Bragg inside the indictment: an inside look at the investigation of Trump’s probe of the Wall street Journal and the National Enquirer

There were numerous reports that the grand jury was going to break in April, two days after Pecker testified. The grand jury was set to meet Thursday but it was not expected to hear the Trump case.

As investigators inched closer to a charging decision, Bragg was faced with more public pressure to indict Trump: Pomerantz, the prosecutor who had resigned a year prior, released a book about the investigation that argued Trump should be charged and criticized Bragg for failing to do so.

So they waited. The next day the grand jury was scheduled to meet, jurors were told not to come in. Bragg and his top prosecutors huddled the rest of the week and over the weekend to determine a strategy that would effectively counter Costello’s testimony in the grand jury.

They called two more people. The former head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer appeared on Monday. The other witness, who has still not been identified, testified on Thursday for 35 minutes in front of the grand jury – just before prosecutors asked them to vote on the indictment of more than 30 counts, the sources said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/politics/trump-bragg-inside-indictment/index.html

The indictment of Donald J. Bragg, a former U.S. District Attorney, and a final attempt to prosecute him in 2024

A source familiar with the situation said that after the indictment, Trump ate dinner with his wife and then met guests at his Mar-a-Lago club.

And yet this case is not simply one of the law in all its impartial majesty holding someone to account. Bragg ran for district attorney and bragged that he had helped lawsuit Trump more than 100 times. Even so, once elected and after looking over the evidence, he is reported to have put the case on the back burner, which triggered a storm of criticism from his Democratic base. If reports are correct, then he decided to prosecute the case on a new basis because the statute of limitations had expired for the charge of violating New York state law.

But it’s the Manhattan indictment, dating back to a payment made before the 2016 presidential election, that now sees Trump facing down criminal charges for the first time as he runs again for the White House in 2024.

Trump’s lawyers also made a last-ditch effort to fend off an indictment. At the behest of Trump’s team, Costello, who advised Cohen in 2018, provided emails and testified to the grand jury on Monday, March 20, alleging that Cohen had said in 2018 that he had decided on his own to make the payment to Daniels.

The effort by Dunne and Pomerantz to seek an indictment of Trump tied to the case had some doubt about their ability to get a conviction at trial because of the difficulty in proving criminal intent.

At that point, the investigation was focused on Trump’s financial statements and whether he knowingly misled lenders, insurers, and others by providing them false or misleading information about the value of his properties.

Weisselberg pleaded guilty to the charges last year and is currently serving a five-month sentence at Rikers Island. Weisselberg wouldn’t tie Trump to any wrongdoing, despite prosecutors’ attempts to flip him to cooperate against him.

Disagreements about the pace of the investigation had caused at least three career prosecutors to move off the investigation. CNN reported last year that they were concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly and without enough evidence to back up possible charges.

Vance authorized the attorneys on the team to present evidence to the grand jury near the end of 2021, but he did not seek an indictment. According to those who are close to him, he wants to leave the decision to Bragg.

Bragg, a Democrat, took office in January 2022. Less than two months into his tenure, two top prosecutors who had worked on the Trump case under Vance abruptly resigned amid a disagreement in the office over the strength of the case against Trump.

Bragg inside-indictment: The investigation of the case of a briber by a New York State attorney general, Donald Trump, and the case against the Trump Organization

“I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating,” Pomerantz wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by CNN.

Prosecutors were building a wide-ranging falsified business records case to include years of financial statements and the hush money payments, people with direct knowledge of the investigation told CNN. The prosecutors thought there was a good chance the charge of making a bribe would be dismissed because of a novel legal theory.

“Investigations are not linear so we are following the leads in front of us. That’s what we’re doing,” Bragg told CNN in April 2022. “The investigation is very much ongoing.”

Bragg was investigating Trump last year but another case against the Trump Organization moved forward at the same time. In December, two Trump Org. entities were convicted at trial on 17 counts and were ordered to pay $1.6 million, the maximum penalty, the following month.

Cohen was going to talk to Manhattan prosecutors. Cohen had previously met with prosecutors in the district attorney’s office 13 times over the course of the investigation. The January meeting was the first in more than a year and it showed that prosecutors were moving in a direction.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/politics/trump-bragg-inside-indictment/index.html

What Happened in Bragg’s Mind: The Case of the Daniels’ Deal and a New York City Grand Jury Indictment

When asked about what went through Bragg’s mind, Pomerantz couldn’t say. I think that he had hesitation about the strength of the case because of what happened at the time.

Necheles told CNN she met with the New York prosecutors in order to argue that Trump shouldn’t be indicted.

Trump’s call for protests after a potential indictment led to meetings between senior staff members from the district attorney’s office, the New York Police Department and the New York State Court Officers – who provide security at the criminal court building in lower Manhattan.

Trump kept calling Bragg a Degenerate Psychopath during the rest of the time. Bragg’s office said the four chairmen of the most powerful House committees interfered in a local investigation by asking him to testify. The building where the grand jury meets was to receive a suspicious white powder and death threat to Bragg but it was deemed non-hazardous.

The grand jury would not meet again until Monday, March 27, when Pecker was ushered back to the grand jury in a government vehicle with tinted windows in a failed effort to evade detection by the media camped outside of the building where the grand jury meets.

Pecker, a longtime friend of Trump’s who had a history of orchestrating so-called “catch and kill” deals while at the National Enquirer, was involved with the Daniels’ deal from the beginning.

Editor’s Note: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria reveals the truth about Trump and the prosecution of a tax-injunction indictment

Editor’s Note: Fareed Zakaria hosts “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” airing at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET Sundays on CNN. The views he has are of his own. CNN has more opinion.

On the one hand, Trump is a walking advertisement for rich privilege. He has always been in violation of rules and norms as he climbed his way to the top, but he did not believe the rules applied to him. His company was found guilty of tax fraud, he’s been taken to court countless times over unpaid bills, and he’s even stolen money from his own charities.

For those who saw Jon Stewart on “GPS” last week, that was the gist of his passionate argument. Jon was certainly right that the law should not care about the popularity of a person or the political effect of an indictment — and no one can really be sure what that effect will be in the long run anyway.

So Bragg’s office will argue that the misdemeanor is actually tied to a felony because it violates federal election laws. But that violation is one that the Justice Department under both Trump and President Joe Biden looked at and decided against prosecution. That is, as many experts have pointed out, a novel legal theory. I should note that Trump denies any wrongdoing.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/donald-trump-indictment-gps-fareed-zakaria/index.html

Do Wall Street Journal Columns Prophesy that any prosecution of a sitting President should involve a serious offense? A warning warning from a real prosecutor

Given the circumstances, this case has the feel of zealous prosecutors minutely examining all possibilities to find some violation of the law. This upends the notion in Anglo-Saxon law that you first have a crime and then search for the criminal, rather than first looking at the person and searching to see if he or she has committed a crime.

Many Republicans have darkly prophesied that this is a watershed moment in American history and will unleash a torrent of indictments by state prosecutors against national politicians whom they dislike. Maybe, but they have forgotten they helped develop the weaponization of the legal system. The Wall Street Journal huffed and puffed last week, “As these columns have made clear, we believe any prosecution of a former President should involve a serious offense.”

Really? The Wall Street Journal published editorials endorsing the investigation of a sitting president in six volumes. Whitewater was a failed land deal in which Bill and Hillary Clinton lost money, which caused a special prosecutor who could not prosecute them, to learn that Bill Clinton had had a sexual relationship with a White. A serious crime?

The truth is that Trump is going to face these charges in the near future due to the Journal’s standard. In Georgia, he quite possibly could be` prosecuted for having threatened Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,000-odd votes he needed to win that state in 2020. He could be charged by federal prosecutors with an attempt to overturn an election, if there is a January 6, 2021, uprising.

Trying a former president breaks centuries of precedent, but he should be tried if the offenses themselves are likewise precedent-shattering, and those election-related ones are. Paying hush money to cover up an affair, however, is not at that level. And I worry that the far more serious cases against Trump will get lumped together with the Stormy Daniels affair as just more efforts to find something to bring Trump down.