This is a very smartly written article by Elie Mystal for The Nation.
The indictment represents the first real attempt to hold Trump legally accountable for any of his many alleged crimes. But the odds that the path to real justice, let alone prison time, runs through the Manhattan DA’s office still seem very, very long.
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This is the lowest-hanging fruit (or, mushroom, to hear some tell it) in the Trump criminal matrix. This isn’t getting Al Capone for tax evasion; this is getting Al Capone for illegally serving alcohol at his underground poker game. It’s minor, but it’s also obvious. Criminal bookkeeping is just as ticky-tack as it sounds, but all the available evidence shows that Trump did it. If law enforcement has enough time and energy to beat the snot out of a person who jumps a turnstile to get onto the subway (and they do), then they have enough resources to indict Trump for this tawdry crap.
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It’s not a clean shot: Bragg is trying to bank in a half-court heave off the backboard after the shot clock buzzer has already sounded.
The first issue that Bragg has is time. Trump committed the underlying campaign finance offense in 2016, and the statute of limitations on bookkeeping fraud and campaign finance violations is five years. That brings you to 2021. The statute of limitations for tax evasion is three years. Even if you don’t start the clock on that until the story breaks in the news in 2018, that brings you, once again, to 2021. To get to 2023, Bragg appears to be arguing that the statute of limitations paused while Trump was president and living out of state. That’s… a theory, but not necessarily a good one, and certainly not one that has been tested enough to know how it’s going to hold up in the courts. Remember, the alleged immunity Trump had from prosecutions applied only at the federal level. Local prosecutors, like Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance, who was the Manhattan DA during Trump’s presidency, could have charged him with this crime at any time.
Bragg has left Trump with entirely plausible legal defenses, even though, again, it’s pretty obvious that he committed the underlying crimes.
…I think prosecutors should use every means necessary, fair or unfair, to trip Trump up. If you could get this guy for taking a penny without ever leaving one (which I’m sure he does), I’d want to get him for that.
But I want to GET him, and these charges don’t feel likely to accomplish that. A federal case against Trump for tax and campaign finance fraud two years ago would have been welcome. But going at Trump with shaky jurisdictional authority, two years too late, feels doomed.
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…Even if everything goes well and Trump is tried and convicted, it’s simply hard to see how any judge or appellate court sentences the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination TO JAIL during the election, based on these charges.
