Today is not only Tax Day in the United States. It is also the day that this country will take another fateful step towards banana republic-like tyranny. For it is the day that New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg will begin trial against Donald Trump.
Ms. Daniels has said that in 2006 she and Mr. Trump had one, er, intimate encounter. A decade later, as the 2016 election neared, Mr. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. A nondisclosure agreement isn’t illegal. Mr. Bragg’s complaint is about the paperwork. Mr. Cohen was reimbursed through 2017 via a monthly retainer “disguised as a payment for legal services,” the DA said. He padded his indictment by separately charging each invoice, check and ledger entry to get 34 counts.
Falsifying business records in New York can be a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations on that has expired. Mr. Bragg therefore must charge felonies, which under New York law means showing that Mr. Trump cooked the books with “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
Even that requires special dispensation. The 2017 payments are outside the five-year felony window, but state judge Juan Merchan ruled that Mr. Bragg enjoys an extra year of leeway after emergency COVID-19 executive orders stopped the clock on legal cases.
Oh dear. In a non-Banana Republic, the law works by uncovering a crime and then prosecuting those guilty of the crime. In a certified Banana Republic, the regime finds someone it dislikes and then calls out the legal bloodhounds to discover or, if need be, to manufacture a crime as a pretext to take out the undesirable person. The latter is what is happening here, which is why the WSJ began its editorial by saying that “it’s a trial that shouldn’t happen in a case Mr. Bragg shouldn’t have brought.”