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Lawyer and National Review columnist Andy McCarthy eviscerated the circus criminal trial unfolding in New York City this week as President Donald Trump has been taken off the 2024 campaign trail and locked in an “ice box” courtroom.
The president drew attention to McCarthy’s legal arguments against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecutorial strategy on Truth Social, quoting, “TRUMP SHOULD BE ACQUITTED IN MANHATTAN: Wholly independent of the plethora of Constitutional infirmities in the prosecution, it should be thrown out for the most basic of reasons: Bragg can’t prove his case.”
The quote was taken from McCarthy’s latest editorial for the National Review, which aims scorching DA Bragg’s faltering case against Trump in the hush money case in New York, which revolves largely around what convicted felon Michael Cohen and porn actress Stormy Daniels have so far unreliably claimed.
To prove that Trump willfully and knowingly treated reimbursement for the Stormy Daniels “hush money” payment as a campaign finance expenditure, DA Bragg must also show the president’s criminal intent, which has thus far proven impossible to do.
McCarthy pointed out, “I am not going to belabor how outrageous it is that, to this day, Bragg has not planted his feet on what crime Trump supposedly intended to commit or conceal by fraudulently falsifying his records. Again, the point here is to assess the strength vel non of the evidence.”
He argued in his piece that Bragg had not even established the “basic misdemeanor” that forms the basis for the astronomical 34 felony charges aimed at Trump.
“Even if Cohen’s invoices are deemed false (and note that Bragg never charged Cohen for falsifying records), there is no evidence of a scheme to defraud. Without such evidence, Bragg can’t even prove misdemeanor falsification of business records,” McCarthy wrote.
In other words, “mere falsity is not enough,” as McCarthy puts it.
Is there enough evidence present in this case that smacks of deception or of a larger plot to “deprive anyone, or any government, of money or property”? The answer, according to McCarthy, is no.
He summarized:
“If there is profound legal doubt that an NDA payment is a campaign expenditure — and it is more than just doubt in this case — then Trump can’t possibly have acted willfully by not treating reimbursement for the Stormy NDA as a campaign expenditure. To sum up, Bragg’s proof of falsity is paltry. His proof of fraud is non-existent. And if he had a scintilla of proof that Trump was even thinking about federal campaign law, let alone willfully flouting it, then he would have spelled it out in an indictment rather than playing his unconstitutional game of ‘guess what the other crime is.'”