Far from a straightforward defeat, Anton Johannsen argues that Donald Trump’s indictment promises an escalation of the bourgeoisie’s political meltdown in the United States.

*Trump raises a defiant fist while leaving Trump Tower as he heads to an arraignment hearing on April 04, 2023. (source)*

Background

A grand jury in the state of New York has indicted former President Donald Trump for falsifying business records in the first degree in violation of NY Penal Law §175.10. Charged with 34 counts of falsification, Trump was arraigned on April 4, 2023, where he pleaded not guilty on all counts.¹ In New York, falsifying business records in the second degree is a misdemeanor: NY Penal Law 175.05. However, when the person falsifying the business records does so to “commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime, it becomes falsification in the first degree and is a class E felony: NY Penal Law 175.10. Finally, imprisonment for a Class E felony shall not exceed four years: NY Penal Law 70.²

Factually, Trump stands accused of having conspired with, among others, his attorney Michael Cohen, as well as executives at American Media, Inc.,³ to falsify business records in order to violate other laws. In his press briefing, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg explained that they planned to buy negative information about Trump in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election in violation of state laws against promoting a candidate by unlawful means⁴ and federal campaign finance laws.⁵ These underlying or predicate crimes are not charged, but are alleged as conduct which Trump, Cohen, and AMI sought to conceal by the specific falsifications charged in the indictment.

Many seem confused by this aspect but the concept is simple. If I break into your house, just to see if I like your interior design setup, that’s a crime. If I break into your house with the intent to steal your cat, that’s a different crime. Even if I don’t succeed in the theft, because of the feline’s finesse, I’m still guilty of the crime of breaking and entering with the intent to steal, as opposed to the crime of breaking and entering with the intent to see how your kitchen backsplash looks. A prosecutor could prove this by statements I made to friends and confidants; or by circumstantial evidence – a cat crate I brought with me; the cat treats I had in my pocket at the time of arrest; etc.

Such is the case here. Falsifying a business record is a misdemeanor. Falsifying a business record to hide illegal campaign contributions, or to promote a candidate by unlawful means, or to get around federal campaign finance contribution limits is a felony in New York.

Trump’s response has been predictable – an appeal to the realm of politics to delegitimize the prosecution. This is designed to undermine the credibility of the District Attorney prosecuting the case and the Judge hearing it. Trump posted a picture of himself loading up a ‘made in America’ baseball bat to bludgeon Bragg, referring to the black prosecutor as ‘an animal.’ Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., posted an image of the Judge’s daughter and remarked that her work on the Biden-Harris campaign revealed the Judge’s bias against Trump.

The purpose of Trump’s messaging is summed up by his profile description on Truth Social: “THEY’RE NOT COMING AFTER ME, THEY’RE COMING AFTER YOU—I’M JUST STANDING IN THEIR WAY!” In the way of what? The weaponization of the law enforcement system for political purposes.

Whose Weaponization?

In the service of securing his oppositional bona fides, it might be that Trump welcomes the prosecution. Consider a recent rally in Waco, Texas, before the revelation of the indictment:

The Biden regime’s weaponization of law enforcement against their political opponent is something straight out of the Stalinist Russia Horror Show. We go, Stalinist Russia. That’s what it was. This was where it seems to have begun from the standpoint of us watching it in semi-modern day history. You go back to communist China or look at a third world. Banana Republic, that’s what we’ve become. Between our borders, our elections, and the weaponization of law enforcement, Banana Republic. That’s what we have become.
. . .
The only way to stop these arsonists is to rebuke and reject this evil persecution by sending us straight back to the White House, to expel the communists and the Marxists and all of them in 2024. We’ll do it in short order.⁶

After the arraignment, Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago and gave a speech to his supporters. There, he opened with a slew of allegations against Democrats:

I never thought anything like this could happen in America. I never thought it could happen. The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it. From the beginning, the Democrats spied on my campaign, remember that? They attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations. Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Impeachment hoax number one. Impeachment hoax number two, the illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago right here. The lying to the FISA courts. The FBI and DOJ relentlessly pursuing Republicans. The unconstitutional changes to election laws by not getting approvals from state legislators. The millions of votes illegally stuffed into ballot boxes and all caught on government cameras.

Trump’s complaint is fundamentally a plausible accusation of hypocrisy. Biden, the Democrats, and the Marxists are charged with weaponizing the legal system, or applying it in an unfair way. According to Trump, Democrats used election fraud, spying and the rest in order to sustain the rule of a minority of elite globalists against the will of the people. Whatever falsity exists in this is irrelevant – the plausibility has purchase in the realm of politics, given the horrific illiteracy of the American public.

And hasn’t this reliance on plausible claims lobbed in the political sphere also characterized the liberal bourgeois approach to politics in recent memory? The entire Russiagate saga was deflated by the release of the Mueller report – but not before liberal news media spent months publicly ruminating, speculating and pining for its “bombshells.” The argument that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russian government to undermine the election turned out to be hollow. It didn’t matter. It served the political purpose of bolstering domestic political support for a proxy war with Russia, and casting left anti-militarists and anti-imperialist as dupes of Russia and Trump.

Meanwhile, the same report contained redactions of Mueller’s findings that Israel was clearly and provably working with the Trump campaign in ways that materially paid off. As James Bamford reports, the Trump campaign and agents of the Israeli government violated numerous federal laws:

Although the affidavit did not specify any individual defendants, the numerous potential criminal charges laid out in the FBI documents spoke to the seriousness of the Israeli plot. They included violation of the foreign contributions ban, which prohibits foreigners from contributing money or something of value to federal, state, or local elections. Other charges included aiding and abetting, conspiracy, wire fraud, and attempted conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Still another charge, ‘unauthorized access to a protected computer,’ indicates Israel may have conducted illegal hacking operations.⁷

What was Israel after? A shift in US policy on an Israeli Jerusalem and the shredding of the Iran Nuclear deal. Why didn’t Democrats seize on this? The decider here wasn’t the rule of law – but foreign policy and their relations to domestic political concerns and ambitions. This last fact – that foreign and domestic political concerns drive Democratic political decisions to apply the law – belies the liberals claim that these prosecutions represent the rule of law. And this lends plausibility to Trump and Republicans’ position that Democrats are engaged in a selective enforcement of the law.

But Republicans are equally guilty. To take an example – did Democrats spy on Trump’s campaign? This claim rests, at least in part, on US Attorney John Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussman, after being assigned by then-Attorney General William Barr to probe the beginnings of the Mueller investigation. Sussman was a former federal prosecutor and DNC attorney who put the DNC in contact with a cybersecurity firm after the FBI alerted the DNC to a data breach in 2015.⁸ Sussman was indicted by Durham for making a false statement to the FBI. Specifically he was accused of denying that he was providing information to the FBI on behalf of any client (i.e., the DNC). Sussman was acquitted, but the purpose of the indictment wasn’t a conviction. As Barr explained:

While he did not succeed in getting a conviction from the D.C. jury, I think he accomplished something far more important, which is he uh – brought out the truth in two important areas. First, I think he [Durham] crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it. And second, I think he exposed really dreadful behavior by the supervisors of the FBI, the senior ranks of the FBI, who knowingly used this information to start an investigation of Trump, and then duped their own agents by lying to them by refusing to tell them what the real source of that information was.⁹

While their may be some truth to the charge that Sussman was dishonest, Durham’s prosecution of Sussman was a straightforward case of “weaponization” of the law enforcement process – using the process of convening a grand jury to indict a party close to a political opponent for the sake of bolstering a narrative in the political arena. Barr, who appointed Durham, even remarked that he was proud of Durham for achieving something more important than proving to a jury that Sussman was guilty – in the grip of countervailing evidence, Durham bravely proceeded with a prosecution in order to “crystallize” of the “truth” in the public arena. In short, Durham served Barr’s purpose of following through on a weak indictment for the greater good of furnishing political capital to Republicans. So Barr and Republicans are at least as guilty as Democrats of “weaponization,” to whatever extent the concept has meaning.

Not surprisingly, the liberal capitalist press has been wringing every ounce of dirty dishwater out of Trump’s pending prosecutions. This will backfire. Because the legal system is weaponized against the poor daily, it will enable Trump’s claim to represent the mass of those oppressed by the world’s largest police state; and ultimately it will be cited in support of Trump and Republicans’ overarching theme of a cabal of elite Democrats bending and breaking the rule of law to oppress their political opponents. The Democrats false friendship of workers and the oppressed will be deployed against them.

In response to Trump’s indictment, some in the orbit of the liberal left have offered truly strange positions. Marxist-turned-CNN-Host Van Jones remarked that, though he dislikes the American criminal justice system, accountability might still be owed:

He looks sad. He looks like, um, ah, the weight of its hitting him. And you know, just as a human being, I don’t take joy. I don’t like the prison system. I don’t like what it does to people. I don’t like this process. I don’t take any celebration in seeing him looking that way. He looks at it now—it doesn’t mean accountability is not owed.¹⁰

Others get lost in the legal details. Yves Smith, of Naked Capitalism, declares that Bragg will not have “standing” to enforce federal criminal law and casts doubt on the provability of Trump’s federal election violations.¹¹ This is a mistake because, again, all that Bragg must prove is that Trump (1) falsified business records, (2) with the intent of violating federal or other laws. Bragg doesn’t need to prosecute or prove any predicate federal offense or state offense.¹²

But Smith offers a wise point of caution – “If you shoot at a king, you must kill him.” After over a half decade of high profile and risky attempts – a Special Counsel Investigation by the DoJ, leading to multiple failed attempts at impeachment, Democrats need something. We might characterize Bragg’s prosecution as heeding Smith’s injunction – an attempt by a good bourgeois liberal to bag Trump on what should be a straightforward case of falsification. Can’t a Manhattan DA convince a jury of New Yorkers that Donald Trump falsified business records?¹³

What’s more, the federal and state election law hooks which would serve to make this a felony would help tag the presidential candidate as a *convicted election fraudster,* notwithstanding the technical inaccuracy of this statement. Charges of election fraud have been the slogan of the right for years. Unable to admit in public that their ideas are unpopular, they resort to accusations of fraud. This case, if successful, puts the shoe on the other foot. No doubt Democrats aim to make ample use of this ammunition. Looks like weaponization isn’t going anywhere.

A Weapon Designed to Kill the Class Movement

Claims and counters of “weaponization” highlight the development of ruling class politics to a stage of managed constitutional crisis. Each election appears to be a referendum on the rule of law. In this way, the daily weaponization of the legal system against the poor and oppressed is elided in favor of a focus on constitutional brinkmanship among the elite.

The law enforcement and legal systems are weaponized daily against workers to forestall a working class revolution. Law enforcement in the United States is largely in the hands of States. They define crimes and their related punishments. States then devolve the execution of this police power upon municipalities who hire and train police forces. These municipalities, in turn, are funded out of State and federal contributions and local taxes.

Who pays the taxes? Local property holders – millage rates assessed on home and commercial real estate make up significant municipal fund contributions, as do service fees and other commercial and business taxes. Capital projects are funded by borrowing (issuing bonds), which, again, comes from wealthy individuals and institutional investors. This further subordinates the municipality to the interest of property holders. Finally, the municipal political structure is also dominated by property holders, who hold a veto power over the campaign finance of Mayors and City Councilors. In short, the city as a political form is bought and sold by the rich.

On top of this, the rest of the American political-legal systems outside of municipal control, is ruled by judges on behalf of the rich. The rebuttal to the charge that the rule of law equals rule by judges is often that judges form an independent profession, tasked with administering a set of professional skills centered on the practice of jurisprudence – or legal reasoning. Defenders of the rule of law, as a system, argue that this special skill of legal reasoning is necessary to promote the rule of law, as opposed to the rule by a particular individual – a monarch or a dictator or an aristocracy.

But it is well known that in structure and in doctrine, judges serve the wealthy. The rich fund the campaigns of the politicians who appoint the judges; they fund the campaigns where the judges run for election; they form the alumni making contributions to the major law schools. The judicial bench is in constant professional contact with the lawyer strata, and the clients on behalf of which the mass of them are employed.

The private financing of legal education which pushes students into debt as a condition for obtaining certification as an attorney, combined with the free market in legal services, results in the bidding-up of legal fees and the all-too-familiar dynamic: giant legal caseloads for public defenders and public interest lawyers pitted against teams of high-priced attorneys, burning through reams of paper to bury the “little guy.” Meanwhile, they separate their wealthy clients from as much of their money as possible in the course of their defense or malicious prosecutions. Finally, the character of the legal system serves the ruling class of property holders by providing multiple levels of judges to which the rich can appeal adverse rulings – giving them multiple ‘bites at the apple’ – in order to track down a decider who sees it their way.

This legal system of ‘independent’ judges and lawyers in tow behind their patrons, is rife with doctrinal and formal bias against the working classes and the oppressed. So much that securing the public virtue – that is, ensuring popular self-government is not undermined by private accumulations of wealth – is anathema to judicial rule.

Formally, any claims at law are shoehorned into remedies cognizable in terms of money, e.g. on the basis of the assumption of a bourgeois legal individuality. On top of the structural dynamics outlined above, this purely formal legal aspect circumscribes the scope of the law. Remedies at equity are hemmed in except when used to stop collective direct action by workers on strike. In that case, US law permits a judge’s discretion to suspend the constitutional rights of thousands to protect sacred property with the injunction. As for examples of doctrinal bias, federal law requires that the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board seek an injunction to stop an unlawful strike, but merely permits injunctions against employers. Where does this leave us with Trump and his prosecution?

Nowhere very useful. The constant state of tension, created by the right’s insurrectionary posture is designed to off-balance the left. On the one-hand, they deploy anti-imperialist and ‘populist’ posturing to demoralize and potentially peel off gullible leftists from the Democrats. Matt Gaetz, a Republican member of the House from Florida and lifelong victim of Goldeneye’s Big Head Mode, recently grilled General Langley, Commander of AFRICOM, over the US empire’s training of military cadres in Africa to otherthrow disfavored governments.¹⁴ Josh Hawley has railed against the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment and castigated Biden for focusing on Ukraine while the people of the American Midwest suffered.¹⁵ This derailment came barely more than a month after Biden and the Democrats voted to impose a collective bargaining agreement on rail workers, after a majority of them voted against it, specifically citing safety concerns flowing from a failure to include adequate sick leave.¹⁶ On the other hand, Republican attacks on sexual freedom, civil rights, and democracy drive many more on the left back into the arms of the Democrats – and allow Republicans to tag the Democrats as both Marxist and corrupt; socialist and elite corporate globalists, etc.

For their part, mainstream Democrats welcome this. Their political strategy has been to stand more and more as the party of order against a depraved and chaotic emerging authoritarianism of the right. Democrats position themselves against gun violence, against outlandish and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, against the war on sexual freedom, against the attacks on public education, and blatant voter intimidation. And yet, they continue to turn away from the re-emerging working class politics of the 21st century. A few years ago, Howard Schultz was a Democratic party presidential candidate. Now Schultz is called before a Senate hearing for his company’s multiple violations of labor law and defended by Republicans like Rand Paul and Mark Mullin. Joe Biden declared himself “the most pro-union president” and then sided with the rail monopolies against the unions.¹⁷ Clinton was the proven hawk in the 2016 presidential election, even if there was ample reason for working people to not trust Trump. His promises to end wars was plausible compared with Clinton’s stewardship of the wanton destruction of Libya, even if brief investigation would have suggested otherwise.

The result is that the only viable alternative to tailing either the corrupt Republicans or the corrupt Democrats is put off the table. An independent working class party is rendered impossible by the left’s fracture under tension from the Republicans’ insurrectionary posture and the Democrats complementary orderly posture. Any attempt by the left to take a revolutionary stand risks appearing like support for Republicans. Oppose NATO expansion? You’re a dupe for Putin and Trump! Stand for a constitutional convention? Sounds like you support ALEC and the Republicans again!¹⁸ Behind this is the day-to-day, grinding suffering which neither party aims to address, let alone correct: the routine weaponization of law against the poor and oppressed.

The Marxist Response?

How do Marxists relate to Trump’s prosecution? The key to this is to understand that fascists support the suspension of the rule of law by a charismatic bourgeois individual, as a means to preserve class society. Marxists aim at the overthrow of the rule of law as such, to be replaced with the self-government of the people. With this in hand, it may seem like Trump’s prosecution is a straightforward, tactical opportunity to finally hold presidents accountable for their crimes. As Ralph Nader recently pointed out:

It’s important to say also that all presidents violate laws. He’s just taken it to a new and diverse height. But he’s doing it so brazenly that if he gets away with it, he will continue to contribute to the institutionalization of lawlessness by presidents of the United States. Let’s face it, both Bush, Obama and Trump have violated all kinds of laws in extending the empire. Obama, for example, decreed, informally, that he could pick out anybody in the world and, as prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner, and in secret, wipe that person out. And he did it. Of course, Bush was the big war criminal, with Cheney, invading Iraq. But then Obama took out the regime in Libya without a congressional debate, without a congressional authorization, appropriation of funds or declaration of war. And that’s, to this day, producing chaos and violence, goaded by Secretary of State Clinton, who pushed Obama to do this, and he later admitted it was the biggest mistake of his administration.

. . . So I think the American people have got to see this as an opportunity, a gateway, to reverse the process where presidents are above the law. They have been above the law. People around the world have suffered and died because these presidents have been above the law.

Tactically, Nader is correct and speaks to a principle Marxists could endorse in the course of struggle: the bourgeoisie include in their bargain with the people, the principle of equal application of the law. We will not rely on their promise, but where we can hold them to it and it is advantageous to do so, we will.

It may be tactically useful to support Trump’s prosecution, but it is not a political program or a substitute for building a working class political party that fights for self-government. It is unrealistic to expect any similar prosecution of Cheney, Bush, or Obama and their ilk, even if Trump is convicted. No, Trump’s prosecution is narrowly tailored to supply political ammunition in the immediate future, no matter how truthful.

Instead, Marxists can expect Trump’s prosecutions to feed into the spiraling threat of constitutional crisis, spurred by the insurrectionary posture of Republicans, and Democrats’ embrace of the National Security apparatus and pro-empire wing of the ruling class. In turn, Democrats and Republicans both will attempt to cajole, smear, and split the rising working class movement represented by a resurgence of the DSA, the study of marxism, and crucially, the return of a more vibrant labor movement.

To ford the stormy river of bourgeois political crisis, the working class needs a party united around a program of revolution. That party must help workers and the oppressed focus on a concrete set of demands about how to put political power in their hands. In a word, the party should fight for a program that sketches a new constitutional order, not unlike John Brown’s famous constitution or the English workers’ Charter.

We can’t afford to tail the Democrats. True, Trump likely broke the law, and true, he should be easily convicted. But as Nader and others point out – why haven’t Democrats gone after him on any of his other, worse crimes? The reason is that they are not loyal to the people, but to the constitutional order which protects their patrons’ property. Examples of such cowardice abound.

Take the Texas abortion bounty law. It gives private parties a cause of action against individuals exercising their constitutional right to procure an abortion, as well as a claim against individuals rendering assistance. The law incentivizes conspiracies against the civil rights of women, trans men, and other people capable of pregnancy.

Democrats can act now. In 1870 and 1871 Congress passed the ‘Enforcement Acts’ which sought to protect the voting and civil rights of freedmen by making criminally liable “two or more persons [who] conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same[. . . .]”¹⁹ Why wasn’t the Justice Department dropping a sack of bricks on any private party attempting to sue under this law?

Or consider the much earlier Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made it a crime for any person to deprive another of “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States[,] under color of law.” Such deprivation is defined as a misdemeanor to be punished with a fine of no less than $1,000 or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both.²⁰ The Act’s enforcement was placed in the jurisdiction of federal courts and the President empowered to mobilize the military in support. Why didn’t Biden deploy this law against state judges intending to or enforcing the application of the bounty law? Or as against the police officers carrying out Ron Desantis’ orders to intimidate voters in Florida by targeting felons misled by the state into believing they could vote? Republicans’ attacks on democracy and minorities – gerrymandering Black and Latino voting districts, targeting felons for voter intimidation, and denying trans people healthcare – these are ripe for political escalation in the name of expanding civil rights. Democrats just refuse to do it.

This refusal to prosecute these crimes exposes the cowardice of the Democrats and their willingness to sell-out the working class and oppressed. Rather than equally apply the law, they strategically employ its application for political gain. When the rubber meets the road, they side with railroad monopolies over the unions, they refuse to challenge Republican States’ attacks on working peoples’ civil rights notwithstanding applicable civil rights laws that working people died to win, and they dutifully execute the foreign policy of the rich abroad. It must be stressed that workers in the United States owe a key obligation of resistance to the world working class which suffers under the US empire.

Marxists can applaud the prosecution of Trump, but should not miss a beat in holding the bourgeois liberals to the same standard: equality before the law. To hold them to this standard, the working class and oppressed need their own party. They need to develop their own project for a constitutional order that secures their liberty, rather than the liberty of the rich. The liberal bourgeoisie’s own corruption and selective law enforcement – in short, its own cowardice and self-interest – undermines its political prospects, and continually hands Trump defeats that morph into victories. But this doesn’t mean that it offers Marxists any straightforward uses. Instead, Marxists must keep their eyes on the prize of a working class party, and not be swayed by Republicans’ populist posturing or Democrats’ cry to vindicate the ‘rule of law.’

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Amna Nawaz, “Trump pleads not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsification of business records” PBS News (April 4, 2023) (link).
By definition, a felony is “an offense for which a sentence to a term of imprisonment in excess of one year may be imposed.” NY Penal Law 10.
AMI publishes the National Enquirer.
NY Penal Law § 17-152 – “Conspiracy to promote or prevent election. Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
Kenichi Serino, “WATCH: Manhattan DA Bragg says Trump’s actions are felony crimes ‘no matter who you are’” PBS News (April 4, 2023) (link)
“Donald Trump Hosts First 2024 Presidential Campaign Rally in Waco, Texas Transcript” Rev.com (March 27, 2023) (link)
“The Candidate and the Spy: James Bamford on Israel’s Secret Collusion with Trump to Win 2016 Race” Democracy Now! (March 24, 2023) (link)
“CrowdStrike’s work with the Democratic National Committee: Setting the record straight” (June 5, 2020). (link)
Mark Moore, “John Durham’s Michael Sussmann probe exposed Clinton campaign: Bill Barr,” New York Post, (June 2, 2022) (link)
Van Jones on Trump Arraignment (link)
Yves Smith, “The Shambolic Criminal Case Against Donald Trump,”naked capitalism (April 5, 2023) (link)
See, e.g. People v. McCumiskey, 12 A.D.3d 1145, 1145, 784 N.Y.S.2d 816, 817 (2004), where a NY appellate division court explained: “We reject defendant’s contention that the verdict must be set aside because the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the count charging defendant with grand larceny. “A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof” (id.). The jury could therefore convict defendant of falsifying business records if the jury concluded that defendant had the intent to commit or conceal another crime, even if he was not convicted of the other crime.” And historically: “It is true there is no evidence to show that this particular omission was to conceal a particular larceny, nor any direct evidence that the defendant had taken the money; but this was unnecessary, for the section of the Penal Code refers only to any larceny or misappropriation by any person, and, while the undisputed facts must irresistibly lead to the conclusion that the defendant himself was guilty of the larceny, it was incumbent *262 upon the prosecution to prove simply that there had been a misappropriation, and that the defendant’s failure to enter the check was with the intention of concealing the same. The evidence, as it seems to me, not only justified, but required, the jury to reach the conclusion which it did.” People v. Curtiss, 118 A.D. 259, 261–62, 103 N.Y.S. 395, 397 (App. Div. 1907). For more useful legal background, see Joshua Stanton, Norman L. Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer, “The Manhattan DA’s Charges and Trump’s Defenses: A Detailed Preview” Just Security (March 20, 2023) (link).
Nothing is certain but as Bragg himself attested, this is the kind of case the Manhattan DA’s office tries regularly. Recent research into federal prosecutions shows a trend of fewer trials, but an increase in convictions. Of note is that jurors were less likely to acquit a defendant than judges. (14% vs 38%). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xngz90tHZWY
https://youtu.be/aI9B-oMnrjg
David Shepardson, “U.S. lawmakers urge Biden to guarantee rail workers’ sick leave” Reuters (December 9, 2022) (link) For further reading, see: Chris Townsend, “RAILROADED, BIDEN-STYLE” Marxism-Leninism Today (March 13, 2023) (link) and “LEARNING FROM THE BIDEN STRIKEBREAKING” Marxism-Leninism Today (December 19, 2022) (link)
Joe Biden “Remarks by President Biden in Honor of Labor Unions” Office of the President of the United States, (September 8, 2021) (link)
Grace Panetta and Brent D. Griffiths “Republicans’ next big play is to ‘scare the hell out of Washington’ by rewriting the Constitution. And they’re willing to play the long game to win.” Business Insider (Jul 31, 2022) (link)
18 USC §241.
18 USC §242.