Former President Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on 34 charges for a crime that no one can clearly articulate, in a case experts on both sides of the aisle have dubbed “ill-conceived” and “unjustified.” But Trump’s real crime was winning the 2016 election — and the show trial in Manhattan was the culmination of the election denialism left-wing sycophants have spent the past eight years spreading.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged that Trump reimbursed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen for payments Cohen made to pornographer Stormy Daniels to suppress negative publicity about an affair Daniels claimed to have had with Trump. The alleged wrongdoing, according to Bragg, is that the payments to his lawyer should have been classified as campaign expenses rather than legal expenses. There is nothing illegal about nondisclosure agreements or purchasing negative press. But Bragg claims Trump “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects.”
In order to make the payment sound more sinister — and to twist an alleged bookkeeping offense into 34 felonies — prosecutors suggested the payment to Daniels was part of a murky plot to steal the 2016 election. Biden’s Department of Justice’s former No. 3, Matthew Colangelo, said during opening statements of the trial that “this was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had
