How Democrats tried to jail Trump before the election

OPINION:

President Trump has filed a lengthy appeal of his campaign finance conviction, which was an over-the-top case brought by Democrats after President Biden demanded that Mr. Trump be destroyed as a 2024 candidate.

“This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction,” states the Oct. 27 appeal from six lawyers at the firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

As Democrats today complain about Mr. Trump’s payback indictments, look at the cast of characters assembled in Manhattan to operate Mr. Biden’s political wrecking ball.

• District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the indictment. His election campaign was financed by Republican hater and socialist George Soros.
• Trial judge and acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan, who donated to Mr. Trump’s political opponents. (Mr. Merchan’s daughter’s digital advertising firm, Authentic Campaigns Inc., received $14.7 million in payments in 2023-2024 from Adam B. Schiff’s Senate campaign. Mr. Schiff raised millions of dollars by citing the Bragg/Merchan criminal case ongoing in those two years.)
• Mark Pomerantz, a former assistant New York district attorney who dedicated his life to indicting Mr. Trump. After the district attorney’s office sifted through and rejected various scenarios, he wrote a how-to book for partisans such as Mr. Bragg to follow.
• Finally, a jury in Democratic-infused Manhattan whose members would gladly convict Mr. Trump for chewing gum too loudly.

In Washington, there were two more players. One was Mr. Biden, then eyeing a reelection campaign. He said on Nov. 9, 2022, when asked by a reporter about Mr. Trump, “We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power if he does run. I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.”

A few weeks later, Matthew Colangelo, the No. 3 official in Mr. Biden’s Justice Department, quit and parachuted into Mr. Bragg’s office. Mission: Prosecute Donald Trump. Within four months, they figured out how to bring convoluted criminal charges that the predecessor district attorney had rejected.

Mr. Bragg announced an indictment on 34 felony counts over a purported nondisclosure agreement between Mr. Trump and adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged a 2006 sexual encounter.

Violent people can run wild in Mr. Bragg’s jurisdiction, but Mr. Biden had a higher priority: to get Mr. Trump. A jury complied in May 2024. Guilty on all counts.

Attorneys filed Mr. Trump’s appeal with the Democratic-rich New York Supreme Court Appellate Division. They took apart a rickety case brought by Mr. Bragg and nurtured by Judge Merchan.

The two took a misdemeanor — altering business records — as the weapon to nail Mr. Trump, but they had a problem. The two-year statute of limitations had expired. So they packaged 34 supposed misdemeanors and turned them into felonies by layering various offshoot crimes. One, for example, was a violation of federal campaign finance laws. However, Congress stipulated that such laws expressly prohibit states from prosecuting violations of federal election law.

Judge Merchan told jurors they didn’t even have to be unanimous in choosing which supposed crime to attach.

“Despite years of rifling through President Trump’s business, [the district attorney’s office] could not find a felony charge,” the Trump appeal reads. “So it concocted an elaborate theory that has never before been pursued in this State and is plainly preempted by federal law.”

Judge Merchan also allowed evidence of Mr. Trump’s official acts, a legal tactic the Supreme Court subsequently outlawed. The judge, tainted by conflicts of interest, also refused defense demands to step aside.

Mr. Trump has said the $130,000 he sent his attorney, Michael Cohen, as he assumed the presidency in 2017, was for legal fees, not a nondisclosure agreement. Mr. Cohen subsequently turned on Mr. Trump and became the Democrats’ favorite witness to doom the president.

“The only direct evidence that President Trump was contemporaneously aware of Cohen’s dealings with [Stormy Daniels] … is the word of one man: Michael Cohen,” the appeal states. “But Cohen is a serial perjurer and convicted fraudster who had previously told even his own attorneys that President Trump had no such contemporaneous knowledge.”

Watching the case closely in Washington was the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee. The Republican staff issued a report months after the conviction.

It chronicled Judge Merchan’s series of anti-Trump rulings, such as placing a gag order on the then-announced presidential candidate and blocking a Federal Election Commission chairman from testifying. The committee summed up the legal tragedy: “Mark Pomerantz later authored a tell-all book in which he took Bragg to task for failing to prosecute President Trump. Unsurprisingly, just months after Pomerantz’s book premiered — and after President Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — Bragg succumbed to this political pressure and filed charges relying on Pomerantz’s theory of the case.”

In the end, Mr. Trump, the most resilient of resilient men, won. He defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.

Judge Merchan convened a court session on Jan. 10 and sentenced the president-elect to “unconditional discharge.” A free man.

“President Trump never had a real shot at a fair trial in Manhattan,” the House committee said. “In a more neutral jurisdiction, where a politically ambitious prosecutor was not motivated by partisanship and a trial judge with perceived biases did not refuse to enforce a fair proceeding, President Trump would have never been found guilty.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi has set up a “weaponization working group.” On the agenda for examination: “Federal cooperation with the weaponization by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.”

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.