Law Professor Slams Trump Prosecution as ‘Embarrassment’ in Scathing NY Times Op-Ed

Brendan McDermid/Pool Photo via AP

Former President Donald Trump has regularly argued that “every legal scholar” disagrees with his prosecution for allegedly falsifying business records in his hush money trial — and one of them may have finally revealed himself!

Jed Handelsman Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, wrote a blistering op-ed in The New York Times Tuesday stating that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump in his hush money trial was not just a “legal embarrassment,” but a “historic mistake.” He had been critical of the indictment when it was announced a year ago, but now that prosecutors laid out their case in opening statements, Shugerman is even more skeptical about their framing of the hush money cover-up as “election interference”:

In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed, “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.

The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.

In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan D.A. is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications.

He later wrote:

Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.

Shugerman gives the prosecution some benefit of the doubt, writing that they could still “have some latitude to develop their case during trial.”