The Daily Beast presents a headline expressing a painful sentiment that appears to be spreading: "Manhattan DA Insiders Worry the Trump Hush Money Case Is Weak Sauce."
"The indictment that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is currently seeking against former President Donald Trump ... is based on a crime that was so flimsy it was never viewed as a standalone criminal case, according to three attorneys who have worked on that investigation," reports the Beast.
"New York County prosecutors," continues the publication, "never considered pursuing the hush money case by itself, because, for one thing, investigators on the DA’s Trump team couldn’t even agree whether Trump committed a serious crime."
The investigation that Bragg had earlier shut down was "much more expansive," one filtering "into Trump’s lies to banks, insurance companies, and government agencies." But along with its expansiveness was a vast complexity. It was "sprawling" and also "much more difficult" to prosecute. Bragg's predecessor, Cy Vance, decided against pursuing it.
The penetrating difficulty of what is called Bragg's "zombie" case — the hush money charge — is that, to have any heft, prosecutors must tie the state crime to a federal, campaign finance felony. This, as the Beast notes, "would open Pandora’s Box, according to one source, because doing so would conspicuously highlight how this should have been a federal case instead."
A federal case was a dead end, though. The feds went after Michael Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels, all right, and even labeled Trump as "Individual-1." But there it stopped.
Perhaps Bragg's greatest challenge is a court that may throw out the zombie-Daniels case altogether, a D.O.A. indictment. Wrote ex-Manhattan district prosecutor Mark Pomerantz in his book, People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account: “DANY would have to argue that the intent to commit or conceal a federal crime had converted the falsification of the records into a felony. No appellate court in New York had ever upheld (or rejected) this interpretation of the law. There was a big risk that felony charges would be dismissed before a jury could even consider them."
Still, the three attorneys cited by the Beast are "cheering on Bragg for taking the case." Said one: "This was Donald Trump’s first attempt at interfering in an election.... In terms of what it represents, I think it’s significant. The 11 payments to Michael Cohen—then recording false information in the business records—were done by a sitting president who was in the Oval Office at the time. I don’t know how anyone could view this as not serious."
It is serious. And justifiable as an indictable act. The really "big" problem, or "big risk," however, is the byzantine American legal system and its seemingly innumerable ways in which serial scofflaws like Trump can evade justice.