Bragg abuses law in prosecution of Trump

By John Faso
Newsday

Josef Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria was notorious for hunting down real and imagined enemies of his patron. Beria once said, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

While Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a far cry from Beria, his prosecution of Donald Trump has all the makings of a political rather than legal initiative.

Bragg accuses Trump of multiple felonies by joining a state misdemeanor business records charge with a potential other crime dealing with both federal and state election laws. Our country has two parallel systems of governance — state and federal — and therefore two parallel justice systems run by separate sovereigns, each with their own laws and prosecutors.

The New York State case of People v. Trump oversteps the boundaries of those systems by premising a state criminal prosecution on a purported federal criminal violation. Neither state nor federal law supports that concept, and if upheld it would undermine both legal systems with harsh and unpredictable consequences.

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