On Tuesday, immediately after former president Donald Trump left a Manhattan courtroom, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made public the 34-count indictment against him.
Prior to the release of the indictment, constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley said that the historic indictment would be an example of good history or bad history. “We’ve all known the most obvious fact that history is being made,” he said on Fox News. “The question we’re going to learn in the next few minutes is what type of history—is it good or bad history? Many of us have no objection to a former president being indicted. That can be a vindication of the rule of law. It can also be the degradation of the rule of law. If you proceed against a former president for political reasons, it is the very antithesis of our legal system.”
Related: The Trump Indictment Is Backfiring Spectacularly
What would make it a degradation of the law? Last week it was reported that Bragg had expanded his investigation to include other possible crimes, which may have explained the large number of counts in the indictment. Turley expressed hope that the indictment would reveal new information and crimes rather than just repeating previous allegations, which he had previously argued were “legally pathetic,” and other experts agreed.
“Hopefully, it will be more than just 34 versions of this rather dubious legal theory that’s been bantered about for weeks now. The suggestion is that there might be something new in the indictment. What we’re looking for is, are there new crimes? Are all of these related to payments around 2016? Are they all based on different variations of this bootstrap argument? Alternatively, do they have some new crimes and my deal with business or tax fraud allegations?”
Turley is pointing to the tactic known as “count stacking,” which involves a prosecutor adding numerous charges or counts against a defendant in an indictment, frequently for the same underlying crime. This strategy is frequently used to create the impression that the defendant is a habitual offender in order to sway a jury. It is also an indication that the prosecutor knows they have a weak case, and is relying on the quantity of charges rather than the quality of evidence.
As it turns out, that is precisely what has happened. Upon examining the Trump indictment, it becomes clear that it is merely a reiteration of the same accusation verbatim, with little more than date changes for each count. This is an entirely evident and absurd instance of “count stacking.” There are no fresh allegations here, just 34 charges relating to the same underlying crime. On top of that, the indictment makes no mention of the federal law Trump is alleged to have violated. Even Trump-hating John Bolton said the indictment was “even weaker than I feared it would be and I think it’s easily subject to being dismissed or a quick acquittal for Trump.”
Even John Bolton recognizes that this is a bogus case. Bolton just said he is “extraordinarily distressed” by the indictment and it is “even weaker than I feared it would be and I think it’s easily subject to being dismissed or a quick acquittal for Trump.” pic.twitter.com/zPEAaCjAhR
— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) April 4, 2023
Of course, the important thing is that the radical left got what they wanted. That the case against Trump is so weak that people on both sides of the aisle, including non-allies of Trump, are agreeing that the indictment is flimsy doesn’t matter. But in the end a terrible precedent has been set, and one day Democrats will live to regret it.