An overview of the European and American press reveals that the media were in euphoria after the conviction of Donald Trump. The proof, we have been told over and over again, that “no one is above the law”. Yet what is striking at first glance after such a spectacular trial is that no one is able to clearly explain what exactly Trump is guilty of. Our contributor takes stock.
For offenses dating back to 2016, the former president was indicted only in April 2023, after he declared himself a candidate for the 2024 presidential election. The prosecutor charged him with 34 counts of “falsification of commercial documents”, 34 in order to strike the mind because the reasons are similar, as if a French judge had indicted an individual for 34 different checks or documents instead of making a single indictment with 34 elements against him. The falsification we are talking about here is the fact of having recorded in the accounts under the heading “legal services” payments to his lawyer Michaël Cohen, which would have been used, in part, to buy the silence of the porn actress Stormy Daniels. It is important to clarify that there is nothing illegal about entering into a money-for-hush type agreement.
Faint bases for such a trial
The statute of limitations for this offense is two years. To be able to reclassify the offense (misdemeanor) in crime (felony) and thus delay the prescription, it must have been committed with the aim of committing a more serious one. By twisting the interpretation of the law as much as possible, without proof, prosecutor Bragg pulls out of his hat that this crime would be a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. However, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) thus that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) had previously declined to pursue Mr. Trump on this ground.
Before this indictment, the predecessor of prosecutor Alvin Bragg, Cyrus Vance, as well as Mr. Bragg himself, elected on the promise of having the skin of Mr. Trump, had given up on indicting him as the outcome of a trial on such tenuous grounds seemed uncertain, before relaunching the procedure in early 2023, following media pressure against Donald Trump resulting in particular from the book by a former deputy prosecutor who worked on the case.
Contrary to New York custom whereby the assignment of sensitive cases to a judge is drawn by lot, Juan Merchan was chosen because he had already rendered a series of negative decisions against Donald Trump in cases lawsuits concerning his companies. He donated to the Biden campaign and to actions for “ resisting the Republican Party and the radical right legacy of Donald Trump “. That should have been enough to disqualify him. This judge then conducted the trial in a biased manner. For the sole purpose of humiliating the former president, he allowed irrelevant testimony like that of Stormy Daniels at the origin of the case which was unrelated to the falsification of business documents. All of America learned that this actress with 200 porn films implied having been raped by Donald Trump.
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The main witness on whom the entire prosecution rests, Mr. Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, is a notorious liar. By his own admission, he lied to a court, he lied to the media, and he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. To condemn Donald Trump, in the absence of other witnesses to what they said, it was therefore necessary to believe Mr. Cohen.
Analyzing the oddities of this trial and the bias of the judge is beyond the scope of an article. We could mention the treatment of the witness Mr. Costello or the refusal to allow the testimony of the former chairman of the FEC, Brad Smith, who was ready to assert that “such payments cannot be considered violations of federal election rules and would not affect the election even if they were considered contributions, since they should not even have been declared until the end of the election » .
Is this your last word?
What will undoubtedly shock a European observer the most, but which has hardly been highlighted in the media, is that, in the New York procedure, the final arguments begin with the defense, with the prosecution having the last word. In the absence of a response from the defense, it is up to the judge to prevent the prosecutor from putting forward blatant untruths, which he will not do, leaving the prosecutor to assert that the electoral law has been violated by the Trump campaign.
The instructions given to the jury were Judge Merchan’s icing on the cake of this astonishing justice. Remember that for Trump to be convicted, he had to have falsified commercial documents in order to commit another, more serious offense. As he had never been convicted for the supposed latter, Judge Juan Merchan left the jury to choose between three options. This could include covering up a federal election offense, falsifying business records or tax violations. But the jury should not be unanimous on this point and as long as everyone agreed that one of these offenses had been committed – without saying which one and even if the jurors did not agree between them – the “Donald” count was good! We will therefore never know – and neither will the accused – what this secondary crime is for which he was never convicted but which still earned him a guilty verdict!
Besides, did Donald Trump have the slightest chance of being found not guilty with a jury drawn from an electoral district that voted 86% for Joe Biden in 2020? We will also not dwell on the fact, five months before the election, in the middle of the electoral campaign, of forcing the Republican candidate to be present in court four days a week for more than a month. Far from being proof of a completely normal functioning of justice, this trial was a gross caricature, marred by numerous irregularities like dozens of jurists and observers (Alan Dershowiz, Alex Berenson, Elie Honig, Johantan Turley..) have highlighted this. Unfortunately, in America’s climate of polarization and hatred of Donald Trump, facts don’t matter. It was therefore important to remember them.
