In his many public harangues just outside the courtroom in Manhattan, former President Donald Trump frequently blamed President Joe Biden for his prosecution. "You have a Soros-backed DA, and the whole thing," Trump said shortly after his conviction, referring to Alvin Bragg, a Soros-funded left-winger whose calling card has been soft-on-crime policies and frequent downgrades of charges. Except, that is, in the case he brought against the presumptive presidential nominee of the opposition party, whom he'd promised to go after during his election campaign. Bragg often lessens the severity of charges he brings against hardened criminals; in this case, though, he discarded the judgments of his predecessor, the DOJ, and the FEC to resurrect expired misdemeanors via a byzantine and untested legal theory that turned the supposed victimless, years-old bookkeeping mis-categorizations into dozens of actively-prosecutable felonies. "This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt an opponent, a political opponent," Trump continued.
Biden, of course, has denied it. It's true that no evidence exists indicating that Biden personally had anything to do with the Trump indictment from Bragg, a fellow anti-Trump Democrat. Biden was also uninvolved in the selection of the judge in the case, who donated to Biden's campaign against Trump in 2020. But does Trump nevertheless have a point, in a broader sense? Team Biden is now running campaign ads against Trump, to the tune of $50 million, slamming his opponent as a "convicted criminal," a label that critics see as the entire purpose of the recently-concluded election year trial:
New: Biden campaign w/ a new ad:
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 17, 2024
“This election is between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who’s fighting for your family.”
will run on general market television and Connected TV in all battleground states and on national cable, per campaign pic.twitter.com/sl8yZqRdSz
Biden may not have brought the charges against Trump, or directly influenced that partisan decision, but he's certainly hoping to benefit from its outcome. Beyond that, his re-election effort held a campaign event outside the courthouse toward the end of the trial, publicly taunting the defendant, who'd been indicted and prosecuted by members of Biden's political party. One of the prosecutors running the case against the Republican standard-bearer had been a very high-ranking official in Biden's Justice Department, making the unheard-of move of leaving his slot as the DOJ's third in command to join a local DA's office as an assistant. He almost certainly did this of his own volition, but he did so for the obvious purpose of 'getting' his former boss's opponent. He himself had been paid thousands of dollars by the Democratic National Committee for political consulting during Trump's presidency. More important and relevant than any of that, however, is this:
Important response by an FEC commissioner to AG Merrick Garland's scoffing denial of involvement in New York's Trump's prosecution. DOJ did not lift a finger as state officials usurped federal authority to enforce campaign finance law.https://t.co/KLqe9wM3ny pic.twitter.com/lbtvafARu3
— Jason Willick (@jawillick) June 14, 2024
WATCH: FEC Commissioner Trey Trainor testifies about the absurd legal theory Alvin Bragg used to prosecute President Trump pic.twitter.com/jya5rdlJ1B
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) June 13, 2024
Trainor, a Commissioner at the Federal Elections Commission, sharply criticizes Bragg's abuses at the beginning of this clip, but the key part starts around the (1:57) mark. Bragg's insane overreach is one thing; the Biden DOJ doing absolutely nothing to defend their own jurisdiction is quite another. This is the closest thing we have to evidence of the Biden administration's fingerprints on the New York case. The Biden DOJ did not intervene to force Bragg to back off his illegitimate usurpation of federal election law enforcement (this goes to the infamous 'second crime' that was neither adjudicated nor proven in court, yet was necessary to turn lapsed alleged misdemeanors into 'felonies'). Their silence aided Bragg's scheme in a major way. Trainor reminds the committee that the DOJ and FEC had each investigated these exact same facts and determined no crimes or violations were committed. Bragg "knew better."
It's also worth remembering that the Biden donor judge in the case would not permit Trump's defense team to call a former FEC Chairman as an expert witness to blow up the federally-linked basis of the ostensible 'second crime.' Because the judge preemptively shot down any useful line of questioning on this front, Trump's attorneys ended up choosing not to call their muzzled witness. Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy has more on this:
"The dog that didn’t bark.” That’s the way I described the collusion of President Biden in the farcical prosecution of his 2024 election opponent, former president Donald Trump, by Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s elected progressive-Democratic district attorney. That’s because the dog in question, the Biden Justice Department, did not do what it would have done in any other scenario in which a local prosecutor usurped DOJ’s exclusive authority to prosecute federal crimes: bark about it long and loud until the courts compelled the DA to stand down...Trainor finds it astonishing that “Merrick Garland and the DOJ did not intervene in the prosecution of Donald Trump.” The Justice Department is famously zealous in guarding its prosecutorial turf. The notion that the Justice Department would sit idly by and let a partisan local prosecutor and a deeply conflicted judge do this to anyone else in the country — knowing that such a scandal might cause Congress to gut the DOJ’s enforcement of these laws — is inconceivable. To the contrary, the happenstance that the Biden Justice Department let it happen to Biden’s campaign opponent is par for this sordid course.
A very senior Biden official left the administration to prosecute Trump. The president's team held a campaign event at the courthouse. And the Biden DOJ conspicuously declined to do anything to enforce its own jurisdiction against Bragg's flagrant and consequential infringement. This can, and perhaps should, be interpreted as tacit approval of the partisan prosecution. Aid and comfort to that effort was not furnished through action, but through precedent-breaking inaction. Whether the 'justice has been served and no one is above the law' crowd wants to admit it or not, these confluence of factors will cause many reasonable observers to conclude that on the whole, Trump has a point.
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