Alvin Bragg’s ‘Election Interference’ Narrative Is Nonsensical
A year after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced 34 felony charges against Donald Trump, the former president’s trial is about to begin. Yet people are still arguing about how to describe the case. This debate is not merely rhetorical. It reflects the disconnect between the counts that Trump faces, all of which allege falsification of business records, and the essence of his crime as Bragg sees it, which is hiding negative information from voters.
“Although it has long been referred to as the ‘hush money’ case,” says CNN legal analyst Norman Eisen, “that is wrong. We should call it an ‘election interference’ trial going forward.”
The reason people call it a “hush money case,” of course, is that it would not exist but for the $130,000 that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paid porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from talking about her alleged affair with Trump. But Eisen, who served as co-counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, joins Bragg in arguing that the significance of the case transcends those tawdry details.
“We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate,” Bragg said in a January interview with NY1. “It’s an election interference case.” That sounds important, and it calls to mind the federal charges based on Trump’s audacious attempts to remain in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election. But this characterization, which Bragg started emphasizing after Special Counsel Jack Smith unveiled the federal indictment last August, is hard to take seriously.
“As this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg said when he announced the New York indictment in April 2023. “No amount of money and no amount of power changes that enduring principle.” Underlining that point, Bragg added: “These are felony crimes in New York. No matter who you are. We cannot normalize serious criminal conduct.”
Bragg was on firm ground in arguing that felonies are felonies. But why was this “serious criminal conduct”? Bragg’s explanation was underwhelming: “True and accurate business records are important everywhere, to be sure. They are all the more important in Manhattan, the financial center of the world.”
In addition to that eye-glazing gloss, Bragg presented the seed of his “election interference” argument. “We allege Donald Trump and his associates repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters,” he said.
Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center, echoes that take in a recent New York Times discussion of the case. “The falsification of business records seems rock-solid based on the documentary evidence,” she says. “The question for the jurors will be Trump’s knowledge and intent.” McCord thinks “it’s a very winnable case for the D.A.” because prosecutors “will give the jurors plenty of evidence” that Trump’s motive in falsifying business records was “to prevent information damaging to candidate Trump from becoming public just weeks before the 2016 election.”
If you read the indictment and the accompanying statement of facts, you will notice a glaring chronological problem with that account: The criminal conduct that Bragg alleges all happened after the 2016
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