Biden Notes Trump’s History of ‘Sexual Assault’ but Highlights ’34 Felonies’ That Victimized No One
“In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is,” says a new Biden campaign ad. “He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.” One of these things is not like the others.
Those “34 felonies” sound like Trump’s most serious offenses, and they are the only justification for calling him “a convicted criminal,” as the ad also does. But those crimes were bookkeeping offenses that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg converted into felonies via a convoluted, legally iffy theory that combined several interacting statutes with questionable assumptions about Trump’s knowledge and intent.
The victims in that case, Bragg said, were American voters, who supposedly had a right to hear porn star Stormy Daniels’ account of sex with Trump before they cast their ballots in the 2016 presidential election. Yet hiding embarrassing information from voters is not a crime, arranging a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with Daniels was not inherently illegal, and Trump was not charged with “election fraud,” which is how the prosecution misleadingly described the essence of his crime.
Trump was instead charged with falsifying business records to cover up the NDA after the election, which allegedly was aimed at concealing “another crime”: a violation of an obscure, rarely invoked New York law that makes conspiring to promote a candidate’s election “by unlawful means” a misdemeanor. The latter misdemeanor transformed the misleading business records from misdemeanors into felonies, and the 34 counts were all based on the same underlying conduct. Bragg multiplied the felonies by treating each invoice, check, and ledger entry related to the NDA cover-up as a distinct crime.
The “financial fraud” to which the Biden ad refers likewise did not involve an identifiable victim. Although a New York judge concluded in a civil case that Trump had systematically exaggerated the value of his assets, there was no evidence that any lenders or insurers had suffered a financial loss as a result. The staggering “disgorgement” order in that case was aimed at stripping Trump of his “ill-gotten gains,” not at compensating anyone who had been injured by his misrepresentations.
In contrast, a New York jury’s 2023 civil verdict against Trump, which found him liable for sexually assaulting and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, did involve an actual victim. Carroll alleged that Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in 1996. The jury, which
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