America on trial
“It’s about election interference.”
In a rare moment of truth-telling, Donald Trump inadvertently summed up the bottom line of his criminal trial in New York. Did he engage in a $130,000 payoff to coverup an affair with a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election?
But it’s also about credibility. Of the courts, and of the media. How they both perform under the intense scrutiny will say much about the nation’s future as a free country watched over by a free press.
Trump allies — and some legal and media analysts — have labeled the criminal fraud trial that kicked off with jury selection yesterday as the “runt” of the four criminal trials the former president faces. That’s because it doesn’t involve classified documents or the January 6th insurrection.
It does, like the federal and Georgia election cases, involve election interference. Just a different election: 2016.
As the witness list and some of the pre-trial motions suggest, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is ready to present the receipts that the payments made by Trump’s one-time fixer — and Bragg’s star witness Michael Cohen — are but the tip of the iceberg of a scheme to “catch and kill” bad stories so that they never saw the light of day.
That involved the active participation of publications that once found at every supermarket checkout counter, ones that used to highlight space aliens, mermaid cemeteries and other oddities of dubious truth:
Until John Edwards. The tabloid that specialized in sex scandals struck gold in unearthing the infidelity (and efforts to cover it up) by the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee. Even the New York Times was obliged to acknowledge the tabloid “earns some respect.”
(Let’s pause for a moment to note the author of the Times piece has the misfortune to share what is the real name of porn star Stormy Daniels.)
But that respect proved to be short-lived as publisher David Pecker delved further into politics, endorsing Trump in 2016 and running stories accusing Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father of working with John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the months before JFK’s assassination, giving Trump ammunition against his primary rival.
Then there’s the swirl of lies surrounding Hillary Clinton, starting with the easiest one to disprove:
What was missing from the Enquirer’s 2016 “campaign” coverage? In addition to the saga of Donny and Stormy, there’s the ones about Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin and Playboy model Karen MacDougal that resided in the safe of Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard.
While legacy media rightly decries paying sources for their stories, it’s an even bigger ethical lapse to catch and kill them. And while traditionalists decry the supermarket tabloids, they have a larger circulation than many daily newspapers and far more enjoyable stories for readers not bound up in the reality-based community.
That’s just one of the barriers the media will need to overcome in the endless hours of cable TV coverage of jury selection and a trial without live audio or video feeds — leaving hours upon hours of airtime for pundit bloviation right and left.
The task may be even weightier for the legal system that Trump has pummeled endlessly as biased. Even when the evidence suggests he’s received far better treatment than the average American, tabloid readers included.
If this is a “runt” of a case, then the Watergate break-in really was a “third-rate burglary.”
Legal critics have blasted Bragg for escalating what would normally be misdemeanor charges for fraud into felonies for cooking the books by tying it to an unnamed additional crime.
That unnamed crime has been hiding in plain sight, spelled out by Geoffrey Berman, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a book published more than a year ago.
Berman spells out how Trump Attorney General and Protector-in-Chief Bill Barr called him off pursuing cases involving Trump, including a parallel federal investigation into campaign finance violations in which the former president was named as “Individual-1.”
The Trump-appointed Berman was eventually fired, as he tells it, after Barr failed in his efforts to buy him off.
But the failure to move forward on the federal case hamstrung Manhattan prosecutors from working on their own case and appears to have also obscured the felony that Bragg is now trying to use as a basis for the enhanced felony charges.
One more example of a two-tiered legal system that favors the well-connected over the average citizen.
Not too much on the line as the “runt” trial moves along. Just the 1st and 6th Amendments.