Donald Trump Indicted on 34 Counts of Falsifying Business Records

Donald Trump became the first former president to be charged with a crime on Tuesday. Trump was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, charges Trump slammed as “lawless” in a post-arraignment press conference.

Summary

Donald Trump became the first former president to be charged with a crime on Tuesday. Trump was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, charges Trump slammed as “lawless” in a post-arraignment press conference.

• Trump made his first court appearance as a criminal defendant at a Tuesday afternoon hearing at the Manhattan Criminal Court.
• Trump was only briefly seen in public before he surrendered to law enforcement in the courthouse and was booked and fingerprinted away from the cameras. Trump apparently did not have to have a mugshot taken.
• Bragg’s case – that Trump committed 34 felonies in an attempt to cover up “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged extramarital affair – rests on a “murky” legal theory per the AP.
• The theory “raises many thorny issues about state and federal law that could provide openings for the defense to attack the charges to try to get them tossed before the case even gets to trial,” according to the Associated Press.
• “I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” the former president said at a post-hearing press conference from his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. “The only crime that I’ve committed has been to fearlessly defend our nation against those who seek to destroy it.”

• The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus called the indictment “a dangerous leap on the highest of wires.” While Marcus is no Trump admirer, she writes “the indictment unsealed on Tuesday is disturbingly unilluminating, and the theory on which it rests is debatable at best, unnervingly flimsy at worst.”
• The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins chronicled “the humiliation of Donald Trump” after “he was forced to return to the island that rejected him – not in triumph, but in disgrace.” Trump returned to Manhattan as “[h]undreds of journalists descended on Lower Manhattan to chronicle each indignity: the courthouse door gently shutting on him because nobody bothered to hold it open, the judge sternly instructing him to rein in his social media rhetoric about the case.”
• The New York Times explained that “bookkeeping fraud is normally a misdemeanor. For it to rise to a felony, prosecutors must show that a defendant intended to commit, aid or conceal a second crime — raising the question of what other crime Mr. Bragg would contend is involved.” Bragg’s case appears to be that Trump falsified his business records in order to commit a state tax crime – a novel and largely untested legal theory.

• National Review’s Andrew McCarthy called Bragg’s indictment “a disgrace” and argued it “fails to state a crime. Not once . . . but 34 times. On that ground alone, the case should be dismissed… The 34 counts are arrived at by taking what is a single course of conduct and absurdly slicing it into parts, each one of which is charged as a separate felony carrying its own potential four-year prison term.”
• The Wall Street Journal explained Trump’s indictment is a key reason “why many Democrats want a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024.” Democrats also argue that “Mr. Biden has defeated Mr. Trump once before, and that the former president motivates Democratic voters to turn out. They also say that pairing 80-year-old Mr. Biden with 76-year-old Mr. Trump would minimize questions about Mr. Biden’s age and abilities—much more so than if he faced 44-year-old Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.”
• Fox News noted Trump’s post-arraignment speech at times veered into a preemptive defense of his conduct regarding the other investigations he is facing. Trump attacked special prosecutor Jack Smith as a “lunatic special prosecutor” and made no apologies for how he handled classified information at Mar-a-Lago.

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© Dominic Moore, 2023