Shortly after the Manhattan district attorney’s office unsealed its 34-count felony indictment against former President Donald Trump, questions started pouring in.
To prove that Trump committed felony falsification of business records, as opposed to a misdemeanor, state prosecutors would need to show that he did so in order to commit or cover up a second crime.
And former prosecutors — some of them veterans of the Manhattan DA’s office — wondered: why didn’t DA Alvin Bragg include any information about a secondary crime in such a high-stakes case?
When you have an indictment, anything you put in the indictment, you must prove it,” Florence, who ran against Bragg for DA in 2021, told Insider in an interview. She added that so-called “speaking indictments” in cases like Trump’s are very rare — they’re generally more common in conspiracy and racketeering cases that require a long narrative of alleged criminal acts.
Indeed, when reporters asked Bragg about the underlying crimes at a news conference following Trump’s arraignment, the DA said his office chose not to include those details because it wasn’t required by law to do so.
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Article URL : https://www.businessinsider.com/why-alvin-bragg-isnt-sweating-misdemeanors-trump-indictment-2023-4?amp