Trump was arraigned on 34 counts. For those interested, the full text of the indictment is right here.
Essentially, what makes it 34 counts is that it’s a separate count for every different scrap of paper and ledger entry that had the fiction of the payment to Michael Cohen being a legal retainer rather than hush money to Stormy Daniels. I’ll post some more thoughts and links in the coming days.
The first thing that needs to be remembered is that Trump is under investigation in at least two other places besides New York, with possible indictments coming. There’s a grand jury investigation in progress down in Georgia over that infamous phone call in which Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him some votes to make him the winner there, and the Justice Department has grand jury investigations in Washington over both his possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his actions in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The indictment in New York is simply the first.
It’s also, in my opinion, the weakest of all the possible cases against our former president.
To be fair, all that we know is what’s been leaked. We haven’t seen the actual indictment. We don’t know how many counts it has. But if the case really is what we’re hearing in the news that it appears to be, then it’s a weak one, and we should not be at all surprised if Trump’s lawyers are successful in getting the judge to dismiss it before it even gets to trial.
Trump apparently falsified business records in the Trump Organization. So far, all that is is a misdemeanor, not a felony. It’s only a felony if the purpose of the falsification is to cover up a crime. The crime, so the story goes, is that a payment to lawyer Michael Cohen was a retainer fee when in reality it was a hush-money payment to be conveyed to porn star Stormy Daniels to get her to shut up about an affair (and the fact that we’re hearing about it would tend to suggest that it didn’t work). Apparently–and listen, I have never been able to make sense out of this next point–apparently, because it happened while he was running for president and because he presumably didn’t want the affair to come out during the campaigns, that hush-money payment was a campaign expenditure that needed to be reported as such.
Now, here’s an important point: If there was an election law crime, it’s a federal crime. But if it’s a federal crime, it’s a crime that the federal authorities have declined to prosecute Trump for. What that means is that when this New York case goes to trial, a local judge and jury will have to take up the question of whether Trump committed a federal crime. But does a local court even have the jurisdiction to make such a determination? That’s quite questionable.
I want to make clear that none of this should be construed as my condoning House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s behavior in the matter. McCarthy has announced that there’s going to be a House committee investigation of DA Alvin Bragg’s motives for seeking this indictment. It’s not the job of the US Congress to be investigating a city DA’s office, no matter how prominent the public figure under indictment. Congress certainly has no business demanding access to records of an investigation.
I also want to make clear that what I’m saying does not translate into sympathy for Trump. My level of sympathy for Trump is less than zero. The fact that my country ever allowed that man to be its president is a source of great personal shame for me. I also think there’s a strong case against him in Georgia and a strong case against him in Washington, especially where the papers at Mar-a-Lago are concerned. (As for January 6, while it’s clear to me that he behaved in a manner that nobody who has any business being trusted with serious responsibilities would ever behave in, I have to defer to others on the question of whether he committed an indictable crime there, because the whole matter of incitement to riot is complicated, not simple.) I definitely think he deserves to face charges, and it frightens me out of my wits that I’m still living in a country in which millions want the likes of him to be their president again. I just think the substance of the New York indictment, based on the limited information that’s available about it, seems weak. And if the case does get dismissed, then the only thing the Manhattan DA will have accomplished is to help Trump raise more funds to try to be our president again.
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