Daniels payoff could get Trump indicted, but should it?
“There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote.
I’m pretty sure he didn’t have in mind scenarios like Donald Trump using a now disgraced and disbarred bagman-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to front hush money to a porn star and then recording the $130,000 reimbursement as “legal fees.”
But here we are. According to various reports... Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is preparing to indict Trump for exactly that . ...
Trump ... famously cheated on his first wife, Ivana Trump, with the woman who would become his second, Marla Maples .... In 1998, a year before his divorce from Maples was finalized, he met Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model. ... They were engaged in 2004, married in 2005, and in 2006 she gave birth to their son, Barron.
With his months-old baby at home, Trump, then 60, allegedly had sexual liaisons with 27-year-old Stormy Daniels, star of “The Witches of Breastwick” and “Porking with Pride 2” (and with) Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate.
Testifying under oath, then-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker admitted that “in concert” with the Trump campaign the tabloid purchased the rights to McDougal’s story for $150,000 without any intention of publishing it “to prevent it from influencing the election.”
Trump opted to ... pay for Daniels’ silence directly, through Cohen. Unlike the Enquirer’s “catch-and-kill” payment, there was nothing illegal about it.
Reports indicate to make his case, Bragg has to show by falsely recording the payment as a legal expense, typically a misdemeanor in New York, Trump committed a felony as it was in furtherance of another crime, disguising an illegal campaign donation.
... By preparing the first indictment of a former president on charges that probably would not have been used against anyone else, Bragg is helping Trump cast himself as a victim . ... This will make weightier and worthier potential prosecutions such as pressuring Georgia officials to “find” votes and fomenting the Jan. 6 riot seem equally politically motivated.
... In each of the modern impeachments — Bill Clinton’s in 1998 and Trump’s in 2019 and 2021 — the political debate ended up being monopolized by lawyers and technical questions of criminal guilt, even though impeachment trials are explicitly not criminal trials. For instance, on Jan. 6, Trump may not have violated the legal standard for criminal incitement of violence. But is the president coming within millimeters of violating that standard therefore fine?
... For many Republican politicians and voters alike, who still claim to care about “traditional values” in the abstract, the legal argle-bargle serves as squid-ink to hide in. All that matters is Trump is a victim, not of his tawdry excesses, but excesses that behavior invites in enemies.