that happen? Because of COVID-19, when New York extended its statute of limitations by a year. That allowed prosecutors to slip the charges in right before the new, one-time-only, six-year extended statute of limitations expired.

But here’s the thing. What was the “intent to commit another crime or aid and conceal the commission thereof” that prosecutors used to raise falsification of business records from a misdemeanor to a felony? In nearly every case of alleged falsification of records that has been charged as a felony in New York, the defendant was charged with another crime — that is, prosecutors made it clear what the other crime was. In Trump’s case, the indictment did not specify any other crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the law did not require him to specify the other crime.

So Trump faced felony charges without knowing what he was accused of doing. And the really amazing thing is that the trial is now underway and Bragg has still not specified what the other crime is. It is a key element of the case. Without it, the charges against Trump could never have been brought because they were misdemeanors long past the statute of limitations. It is the other crime that makes this whole prosecution possible. But the prosecutor has not specified what it is.

One of my lawyer friends tells me that a trial must deal with whatever the defendant is charged with in the indictment. The Fifth Amendment “requires a felony charge to be spelled out in an indictment whose criminal elements have been established by probable cause to the satisfaction of a grand jury.” In this case, the prosecutor has not even specified the crime that made the prosecution possible. Is there anyone in the New York State legal system who has actually read the U.S. Constitution?

Does Lawfare Work?

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On Tuesday, The Conservative Review posted an article about the possible impact of the trial of President Trump in New York. Based on what I know of the charges, the trial is frightening because it illustrates how an overzealous justice department can put anyone on trial for anything. Is the jury aware that Congress has a specific fund to deal with allegations of a sexual nature against Congressmen?

In 2017, CNN reported:

So far, there’s been little specific data to help illuminate just how pervasive sexual harassment is on Capitol Hill, but one figure has emerged: the total that the Office of Compliance, the office that handles harassment complaints, has paid to victims.

On Thursday, the Office of Compliance released additional information indicating that it has paid victims more than $17 million since its creation in the 1990s. That includes all settlements, not just related to sexual harassment, but also discrimination and other cases.

So are we going to arrest whoever disburses the money?

The article at The Conservative Review reports:

On Monday, trial arguments began in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against the former president. Trump is accused of falsifying business records related to payments made to Stormy Daniels. The trial is expected to take weeks, which means Trump’s ability to campaign is severely hampered. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is ramping up his campaigning.

That juxtaposition — Trump in a courtroom versus Biden on the campaign trail — could help Trump, Turley predicted.

“This is becoming the split-screen election,” the law professor said on Fox News. “Earlier it was pretty damaging to see the split screen between Trump in different courtrooms. This is even more effective when the other side of the screen shows Biden campaigning in key states like Pennsylvania while [Trump’s] held in this courtroom.

The article at The Conservative Review concludes:

“Keep in mind: this is what Hillary Clinton’s people did,” he pointed out. “Remember, when they funded the Steele dossier — which they denied to reporters — they put it as a legal expense. And then they fought the eventual fine they received from the federal government saying, ‘But it was a legal expense.’ Now you’ve got some of the same Democrats supporting this bizarre theory.”

Turley, moreover, agreed there is credence to the narrative that Bragg’s case is “coordinated” with the Justice Department, owing to the fact that Michael Colangelo, who once worked in the Biden DOJ, helped present opening arguments on Monday.

It’s only illegal when Republicans do it!

Unfolding Before Our Eyes

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On Monday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the use of the legal system against President Trump.

The article reports:

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Monday that the “improvisational” nature of the cases against former President Donald Trump caused damage to the image of the legal system and proved Trump was “right” about being targeted by a “weaponized” justice system.

Trump’s attorneys said Monday the former president was having difficulty posting a $454 million bond to cover the judgment in a civil fraud case issued by New York Judge Arthur Engoron in February. Turley said that the cases brought by Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis proved Trump’s allegations that he was being targeted correct. 

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that we have a legal system now that is being heavily distorted by politics and you cannot look at all of these cases and see blind justice, you see the opposite,” Turley told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, a former Trump administration official. “You see a justice that is being weaponized, and in many ways the Democrats fulfill the narrative of President Trump. He is now right. No matter what they thought about it at the beginning, they proved him to be right with this pile-on from Florida to Georgia, to Washington, D.C., to New York and most of the public gets it.”

The article concludes:

“I mean we have to wait to see if New York still has a judge or two that’s willing to say enough,” Turley continued. “When you are forcing someone to come up with half a billion dollars just to get an appeal? Someone has to say enough. This is not what New York is supposed to be.”

If we want to see our justice system restored back to equal justice under the law, we are going to have to elect people who are willing to follow the law. Please keep that in mind when you vote in primary elections and in November.

 

Red Laws And Blue Laws

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On Thursday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at American Greatness about the use of the law as a political instrument. The contrasts how the law was applied in similar cases based on the politics of the person involved.

The article reports:

One state prosecutor and one civilian plaintiff have already won huge fines and damages from Donald Trump that may, with legal costs, exceed $500 million.

Trump awaits further civil and criminal liability in three other federal, state, and local indictments.

There are eerie commonalities in all these five court cases involving plaintiff E. Jean Carroll, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James, federal special counsel Jack Smith, and Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis.

One, they are either unapologetically left-wing or associated with liberal causes. They filed their legal writs in big-city, left-wing America—Atlanta, New York, Washington—where liberal judges and jury pools predominate in a manner not characteristic of the country at large.

Two, they are overtly political. Bragg, James, and Willis have either campaigned for office or raised campaign funds by promising to get or even destroy Donald Trump.

The article notes:

Three, there would not be any of these cases had Donald Trump not run for the presidency or not been a conservative.

Carroll’s suit bypassed statute of limitation restrictions by prompting the intervention of a left-wing New York legislator. He passed a special bill, allowing a one-year window to waive the statute of limitations for sexual assault claims from decades past.

Until Trump, no New York prosecutor like James had ever filed a civil suit against a business for allegedly overvaluing real estate assets to obtain loans that bank auditors approved and were paid back in full, on time, and with sizable interest profits to the lending institutions.

Alvin Bragg bootstrapped a Trump private non-disclosure agreement into a federal campaign violation in a desperate effort to find something on Trump.

Smith is also charging Trump with insurrectionary activity. But Trump had never been so charged with insurrection, much less convicted of it.

Willis strained to find a way to criminalize Trump’s complaints about his loss of Georgia in the 2020 national election. She finally came up with a racketeering charge, usually more applicable to mafiosi and drug cartels.

Four, in all these cases, the charges could have been equally applicable to fellow left-wing public figures and officials.

Please follow the link to the article to read the entire article. What has  happened to our justice department in recent years reads more like Soviet justice than American justice.

The Circus Continues

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The arraignment of President Trump was questionable at best, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had to fulfill his campaign promise to ‘get Trump.’ The next step in the drama was Representative Jim Jordan looking for information on what role the federal government paid in the investigation. Obviously, Alvin Bragg does not want any information on that topic investigated or revealed, so he a entered a restraining order against Rep. Jim Jordan to stop Jim Jordan’s investigation.

On Wednesday, The Epoch Times reported the following:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s urgent request to enter a restraining order against Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was rejected on April 11, the same day it was filed.

U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, turned down Bragg’s emergency request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Jordan.

“The Court declines to enter the proposed Temporary Restraining Order and Order to Show Cause,” Vyskocil said, noting that she had not yet received several documents that were referenced in Bragg’s filings.

…Jordan said on Fox News that Bragg is obstructing a legitimate congressional investigation.

“They’re obstructing our investigation,” Jordan said. “We have a constitutional duty to get to the facts, particularly when you have a district attorney interfering with the most important election we have, which is the election of the commander-in-chief; the president of the United States.”

Trump, who was president until early 2021, is running for a second term in 2024.

Bragg has asserted that Jordan and other members of Congress lack the authority to probe the Trump prosecution but Jordan disagreed, pointing to how federal funds were used to investigate Trump.

“First, they indict a president for no crime. Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it,” Jordan said in a statement.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is engaging in election interference. Whether or not he will pay a price for that behavior remains to be seen.

 

The Letter

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The New York case against President Trump keeps getting weaker. On Wednesday, The Daily Wire posted an article about the latest wrinkle in the case.

The article reports:

A five-year-old letter surfaced Wednesday that appeared to show President Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen lied to investigators about a hush money payment made during the 2016 presidential election.

The letter, dated February 8, 2018, was written by Cohen’s attorney Stephen M. Ryan to the Federal Election Commission about the payment Cohen made to porn actress Stormy Daniels. In it, Cohen’s lawyer claims that Cohen used “his own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford.”

“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payment directly or indirectly,” the letter said.

Cohen pled guilty six months after that letter was written to several charges in federal court, including campaign finance violations related to the payment to Daniels.

Cohen, who has since been disbarred, is a key figure in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office grand jury investigation into former President Donald Trump’s alleged involvement in that payment to Daniels. He has told investigators for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and testified to the grand jury that he made the payments at the direction of Trump.

I would like to point out that Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000. Whoever paid Stormy Daniels was obviously a much better negotiator. This is much ado about nothing, but it has kept the news about the Biden family corruption off of the front pages. It has therefore served its purpose.

At Least They Are Consistent

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On Tuesday, The Gateway Pundit posted an article about the Grand Jury testimony of Attorney Robert Costello, the former legal adviser to Michael Cohen. Attorney Costello appeared on Tucker Carlson on Monday night after testifying before the Grand Jury that wants to indict President Trump.

The article reports:

Costello told the FOX News audience that he testified for two hours in front of Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan Grand Jury.

Robert Costello told Tucker Carlson, “I spoke to the jury for two hours… It was clear to me the Manhattan Grand Jury did not want to get to the truth.”

The article concludes:

According to FOX News legal mind Gregg Jarrett, Soros-funded DA Alvin Bragg HID nearly 600 pages of exculpatory evidence to the New York Grand Jury investigating President Trump.

Gregg Jarrett: I mentioned it yesterday, I think, when Bob Costello got into that Grand Jury room and told them, “Wait a minute. You don’t have the hundreds of pages I handed over to Alvin Bragg over here? You only have six cherry-picked documents?” You know, hiding from grand juries exculpatory information is reprehensible and unconscionable. And the conduct of Alvin Bragg and his henchman Mark Pomeranz, who specifically says in his book, “We’re targeting zombies because we don’t like his beliefs,” those guys should face disbarment proceedings.

Once again the REAL crooks reveal themselves.

And Jarrett is right. If there was a real justice system in the country, they should be disbarred.

The question of an indictment will probably drag on until next week. At some point even Americans who dislike President Trump are going to realize that this is a political case–not a legal case.

The thing that worries me here is that no matter how you feel about President Trump, if he is not elected in 2024, the deep state has won and will only get worse. The defeat of President Trump would mean that even if a majority of Americans support someone, the deep state can take them down. That’s not a good thing.

There Seems To Be A Slight Discrepancy In The Rules

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On Sunday, Breitbart posted an article about the charges against President Trump that may result in his arrest. It seems as if this sort of misbehavior has come up before in other campaigns by other candidates.

The article reports:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is essentially using the same legal theory to potentially indict former President Donald Trump that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was fined for, argued former United States Attorney Brett Tolman.

Tolman asserted Saturday that Bragg’s legal theory that Trump tried to hide a campaign expenditure by using his then-lawyer to pay porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in alleged hush money before the 2016 presidential elections would have applied to Clinton when her campaign hid a payment for the phony Russian pee dossier against Trump as “legal fees.”

Former New York City police officer and conservative pundit John Cardillo tweeted, “Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000 and no one cared.” Tolman tweeted in response, “And the Hillary Campaign was actually fined for hiding the Steele Dossier payment under ‘legal fees’ — essentially the same legal theory on the Stormy Daniels payment the DA is running criminal investigation of Trump.”

The article concludes:

Although Bragg cannot bring charges against Trump for federal violations, Turley said he could bring state charges under Section 175 for falsifying business records, based on the claim that Trump concealed the hush-payments as “legal expenses” to violate federal election laws.

As Turley noted, a Section 175 charge would normally be a misdemeanor, but Bragg could try to convert it into a felony by showing that “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” The crime, Turley speculated, is that the federal election violations, which he noted the Justice Department previously declined to charge.

Epoch Times show host Hans Mahncke — who followed the Russia collusion hoax closely — also agreed with Tolman: “Probably the most important thing anyone has said since the pending arrest reports came out. Hillary claimed the Steele reports were legal fees. That’s not just essentially the same as what Trump is being charged with, it is the same.”

I wonder if the people who are planning to arrest President Trump are having second thoughts. We shall see.