Four Reasons Why Donald Trump’s Conviction ‘Contorted the Law,’ CNN Legal Analyst Argues

Former President Donald Trump’s conviction on Thursday “contorted the law,” CNN Legal Analyst Elie Honig explained in four points on Friday.

Honig underscored his analysis with the following “undeniable facts” in the full article in New York Magazine:

1. Judge donated to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation
2. District Attorney Alvin Bragg campaigned on prosecuting Trump
3. Charges push the “outer boundaries of the law and due process”
4. Bragg refused to specify what the “another crime” Trump committed was — “and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments”

Honig slammed the case against Trump as an “ill-conceived, unjustified” “Frankenstein Case” with “obscure” and “unprecedented” charges that have not been brought “against anyone, for anything.”

“[T]his case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right,” he wrote:

Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.

…

The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.

…

The Manhattan DA’s employees reportedly have called this the “Zombie Case” because of various legal infirmities, including its bizarre charging mechanism. But it’s better characterized as the Frankenstein Case, cobbled together with ill-fitting parts into an ugly, awkward, but more-or-less functioning contraption that just might ultimately turn on its creator.

President Joe Biden defended the conviction of Trump on Friday and claimed it was “reckless” for his gagged political opponent to call it “rigged.” Biden pointed out that Trump’s lawyers chose the jury in Manhattan, a location from which Trump tried to move the case. The jurors more often than not leaned politically left in Manhattan, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recalled during jury selection.

Trump called the trial a “scam” on Friday and vowed to appeal the guilty verdict.

Trump’s campaign raised $34.8 million from small-dollar donors after a Manhattan jury found him guilty on Thursday, the Trump campaign announced Friday morning. Small-dollar donations are significant because donors can give again and again.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.