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No matter your politics — and, more to the point, no matter your views on the lightning-rod-of-a-man who is Donald J. Trump — the decision to indict him for violating an as-yet-unknown New York state law 6.5 years ago should be keeping you awake at night. And that insomnia should be coming not from Christmas Eve–style giddiness at the prospect of seeing the Orange Man in orange but, instead, from anxiety over the terrible precedent the indictment sets.
It’s hardly surprising that the grand jury voted to indict. Our degraded grand jury system has served for decades as a rubber stamp for prosecutors. The old ham-sandwich quip comes to mind. Add to that the fact that the pool of eligible grand jurors for Trump’s case came from Manhattan, where seven out of eight voted against Trump in 2020. This was hardly the jury of his peers to which Trump was entitled. Once the case was submitted to the grand jury, the result was all but guaranteed.
So the grand jury vote itself was predictable. But Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to pursue charges in the first place was shocking. The tagline on Bragg’s office website reads, “One Standard of Justice for All.” Really? Can Bragg point to a single instance in which he has pursued an indictment under similar circumstances? The five-year statute of limitations likely applicable to Trump’s supposed “offense” — whatever it was — expired long ago, but it appears Bragg is attempting to exploit a legal loophole that allows him to ignore that five-year limit if the alleged offender “was continuously outside th[e] state or … [his] whereabouts … were … unknown” during that five-year period. Was Trump hard to find over the last 6.5 years? Was he concealing evidence out of state that only now has come to light? Of course not.
And what of the crime itself? If the allegations are true, Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels was the just object of moral condemnation. But was his alleged decision to cave to what appears to be her attorney’s demand for hush money criminal? Hardly. The only hook Bragg appears to have is Trump’s (or, more likely, his counsel’s) alleged decision to make that hush-money payment through Trump’s former attorney and subsequently reimburse those funds to the attorney as payment for legal fees.
