A lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump previewed on Sunday what is likely to be his client’s main argument going into his criminal trial in Manhattan: That the charges against him are politically motivated, and were a direct result of his White House ambitions.
Joe Tacopina made the assertion during an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, arguing that an American without public prominence would not be facing the same criminal charges. Mr Trump is reported by multiple news outlets to be facing 34 criminal counts related to his former attorney’s hush payment to a porn star on his behalf in 2016, days before the presidential election.
“If he was not running for reelection, there’s no way this would have been brought,” said Mr Tacopina.
Mr Tacopina further went on to argue that Americans of all political stripes should be outraged by the indictment. He asserted that experienced federal prosecutors had looked at the case (despite the indictment not yet being public) and believed it to not hold water.
Many legal experts not tied to the case firmly disagree with that assertion, however.
Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute known for his previous work as co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, has called the indictment a vindication of the idea that no one is above the law. A number of centrists in both parties have also avoided the rush to judgement about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the case itself that more conservative allies of the former president have embarked upon.
Allies of the former president have resorted to attacking the Manhattan DA and his case with inaccurate descriptions of the indictment itself. Many, like Fox’s Tucker Carlson, have insinuated that the actions taken by the former president were not just legal but perfectly normal, as if paying off a porn star to stop her from spreading rumours about an extramarital affair is somehow commonplace in American society. And the indictment’s slow release has fanned those flames by allowing Republicans to obfuscate the actual charges themselves.
Meanwhile, Democrats have varied between quiet refusals to comment and outright celebration, as many have depicted the New York indictment as the first stone dropping in an avalanche of legal trouble that has slowly been picking up steam against the former president since the day he left office.
Lawyers for Mr Trump have indicated that they will seek to quash Mr Bragg’s case entirely on the grounds that Democrats in New York state are supposedly out to get the former president; this argument did not convince a judge to toss out a separate lawsuit brought by the state’s attorney general over the Trump Organization’s business practices.
