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Tuesday, April 4, 2023

How Alvin Bragg Resurrected the Case Against Donald Trump

A year ago, the investigation into the former president appeared from the outside to be over. But a series of crucial turning points led to this week's indictment.

One year ago this week, the Manhattan district attorney's investigation into Donald J. Trump appeared to be dead in the water.

The two leaders of the investigation had recently resigned after the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to charge Mr. Trump at that point. Amid a fierce backlash to his decision — and a brutal start to his tenure — Mr. Bragg insisted that the investigation was not over. But a disbelieving media questioned why, if the effort was still moving forward, there were so few signs of it.

"Unless y'all are great poker players," Mr. Bragg told The New York Times in an early April 2022 interview, "you don't know what we're doing."

What they were doing, new interviews show, was going back to square one, poring over the reams of evidence that had already been collected by his predecessor.

For a time, their efforts were haphazard as they examined a wide range of Mr. Trump's business practices, including whether he had lied about his net worth, which was the focus of the investigation when Mr. Bragg had declined to seek an indictment. But by July, Mr. Bragg had decided to assign several additional prosecutors to pursue one particular strand that struck him as promising: a hush-money payment made on Mr. Trump's behalf to a porn star during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump was indicted on that strand. He is expected to surrender to the authorities in Manhattan on Tuesday and face arraignment on more than two dozen charges, which will be unveiled at that time.

This account of Mr. Bragg's decision to revive the investigation and point it toward the hush-money arrangement, based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with the matter, reveals the circuitous and sometimes uncertain road that led to the first criminal charges against a former American president.

Along the way, a key internal skeptic of the investigation became one of its champions; Mr. Bragg shook up the Trump team and hired an experienced lawyer away from the Justice Department to help lead it; and he ultimately found new promise in a key witness he had once disregarded as unreliable. The district attorney was also emboldened late last year when his prosecutors won a conviction of Mr. Trump's company in an unrelated tax case.

Last April, Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, had a chance to move on from the ex-president and turn his tenure toward his initial motivation in running for office: reshaping the criminal justice system in Manhattan. Now, his willingness to wager his political future on the case against Mr. Trump will be tested like never before — his success, or failure, is inextricably tied to the former president.

Winning an indictment is one thing. Winning a conviction of Mr. Trump will be far more difficult.

The decision to revisit the case despite his earlier reservations has opened Mr. Bragg to criticism from the former president's supporters that he is blindly pursuing Mr. Trump.

The case has also exposed the district attorney to a wave of hostile and racist rhetoric from the former president and his supporters. Mr. Bragg, a career prosecutor, has received vivid death threats, including one that was mailed to the office last week.

In a statement on Thursday, after the indictment was reported, Mr. Trump called the case a "political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history," adding that Mr. Bragg was "a disgrace" and calling himself "a completely innocent person."

Going Through the Binders

Shortly after Mr. Bragg took office in January 2022, he received a warning.

At the time, he was grappling with the potential case centered on Mr. Trump's net worth, which two senior prosecutors, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, were presenting to a grand jury.

The warning came in the form of memos about that investigation, one of which was delivered to Mr. Bragg's aides by a career prosecutor, Chris Conroy. The memos highlighted potential gaps in the evidence, and darkened the new district attorney's view of the case he had just inherited.

Mr. Bragg also developed concerns about relying on Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump's former fixer, questioning whether he had enough knowledge about the intricacies of Mr. Trump's financial records to be a pivotal witness.

In a series of meetings early last year, Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne tried to persuade Mr. Bragg that the case, which had been developed under Mr. Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., was solid. Mr. Bragg and his aides remained unconvinced, and soon after the district attorney decided to halt the grand jury presentation, Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne resigned.

Mr. Cohen, who had met extensively with Mr. Pomerantz, was furious, and demanded that prosecutors return documents that he had provided. (They did.)

It seemed as if Mr. Bragg's decision could carry historic consequences: a brand-new district attorney had just given up a chance to charge Mr. Trump criminally. The political backlash was heated — Mr. Trump is widely loathed in Manhattan — and it was only compounded when a copy of Mr. Pomerantz's resignation letter was published in The Times: He declared that Mr. Trump had committed multiple felonies.

Mr. Bragg said the investigation was continuing, but the team was running low on prosecutors. Shortly before he took over the office, three prosecutors who were concerned about the inquiry's pace had taken on other assignments, leaving the team threadbare. And four months into Mr. Bragg's tenure, Solomon Shinerock, who had been the lead assistant district attorney on the case for years, stepped back from the investigation into Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bragg and two of his office's leaders — the head of investigations, Susan Hoffinger, and another top aide, Peter Pope — began to steep themselves in the details of the inquiry. But the team was not yet clear on a game plan. They issued a smattering of subpoenas and questioned some witnesses but did not appear to gain much traction.

They were also digging into binders that contained the numerous files gathered over the years, files that Mr. Bragg had not yet had time to review in depth.

The research laid the groundwork for a more robust investigation. The remaining members of the team split up into small groups to focus on different topics, including the financial statements and the eye-catching payoff that was the original impetus for Mr. Vance to open an investigation into Mr. Trump in 2018: the hush-money deal.

A New Team

Building a case around the sordid episode involving the porn star, Stormy Daniels, was hardly a new idea. Mr. Vance's prosecutors had considered the hush-money payment for so long that some of them began to call it the "zombie case," because it kept coming back to life. Although Mr. Vance had pivoted to focusing on the former president's net worth, he never closed the hush-money inquiry.

There was a key difference between Mr. Bragg's briefings on the net worth case and digging into the hush-money: time. The new district attorney had only weeks to consider the net worth case before it would have been time to seek a vote from the grand jury, whose term was scheduled to expire in late April 2022.

Kim Foxx, the state's attorney in Cook County, Ill., who is friendly with Mr. Bragg, said that prosecutors running for office are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to the cases they inherit.

"You don't have the facts, you don't have the months or years worth of investigation that are there," she said.

But going through evidence, Mr. Bragg warmed to the idea of charging Mr. Trump for his role in the hush-money payment. Unlike the net worth case, Mr. Cohen was directly involved: He had made the $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels, for which Mr. Trump reimbursed him. If the sequence of events that led to the payment were to be illustrated, the former fixer would be the line connecting all the dots.

Ms. Hoffinger contacted Mr. Cohen's lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, to reassure him that the investigation into Mr. Trump was very much alive. Mr. Cohen, she suggested, might still become a valuable witness.

In July, Mr. Bragg built up the Trump team, a sign of his growing confidence. Catherine McCaw, who had garnered attention for her role in the prosecution of Anna Sorokin, the con woman better known as Anna Delvey, joined. So did Rebecca Mangold and Katherine Ellis, prosecutors in the office's Major Economic Crimes Bureau.

At the time, prosecutors in the district attorney's office were preparing for another Trump-related trial: Before Mr. Vance left office, he had charged the former president's company and a senior executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, with orchestrating a yearslong tax fraud scheme. In August 2022, Mr. Weisselberg pleaded guilty, but the Trump Organization refused a plea, setting the stage for the highest-profile trial of the district attorney's tenure.

Mr. Bragg later said he began to think of the two matters as chapters in a book: First would come the Trump Organization's trial. Then the investigation into Mr. Trump could progress.

For the trial, which began on Halloween, Ms. Hoffinger teamed up with Joshua Steinglass, an experienced trial lawyer who specializes in homicide cases. It was part of the district attorney's philosophy: pairing lawyers with different skills on a single team.

While Ms. Hoffinger and Mr. Steinglass were focused on the trial, Mr. Conroy and Mr. Pope continued to examine the legal theories underpinning the hush-money case. A chief skeptic of the previous Trump investigation, Mr. Conroy was pushing the hush-money one forward.

During that period, Mr. Bragg and his deputies indicated to associates and outside supporters that he was newly optimistic about building a case against Mr. Trump, The Times reported in November. Shortly before the jurors in the Trump Organization trial began to deliberate, the office announced that it had hired Matthew Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official who had experience building a civil case against Mr. Trump and who came to be one of the leaders of the Manhattan investigation.

The day after Mr. Colangelo's hiring was announced, the jury returned its verdict: Mr. Trump's company was guilty, and Mr. Bragg had won a significant victory.

In interviews after the win, Mr. Bragg took his "chapter" analogy public. And when asked about the case against Mr. Trump himself, he told reporters that he had "been cautioning people not to read ahead in the book."

The Grand Jury

For Mr. Bragg, the new year began by impaneling a grand jury to hear evidence in the hush-money case. For some of his prosecutors, it began with a peace summit with Mr. Cohen.

At a meeting in their office in Lower Manhattan — the same building where the new grand jury would soon start to meet — the prosecutors told him they wanted to start fresh, and Mr. Cohen was amenable.

"I went in to 80 Centre St. skeptical and guarded," Mr. Cohen said in an interview with The Times, referring to the building where the Major Economic Crimes Bureau is. "After a three-hour initial meeting, I left reassured and confident in the team. They were knowledgeable, articulate and professional in a way that made me as comfortable as I was with the previous Pomerantz and Dunne team."

It was the first of at least seven visits Mr. Cohen made to the office this year. In the ensuing meetings, prosecutors grilled him about granular aspects of the hush-money episode. He provided them with documents and his phone.

While evaluating Mr. Cohen's evidence, the prosecutors began presenting evidence to the grand jury. The first witness was David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker Mr. Cohen's payout to Ms. Daniels. Mr. Pecker was followed by Ms. Daniels's lawyer and some of Mr. Trump's employees and campaign aides, most prominently Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks. The process culminated in Mr. Cohen testifying before the panel for more than two days in March.

By then, the parade of witnesses had begun to draw a media crowd outside 80 Centre. The fervor grew when The Times reported that Mr. Bragg had signaled to Mr. Trump's legal team that he was poised to seek an indictment. And when Mr. Trump prematurely predicted his own arrest two weeks ago, the blocks near the courthouse took on a circuslike atmosphere.

At one point, as court officials were preparing to escort a witness into the grand jury, there was a traffic accident outside the courthouse involving a truck that was packing up from filming a scene of the sequel to the film "Joker" nearby.

All week, no indictment had emerged. But on Thursday afternoon, Chris Conroy, the formerly skeptical prosecutor, walked into 80 Centre Street. In his arms was a copy of the New York State penal law, marked up with sticky notes, to instruct the grand jurors on the law before they took the vote that indicted the former president.

Three hours later, Mr. Conroy, Ms. McCaw and the warden of the grand jury left 80 Centre and crossed the street to the building where indictments are filed. Reaching the clerk's office through a back entrance, they submitted the paperwork two minutes before the office closed for the day.

Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Trump Is Still a Mystery

The Manhattan DA released the indictment today after Trump's arraignment, but we still don't know enough to evaluate the prosecution

IF YOU WROTE a list of American political virtues, "patient" would not figure prominently. So when we learned last week that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had secured a grand jury indictment of former President and prominent Truth Social poster Donald Trump, nobody wanted to wait before jumping to conclusions. Speculation on the contents, strategy, and strengths of the unseen indictment was rife. Some legal commentators urged patience. Wait, we said. Wait to read the indictment. Then we'll know so much more about the District Attorney's theory and strategy.

Well. Don't we have egg on our faces. Alvin Bragg released the indictment today after Trump's terse and grumpy arraignment, supplemented it with an unusual "Statement of Facts," and topped it off with remarks at a press conference. But we still don't know everything we need to know to evaluate the prosecution. We only know the bare bones and the details the District Attorney decided to share.

We know that Trump stands charged with 34 counts of violation of New York Penal Law § 175.10, which prohibits making false entries in business records with intent to defraud. We know that the District Attorney charged these crimes as felonies, thus assuming the burden of proving that Trump made the false entries in order to commit or conceal another crime. We know where the allegedly fraudulent entries were made — in general ledgers and checkbooks of the Trump Organization and the Trump Revocable Trust — and the dates they were made. We even know (as we've known for months) the very general theory of the case: Former Trump fixer and rehabilitation-tourist Michael Cohen paid $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels so she wouldn't reveal a series of memorable-but-not-in-a-good-way sexual encounters with Trump, and when Trump reimbursed Cohen (surprisingly) he falsely classified the reimbursement as payment of legal fees. The Statement of Facts even has allegations about which transactions happened when, and what the participants discussed.

What we don't know — at least with the precision necessary to evaluate the case's strengths and weaknesses — is the District Attorney's specific legal theory of how Trump was defrauding anyone and how he was promoting or concealing a crime by doing so. That may sound like law pedantry, but it's crucial to understanding the case.

Commentators disagree, but some argue that Bragg will have to prove that Trump conned someone out of money or property, or at least impeded the government's functions, to prove he falsified his books with intent to defraud under the statute. We don't know Bragg's theory of how he'd meet that burden, because neither the indictment nor the Statement of Facts spells it out.

Moreover, different crimes have different intent and knowledge requirements. Is the District Attorney arguing — as Bragg and his Statement of Facts imply — that Trump cooked the books to hide that he was committing federal campaign finance violations, because the payoff to Stormy Daniels was a prohibited contribution to his own campaign? That's a heavy lift: Campaign finance violations generally require the government to prove that the defendant acted "knowingly and willfully," meaning that the defendant knew their action was illegal. (As a rule, crimes mostly committed by rich people have daunting intent requirements, crimes mostly committed by poor people are easy to prove.) But we don't know their theory because they don't spell it out.

Is the District Attorney asserting that Trump was promoting tax fraud by making false entries in the Trump Organization's otherwise-no-doubt-irreproachable books? I don't know, and I do this for a living. The Statement of Facts says that the participants "also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments." But whose taxes were changed, and how? We don't know, so again we can't evaluate the intent requirements the DA will have to meet or how unlikely it is that Trump understood them enough to be criminally liable.

Bragg also said that Trump promoted a candidate (himself) by unlawful means through these false entries. That's probably a reference to New York Election Law § 17-152, a misdemeanor that prohibits conspiring to promote or prevent someone's election through unlawful means. But what are the unlawful means? Are we back to the campaign finance violations? Is this merely circular? The indictment doesn't say.

To understand Bragg's burden of proof, the challenges his office will face, and Trump's likely defenses, we need to know more about his legal theory of the case. This is a common problem with state prosecutions. District Attorney's generally don't offer "speaking indictments" that both narrate the government's version of the facts and apply them to the law. That's in sharp contrast to many federal indictments, and particularly Special Counsel Robert Mueller's verbose indictments of various Trump associates. Mueller would have explained how Trump intended to defraud and what specific crimes — with citations — he intended to promote or conceal.

One thing is absolutely certain — we don't know anything about the strength or provenance of the case because the District Attorney brought 34 counts. That's puffery — the number of counts doesn't have a material impact on the sentence and won't significantly alter what evidence is admissible. The DA could have brought a half-dozen counts and covered his bases and lost nothing. Nearly 30 years ago, federal judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. — who famously presided over the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers trial — hollered at me for about 10 minutes for bringing a 21-count grand jury indictment for fraud. He accused me of piling on counts so I could impress women in bars. At the time, I thought the criticism was unfair (and that Judge Byrne's grasp of what women want was somehow worse than mine). Now I realize that gratuitous count-padding is performative and time-wasting. Prosecutors do it because it works — how many breathless references to 34 counts did you read this week?

As the cases progresses, Bragg will be forced to show his hand (likely in response to motions by Trump) and we'll learn more about his specific theories and their chance of success. For now, be skeptical of certain predictions.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says "thorough investigation" led to Trump indictment

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told reporters Tuesday after the arraignment of former President Donald Trump that a "thorough investigation" led to his office's decision to charge Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

"This is the business capital of the world," Bragg said about New York City. "We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock of the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace is accurate record-keeping."

Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The charges were announced after Bragg conducted a grand jury investigation related to a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels made by Trump's former attorney and "fixer" Michael Cohen in the days before the 2016 presidential election. Trump has denied a sexual encounter with Daniels. Bragg's office announced last week that a grand jury had indicted the former president.

At his news conference Tuesday, Bragg alleged that Trump "repeatedly made false statements on New York business records" and "caused others to make false statements."

"Why did Donald Trump repeatedly make these false statements?" Bragg said. "The evidence will show he did so to cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election."

Bragg accused Trump of "paying Mr. Cohen for fictitious legal services in 2017 to cover up actual crime committed the prior year." To pay Cohen back, "they planned to mischaracterize the repayments to Mr. Cohen as income to the New York State tax authorities," Bragg said.

In addition to the payment made to Daniels, the indictment also details an alleged "catch and kill" scheme by Trump, Cohen and American Media, Inc. (AMI), which "agreed to identify and suppress negative stories about him."

Both Cohen and AMI have "admitted to committing illegal conduct in connection with the scheme," according to court documents. In August 2018, AMI, the owner and publisher of magazines and supermarket tabloids including the National Enquirer, "admitted in a non-prosecution agreement that it made a payment to a source of a story to ensure that the source 'did not publicize damaging allegations' about the Defendant 'before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election,'" according to a statement of facts filed by prosecutors along with the indictment.

DeSantis’ signature tips US into majority 'constitutional carry' nation with new Florida gun rights law

FIRST ON FOX: The U.S. now has a majority of states with constitutional carry laws on the books after Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law Monday that eliminates the requirement for an individual to obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm.

"The NRA applauds Florida for becoming the 26th state to adopt the vital Constitutional Carry legislation. This NRA-spearheaded initiative empowers Floridians to exercise their Second Amendment rights without undue bureaucratic barriers, affirming the fundamental right to self-defense," NRA-ILA Interim Executive Director Randy Kozuch exclusively told www.tranganhnam.xyz Digital in a statement.

The Florida Senate voted 27 to 13 last week on the constitutional carry bill, sending the legislation to DeSantis, who signed it into law on Monday morning. There were already 25 states that had permitless or "constitutional carry" laws on the books, meaning Florida tipped the U.S. into becoming a constitutional carry-majority nation.

The law allows eligible citizens 21 years of age and up to carry without asking the government for a permit and without paying a fee. The legislation does not change who is eligible to obtain a carry permit, and those who still wish to get a permit may do so under the law.

"We thank Gov. DeSantis for his support of self-defense and Second Amendment laws and for prioritizing the safety and security of Florida residents. This historic moment is a testament to the dedication of the NRA, our members, gun owners, and Second Amendment supporters working together in the state. Today's NRA victory inspires us to continue advocating for Constitutional Carry laws across the nation, ensuring the protection of Second Amendment rights for all Americans," Kozuch added in his comment to www.tranganhnam.xyz .

"We extend our gratitude to the Florida legislature and all those who have worked tirelessly to make this a reality in the Sunshine State."

The law will officially go into effect on July 1, 2023.

"Constitutional Carry is in the books," DeSantis said in a press release Monday.

Republicans in the state argued over the last few months that the bill would further protect residents and their families from potential crimes, while also continuing to advance Second Amendment freedoms.

"This bill is a big step, a big step to help the average law-abiding citizen, to keep them from having to go through the hoops of getting a permit from the government to carry their weapon," Republican state Rep. Chuck Brannan said last month.

Florida state Democrats and activists argued that easier access to conceal carry would lead to more violence.

Neighboring Georgia became the 25th state with a constitutional carry law on the books when Gov. Brian Kemp signed a similar bill nearly one year ago.

Friday, February 3, 2023

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