A jury selected from a pool of New York City voters that gave President Joe Biden nearly 90 percent of the vote in 2020 convicted Donald Trump on 34 counts of bookkeeping fraud on Thursday, following a trial that many legal experts said was improper and rigged against the former president from the beginning.
Biden donor Judge Juan Merchan will begin preparations to sentence Democrats’ top political enemy — a sentence that could include up to 136 years in prison — after the jury he coached through deliberations claimed that Trump falsified invoices, falsified ledger entries, and falsely recorded repayment checks as legal retainers.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump after claiming the former president violated the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) when his former attorney Michael Cohen paid pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair. According to Bragg, because the cash changed hands ahead of the 2016 election, it should have been publicly reported as a campaign expenditure.
Nondisclosure deals like the one that served as the basis of Trump’s payments are perfectly legal. The payment for which Bragg is prosecuting Trump doesn’t meet the threshold for misreporting business expenses, much less amount to any criminal activity above a misdemeanor, so the former president pled not guilty. Yet Bragg, who campaigned on vengeance against the Republican, ignored the FEC and Department of Justice’s deliberate decision not to charge Trump for the same payment and pursued a felony prosecution.
Several notably anti-Trump legal experts and media mouthpieces
