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April 5, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:04:36
Historic Prosecution: Trump’s Arraignment, Indictment Unsealed, with On-the-Ground Reporting from Michael Tracey

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Good evening, it's Tuesday, April 4th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, former President Donald Trump appeared this afternoon in a Manhattan courtroom where he pled not guilty to an indictment containing 34 felony charges.
We analyzed this case extensively on last Wednesday's show, examining why it is a genuinely trivial and blatantly politicized attempt To transform what is, at most, a single minor misdemeanor into multiple felony charges.
But now that the charges and the prosecutor's theories are publicly disclosed and the prosecutor, District Attorney in Manhattan Alvin Bragg, was forced to explain them at a press conference, we are enabled even more now to first explain exactly what these theories are and then demonstrate why this is one of the worst cases imaginable For Democrats to have brought as the first ever indictment of a former U.S.
President, as well as the current presidential frontrunner, the first in American history.
Then, independent journalist Michael Tracy has been outside the courthouse in Lower Manhattan all day today, reporting on the boisterous events connected to this traveling circus.
We'll speak to him about what he saw.
The media is very visible excitement that they have new and fresh Trump material to talk about, which is the only way they can get people interested in what they're saying.
And we'll talk to him about the broader political implications of these criminal charges and this ongoing case.
Because this is Tuesday night, we ordinarily would have our live interactive after show on Locals, but because I'll be appearing on Tucker Carlson's FOX program shortly following our live broadcast tonight, we will have that after show instead tomorrow night on Locals.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Whatever you think of the attempt by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to prosecute Donald Trump in connection with an alleged hush payment to a former porn star, there's no doubt that the events today in lower Manhattan are historic.
It is the first time ever in American history that a former United States President has been criminally indicted.
As I said, we devoted last Wednesday's show, the full show, to examining what we knew would be the charges, namely that Trump, by paying these payments, which themselves were not illegal, in the eyes of the prosecutor, committed crimes by falsely describing what those payments were for in internal committed crimes by falsely describing what those payments were for in internal Trump organization and Trump campaign records, and then that turned it into a felony by claiming that he did that with the intent to violate campaign
And though at the time we didn't have the actual indictment or the charges or the prosecutor's theories laid out, We now do have that and we can very much more clearly explicate exactly what the prosecutor is hoping to do and what the very severe vulnerabilities are in this indictment.
So let's just begin with the basic facts, which is that Donald Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts, technically 34 felony counts.
In reality, it's really just one crime.
The crime being that he conspired with his then-attorney Michael Cohen, along with the head of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, and others, not only to pay hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the former adult porn star, but also to then cover up those payments.
Again, paying somebody Not to reveal information about you is not in and of itself criminal.
That's done all the time.
It's done in non-disclosure agreements, it's done in settlement agreements, and actually a lot of times victims of extortion or blackmail pay people not to reveal information that the people who are being paid claim to have about the person who's paying.
So there's nothing illegal about paying hush money to somebody.
Even if you're a candidate running for office.
So they need to figure out how is it that we can convert this act into not only a crime, but a felony crime.
Because obviously if it were just a misdemeanor it wouldn't even be worth attempting.
And so what Alvin Bragg did, and again, Alvin Bragg is a Democratic Party district attorney who ran on a progressive platform, explicitly progressive, which is why his campaign was supported by a PAC that six days after it announced supporting Bragg received a check for $1 million six days later from George Soros.
Which is why it's absolutely accurate to say that the Manhattan District Attorney is, in fact, a George Soros-backed prosecutor because the color of Change PAC that endorsed him and pledged to spend a million dollars to promote Alvin Bragg's campaign in 2021, six days later, received that $1 million, that exact sum, from George Soros.
And then what he is now attempting to do And I think it's worth remembering two things.
First, Alvin Bragg originally did not want to bring this case.
And the reason he didn't want to bring this case is because he knew of the very grave vulnerabilities and holes that this case presents.
Two of his prosecutors resigned in protest and went public and accused Alvin Bragg of being unwilling or lacking the courage to prosecute Donald Trump.
And only then did Bragg, who lives in Manhattan or lives in New York and is surrounded at all times by Manhattan liberals, feel the pressure, the political pressure, to bring this case.
Not only that, the transactions at the heart of the indictment Not only the payments to Stormy Daniels, but also the attempt to depict them as something other than that, were looked at both by regulators of campaign finance law inside the United States government, as well as federal prosecutors, both of whom concluded that there was no evidence sufficient to prove a crime or that it would not be wise to try and convert these events into a crime.
It took a local district attorney in ground zero of American liberalism, which is Manhattan, in order to do it.
And the way in which he has done this is to take a single act, namely that every time Michael Cohen, Trump's then lawyer, sent a bill or an invoice for this money that he had paid just Jeremy Daniels, calling it sent a bill or an invoice for this money that he had paid just Jeremy Daniels, calling it legal services, and then every time the Trump bill or an invoice for this money that he had paid to Strummy Daniels, calling it legal services, and then every time the Trump campaign took that invoice and entered it into the account,
into the records, and then every time they paid Michael Cohen into the records, and then every time they paid Michael Cohen and then entered it into the records, each time they did that, those three acts, received the invoice from Michael Cohen, entered it into the records, and then paid him and entered the payment into the records, each one of those acts constitutes a crime, each one of those acts constitutes a crime, a crime of falsifying business records with the intent
So you get to 34 because they did that 11 times over the course of 11 months.
And so the indictment is nothing more than a repeat of that same act, that same central act, that same crime over and over and over and over and over again.
And it's structured so that each individual act is its own count.
So it's really just one crime.
But it predictably produced this very dramatic, melodramatic headline of 34 felony charges, making it seem as though this avalanche of criminality has poured down on Donald Trump's head.
And usually, the crime that's being alleged, which is falsifying business records, is, in almost every case, nothing more than a misdemeanor.
But again, there would be no political value to accusing Trump or indicting Trump on a misdemeanor charge.
The only way it would be exciting, the only way it would have value to the Democratic Party, to American liberalism, to the media, is if you found a way to escalate that misdemeanor into a felony charge.
And the theory used by Alvin Bragg when doing so is that when Trump concealed these payments, or the purpose of these payments, by pretending that the payments to Michael Cohen were for legal fees as opposed to reimbursing him for paying off Stormy Daniels, the intent was to cover up a separate crime.
Only then can falsifying business records be converted into a felony.
If the intent in falsifying the business records is to conceal some other crime.
So the question is, what crime are they alleging Trump was concealing?
Because again, paying off somebody, even a porn star, to stay silent and not to accuse you of doing things is not illegal.
So what crime was he trying to conceal?
And the indictment now makes clear that the alleged crime that Trump was trying to conceal was that he violated federal campaign finance law.
Because, according to the prosecution, the purpose of these payments was to influence the 2016 election, to increase Trump's chances of winning the 2016 election, and therefore it was really a campaign expenditure.
Even though a person in Donald Trump's position would have all sorts of other motives for wanting to pay off someone who would accuse him of having sex with them while they were a porn star three months after he had a new child.
Personal embarrassment, protecting your family, avoiding embarrassment for your wife or your children.
The allegation is that he only had one overwhelming purpose, which was to influence the 2016 election by ensuring that this information wasn't known.
And therefore, these payments were, in fact, campaign expenditures, similar to buying ads on television for your candidacy, or sending out mail, or paying people who work for your campaign.
And that as a result, these expenditures had to be disclosed and treated as campaign expenditures under campaign finance law.
And because Trump never declared them as campaign expenses, instead he worked to conceal them, so this theory goes.
Then it was a violation of federal election law because federal election law requires that you disclose these payments and he didn't do that.
That's the theory.
And that is how they took what is at best a single misdemeanor count of paying off Stormy Daniels but recording it as a payment to Michael Cohen for legal services and escalated it or elevated it into 34 felony charges by claiming the intent of concealing it was to violate federal election law.
Now there's two gigantic problems just with this part of the case alone.
Number one, even if The Manhattan District Attorney can prove everything I just said, that that was Trump's intent, and that by doing so, he violated federal election law, even though, again, federal finance, campaign finance regulators and federal prosecutors chose not to pursue this.
Even if they can prove that he violated federal campaign finance law and his intent was to conceal it, just under New York law, The theory that he would have to use, which is that the crime that you're attempting to conceal can be a federal crime, not just a New York State crime, is very dubious.
Remember, this is a New York state prosecutor.
He's not a part of the federal system.
He can only enforce New York state law.
He has nothing to do with federal law.
So the question of whether or not you can even commit this felony by trying to conceal a federal crime, namely violation of the federal campaign finance regulations, is completely uncertain.
New York courts have never ruled on that question.
They've never ruled that you can violate this statute in a way that makes you a felon By concealing a crime that is federal in nature.
So, courts are going to have to decide that question for the first time, and if they decided against the prosecutor by saying, of course, this is a New York State court, this is a New York State prosecutor, you can't commit a felony under New York State law because of a federal law violation, very, very likely, or possible at least, that a court will do so, the entire case disappears.
It means that even if everything they say about Donald Trump is true, both his actions and his intent, This is not a felony under New York law as courts will interpret it.
That's a gigantic hurdle.
It's a huge gamble.
It's the reason why Bragg didn't want to bring this case until he got politically pressured to do so.
He does have a second theory that Trump also violated New York law, election law, by presenting a candidacy to the people of New York based on false pretenses or by trying to conceal a crime.
It's an incredibly vague law.
There's no way a person would have advance notice or due process notice that that would even be a violation of this law.
And I seriously doubt courts will accept that state law.
Interpretation, the question is, will they conclude that you can actually commit a felony under New York State law by violating federal law?
And that too presents the due process problem, which is because this question has never been answered by a court, you can't try and convict somebody of a crime whose existence was very unclear.
Because the only way due process is satisfied is if a person is accused of committing a crime that they had reason to know was actually a crime.
So there's all kinds of reasons why, even if they can prove that Trump did everything that they say he did with the intent that they claim he had, this is a crime in the first place.
The other extreme difficulty is proving that Trump's intention when paying Stormy Daniels this money, assuming they can prove he did that, was overwhelmingly or primarily to influence the election.
As I said, there's a million other different motives one might have in not wanting that information to surface.
And a very similar case happened in 2012, which we will review, when federal prosecutors tried to prosecute John Edwards, the former Democratic senator, the vice presidential candidate in 2004 on the Democratic ticket with John Kerry.
When he was running for president, he had two very rich donors pay $900,000 to his mistress, Rial Hunter.
And because that was concealed, they prosecuted him based on the same theory.
And the jury acquitted him on one count and couldn't reach a verdict on the other four.
And that's because there was no way to prove his motive.
There was no way to prove that his motive in paying off his mistress was primarily electoral as opposed to protecting his family or his reputation.
And they're going to run into that same problem.
That's why I say when you add all these things together, including the fact that this is brought by Historos Fact, prosecutor in the heart of American liberalism, I'm in favor of holding even ex-presidents accountable for crimes they commit, but you have to make sure you have solid footing to do that and this is the opposite of that.
So let's just look at A couple of the basics, first from the New York Times today.
There you see the basic story on the screen.
Even the New York Times acknowledges, quote, Donald Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
The former president pleaded not guilty to all counts.
The charges against Mr. Trump are all Class E felonies, which are the lowest category of felony offense in New York.
And carry a maximum prison sentence of four years per count, though it's inconceivable that he would ever get anything close to that.
Under New York law, falsifying business records is generally a misdemeanor, but prosecutors can escalate the charge when they believe a person falsified business records in order to commit another crime or hide the crime, the committing of a crime, and that's their challenge.
As the New York Times says, quote, for Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, a conviction is no sure thing.
The falsifying business record charges appear to hinge on a novel application of the law.
Even liberal media outlets are acknowledging that this case has been brought on a very precarious footing.
Here, for example, is an article in Vox from today by their legal correspondent, who I would venture to say is probably the single most partisan Democratic loyalist on all of media, Ian Millhiser, if not one of them.
I would say he probably is the leading one.
And he admits, as you see in this headline, quote, the dubious legal theory at the heart of the Trump indictment explain no one knows if Donald Trump can be prosecuted for the money payment to Stormy Daniels.
And his article, and again, this is Vox, as democratic of an outlet as you get, acknowledges just how vulnerable this case is.
Quote, the actual felony counts arise out of allegedly false entries that Trump made in various business records in order to make the payment to Daniels appear to be ordinary legal expenses paid to Cohen.
But Bragg built his case on an exceedingly uncertain legal theory.
Even if Trump did the things he's accused of, it's not clear Brad can legally charge Trump for them, at least under the felony version of New York's false records law.
As Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA's office, who played a significant role in the Trump investigation prior to his resignation in 2022, so that was one of the prosecutors who quit and publicly accused Bragg of being too much of a coward to bring this case, as even he wrote in a recent book, a key legal question that will determine whether Trump can be charged under the felony version of New York's false record law has never been resolved by any appellate court in the state of New York.
The felony statute requires Bragg to prove that Trump falsified records to cover up a crime.
Bragg has evidence that Trump acted to cover up a crime, but it is not clear that Bragg is allowed to point to a federal crime in order to charge Trump under the New York State law.
The answer to this, quote, gnarly legal question, as Pomerantz put it, is simply unknown.
So there is a serious risk That a New York judge will toss out the charges against Trump on tactical legal grounds unrelated to the former president's actual conduct.
Again.
If you're going to bring a case against the former president, which I am not opposed to in theory, I wrote a whole book, as I reviewed the other day, in 2011, arguing that this two-tiered justice system, where elites, both business and political, are immunized to prosecution, and whereas working class people and poor people are put into prison in gigantic numbers, is a grotesque vandalization of what a justice system is supposed to be.
But if you're going to do this, especially a Democratic prosecutor bringing a case not just against a Republican former president, but against the Republican front runner, you need to make certain that you're doing it in the most apolitical way possible and the most trustworthy way possible, only where there are serious charges to be brought, and where there is a clear cut law that you can claim has been violated.
None of those is true in this case.
None of them.
It's true.
It is the worst possible case for Democrats to have had to bring, and I think even they're embarrassed.
They were hoping it was something more consequential, like Trump being accused of inciting an insurrection or even mishandling classified information by taking up to Mar-a-Lago, something meatier.
Then a Democratic Party judge, district attorney in Manhattan indicting him for something that may not even be a crime at all.
Now, as I mentioned, it's really worth remembering what happened in the John Edwards case because it is so similar, although what John Edwards was accused of doing was actually much more serious.
Because if Trump paid off Stormy Daniels and it's found that that was actually a campaign expense, Trump was using his own money.
He's allowed to use his own money on his own campaign.
The only problem would be he didn't disclose it as a campaign expenditure, and he would argue because he didn't think of it as such.
But in the case of John Edwards, he had two very rich friends, rich supporters, pay $900,000 for him.
So if the jury found that that was for political purposes, for purposes of helping him win the election, that those were campaign expenditures, that would not only be illegal to conceal, it would be illegal to do.
Because those two people would be barred from donating that much money or spending that much money on John Edwards' presidential campaign since he was conspiring with them as they did it.
And they couldn't even get a conviction in that case at all.
He was acquitted on one charge and had a mistrial on the other and they decided never to prosecute him again.
Here's the New York Times headline.
When that happened in 2012, John Edwards not guilty on one count, mistrial on five other charges.
Listen to what happened in that much stronger case.
Quote, when former Senator John Edwards, a man who reached for the presidency while scrambling to hide a pregnant mistress, Heard on Thursday that a federal jury would not convict him on the six corruption charges he faced, he fell back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Certainly, Mr. Edwards had lost in the court of public opinion.
But on Thursday, he was vindicated, for the moment, by a jury of mostly working class North Carolinians who could not reach a verdict on the five charges of campaign finance fraud and conspiracy he faced.
They acquitted him on one, which is based on a $200,000 check.
that the heiress Rachel Mellon had written him in January 2008, the month he dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination for president.
The result was seen as a setback for the DOJ's public integrity section, the watchdog agency that has struggled to rebuild itself.
It is unlikely that the verdict will help politicians better interpret the labyrinth of campaign finance law or lead to more gifts to candidates, said Richard Austin, an expert in election law at the University of California, Irvine.
Quote, this is not going to open up a free-for-all where you're going to have the super-packed billionaires giving large gifts to their candidates' friends.
He noted the FEC has made it clear that it looks critically upon the practice unless there has been a pattern of gift giving unrelated to campaigns.
As with Ms.
Mellon to Mr. Edwards.
In other words, she had given him gifts before and that was why the jury refused to conclude that there was anything illegal about this one.
The government contended that Mr. Edwards used about $1 million to finance a complex scheme to keep Riel Hunter, a former campaign videographer with whom he began an extramarital affair in 2006, from his wife and the public while he pursued the presidency.
The charges are based on how he handled money from Fred Barron, a wealthy Texas lawyer who was Mr. Edwards' finance chairman, And Mrs. Mellon, now 101, an heiress to a pharmaceutical and banking fortune with connections to the Kennedy family.
Now, if they couldn't get a conviction in that case, and in part it was because, as the New York Times said, campaign finance law is incredibly complicated.
It's a labyrinth.
And so you have to prove not just that there was a violation, but that there was intent involved.
I think it's going to be very difficult, very difficult, to prove that Trump understood this.
As a violation of campaign finance law, or that his intention was principally electoral.
That's one of the major hurdles that they face.
Now, I think it's worth noting a couple things about the judge in this case, because as I said, if you're going to have the Democratic Party and its judges or district attorneys indict A former president who's currently leading the polls to become the president in 2024, it is vital, just from public perception purposes, that it look apolitical.
If it looks politicized, it will make this cause that I believe in, namely holding even former presidents accountable when they commit crimes, more difficult, not less so, because it will mean the first time it was ever tried will be perceived as a political scam.
And the history of this judge is not going to help that case at all.
Here's an AP article from yesterday asking, who is Juan Merchan, the New York judge handling Trump's case?
And it goes into his background.
I think what's very notable is two things.
Number one, he is not some senior judge known for overseeing complex cases.
Quite the contrary, he's a low-level state court judge who, for most of his career, has handled very low-stakes cases.
And number two, he has presided over cases involving the Trump Organization before and was very clearly against Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, and the arguments made by his lawyers, as you're about to see.
Quote, his caseload has featured charges against former President Donald Trump's company and some of Trump's closest business associates in business and politics.
Now Judge Juan Manuel Mershon is poised to take the historic hush money prosecution of Trump himself.
Mershon, a former prosecutor with 16 years on the bench, is expected to preside Tuesday over the unprecedented arraignment of a former U.S. commander-in-chief.
Trump, who is running for the White House again, says he's completely innocent and has called the case a political persecution.
He has also seized on Mershon's involvement.
This judge hates me, Trump riled on social media.
The Colombian-born Mershon, 60, emigrated as a six-year-old to the United States and grew up in New York City.
The first member of his family to go to college, he worked his way through school and went on to earn a law degree from Hofstra University in 1994.
He was a Manhattan prosecutor and worked in the state attorney general's office.
Before then, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed him as a family court judge in 2006.
Three years later, Mershon was assigned to a trial court called the Supreme Court in New York.
Even though it's called the Supreme Court in New York, that level of the court is the lowest level court in New York's system.
Above that is the Appellate Court, and then above that is what's called the Court of Appeals.
So the Supreme Court, paradoxically, which is where he was appointed, is the lowest level Of the judiciary, and that's where he is.
His particular duties now include overseeing a Manhattan mental health court, where some defendants get a chance to resolve their cases with treatment and supervision, a program he views as a success story.
If those cases put Mershon in the public eye, the last two years trained a Trump-orbiting telescope on his courtroom.
First came the tax fraud case against Trump's company and his longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg.
After hearing Weisselberg's testimony at trial, Mershon said he wished he could impose a tougher penalty than the one Weisselberg actually got.
The Trump Organization went to trial, saying that the company didn't benefit from Weisselberg's scheme and that Trump knew and his family knew nothing about it.
But a jury convicted the company, and Mershon imposed a $1.6 million fine, the legal maximum.
Trump himself was not charged in that case, but when it came time for closing arguments, Mershon let prosecutors claim that Trump knew about the tax cheating maneuvers.
The judge said it was, quote, only fair because the defense summation had mentioned Trump repeatedly.
The defense sought a mistrial over the issue.
Mershon said no.
After the verdict, it emerged that Mershon had secretly held the company in contempt of court for willfully disobeying four grand jury subpoenas and three court orders.
So this judge definitely does have a demonstrated antipathy to the Trump Organization and to Donald Trump.
Whether justified or not, there's a record of him not only ruling repeatedly against the Trump Organization and rejecting the charges of Trump's lawyers, but even saying that in the case of Trump's longtime CFO that he wishes he could have imposed an even greater penalty than the law allows.
That's why Donald Trump's saying, he hates me, there's no way I'm going to get a fair trial.
Now, again, I don't necessarily think that proves the judge is incapable of presiding in an unbiased way, but it's certainly going to add fuel to the already raging fire given how Alvin Bragg brought the case, given who Alvin Bragg is, given who donated so much money to help him get elected.
That this is, above all else, a politicized prosecution, not an exoneration or a vindication of the rule of law, but an abuse of the criminal justice system to try and render the person they're petrified might regain the presidency, Donald Trump, render him ineligible to run.
That seems clearly to be the overriding objective of not just this case, but the investigation into whether he illegally or criminally took Classified documents, the way we know Joe Biden did, and as well as whether he incited an insurrection by using his free speech rights, his First Amendment rights, to speak about what he perceived as the unfairness of the 2020 election.
Now, also adding to the perception that this judge is acting politically is who his daughter is and what she has done.
Here from the Daily Mail, Which is not the most reliable of all media outlets, but this information that they presented, we've confirmed the veracity of it using other sources.
There you see the headline quote, the prosecutor's daughter, the progressive daughter of the judge presiding over Donald Trump's hush money case in Manhattan, worked for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and is swirling speculation of bias against the ex-president.
And they have a photo here of that judge and there's his daughter.
And there's his daughter wearing a Kamala Harris for President t-shirt.
And the article says, quote, speculation and political bias is heightening the surrounding Donald Trump's indictment after it was revealed the daughter of the judge presiding over the case worked for Vice President Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential run and a slew of other progressive campaigns.
You would be forgiven if you have forgotten that Kamala Harris ran for president in 2020 because that was a very short, live campaign.
She rose to the top of the polls very briefly after she accused Joe Biden of being a racist for opposing segregation.
And immediately after that, Tulsi Gabbard humiliated her in a debate over the fact that she was presenting herself as this warrior for racial justice, whereas as a prosecutor, she reveled in putting huge numbers of people of color in prison for nonviolent drug crimes and the like.
She collapsed, and she withdrew before the first vote was count, but she did run in 2020.
And one of the people who supported her campaign and worked for it happens to be this judge's daughter.
Trump railed against Judge Juan Manuel Marchand in a social media rant ahead of his arraignment on Tuesday afternoon with a post claiming the judge is from a, quote, family of well-known Trump haters.
Lauren Marchand, the 34-year-old daughter of the Manhattan judge, is partner and president of Authentic Campaigns, a progressive digital firm, and worked on several high-profile Democratic campaigns, including Joe Biden for president, as well as Kamala Harris.
Before we get Michael on, which we're about to do, I just want to show you a little bit of what this indictment actually looks like so that you can see what is meant when media outlets claim that he was faced with, that he's facing 34 felony counts.
So there you see the indictment against Donald Trump that was unsealed today.
Can we put that on the screen, the indictment?
And we're going to show this to you in just a second, but can we put that on the screen?
So what we're going to show you is the fact that there you see it on the screen.
There's the cover of it.
And now this next page reads, this is the indictment itself.
The grand jury of the county of New York, by this indictment, accuses the defendant of the crime of falsifying business records in the first degree in violation of penal law section 175.10 committed as follows.
And then the document reads, quote, the defendant in the county of New York and elsewhere on or about February 14, 2017, with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aiding concealed the commission thereof, The document reads, quote, the defendant in the county of New York and elsewhere on or about February 14, 2017, with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aiding concealed the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise to wit, an invoice from Michael Cohen dated February made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise to wit, an invoice from Michael Cohen dated February 14, 2017, marked as a record of the Donald
And then you see the second count, it's essentially exactly the same thing verbatim, and it does that for 34 counts.
Because again, each act of the same transaction, receiving an invoice from Michael Cohen, entering it in the books, paying Michael Cohen, entering that in the books, each one of those counts is a separate felony, and that's how you get up to 34 felonies.
It's not some massive avalanche of criminality the way media headlines are presenting it as based on how this indictment was structured.
So that is essentially the indictment.
Those are the vulnerabilities of it.
Those are the reasons to suspect that there's actually a much greater political motivation than a legal one in this case.
And also, the one thing I would add is there's also an additional problem of the statute of limitations because the statute of limitations for this crime is five years.
For the misdemeanor account, I believe it's two.
But for the felony version, it's five.
And you see here that these transactions took place throughout 2017.
Which means that the statute of limitations would have run in 2022 and the theory they're using is that the last act extended into 2018 and therefore they got the last act in right before the indictment.
Which means that all the acts, since it's part of a conspiracy, are now within the statute of limitations, also a precarious legal theory, that this district attorney is going to have a hard time getting approved.
Now, I should add that the judge, I think there's every reason to believe, given his trajectory, Is probably someone who's politically and legally already inclined to dislike Donald Trump.
And so whether Trump's going to get a fair hearing in Manhattan before a Manhattan judge or the Manhattan jury is obviously a significant question.
But a lot of this is going to make its way through the New York criminal, the New York appellate system and these appellate courts and especially the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals as it's called in New York.
Tends to be more conservative.
A lot of them are from outer boroughs, like Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx and Staten Island.
And then the Court of Appeals itself actually nullified the Democrats' voting system, which is one of the reasons why Republicans did well in the 2020 to midterm, because the Court of Appeals, the top court in New York, had nullified the way in which these districts were drawn.
So we'll see how this case plays out.
The last point is that it's going to be another eight months before Trump has to return to court.
I believe it's in December of 2023.
So the case is really not going to be decided until early 2024, right as the primary season is kicking off.
And we've already seen some polls suggesting that this case is helping Trump, at least among Republican voters, because once he was indicted in several polls, his lead over Ron DeSantis and every other Republican candidate is by far at its largest level since it's been in many months.
Because Republicans are likely to be susceptible to the claim, which Ron DeSantis has already endorsed.
That this is an overwhelmingly politicized prosecution brought by a very liberal district attorney who is backed by George Soros.
Not a very compelling narrative if you're a Republican Party primary voter.
Something that I can easily see helping Trump, at least in the primaries, if not the general election.
So those are the basics of that.
We will obviously follow that as we go along.
And we want to now talk to Michael Tracy, who's been outside the courtroom all day about everything that he's seen.
And we're going to talk to him in just a second.
There he is.
Hello Michael Tracy.
I'm here.
Let me move back so my disgusting face is not occupying the entire screen.
It's hard to say whether the face is more disgusting if it's really up close to the camera we can only see part of it or if it actually moves back and we see the entire thing in its full totality but either way I think you should just relax forget about that we're interested in your journalistic insights so tell us what it is that you did today and what you saw today.
Well, I basically just meandered around the exterior of the courthouse because it had turned into this sort of destination event for people who are both pro and anti-Trump to show up and just kind of look around and Debate and, you know, it's just sort of interesting in a way.
But the most interesting aspect to me was that the number of journalists who were there, and this is the only journalist who I could tell overtly were journalists because they have the garish press badge dangling from their necks as though that endows them with some kind of superior status.
I don't wear that.
I happen to be a journalist myself as well, though, so who knows?
I'm probably underrating the prevalence of journalists who are in attendance.
Yeah, one time I remember.
No, go ahead, go ahead.
But they're basically having to compete with one another for like this small pool of potential interviewees.
So I talked to specific individuals who were among the minority in attendance who actually showed up as just like participants or rally goers or protesters.
Some of whom have been interviewed 35 times by 35 separate media outlets.
I was sitting next to a woman at one point who was dressed up in a costume and had Trump behind bars as a little doll she was carrying around.
And she had a police officer get up that she was adorning.
And I asked her, how many people?
Because it was one after another, people coming up to her to interview her about the same crap.
To the point of total redundancy.
But she said at least 30 people, at least 30 separate media outlets had interviewed her.
And then I watched as a Swedish outlet then interviewed her again.
And then like two others and she was interviewed like these barstool media guys.
I mean, it's just absurd.
So it became like almost a pilgrimage zone for journalists in particular.
What they really should have done was interview one another.
Because they were more of a story than the actual participants who were just ordinary citizens.
And it just goes to show the deep psychic longing that people have in the media to elevate Trump.
Because as you're well aware, Glenn, much of the media industry was on a very stark downward trend before Trump came onto the scene politically in 2015-16.
To the point that they were atrophying readers and viewers, their business models were basically in freefall, and Trump was a shot to the system and created a bonanza, a cash cow, where, you know, the New York Times had its greatest number of subscribers ever because people were sending the New York Times money because they thought that in doing so they were defending democracy or what have you against Trump.
So it's just sort of an extension of that longstanding phenomenon.
Well, I want to talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I want to talk about that actually, about the media's dependency on Trump, but just before I do, you're mentioning of this press badge.
You know, every time I've ever been given a press credential and they hand it out to you like it's some sacred document that is highly coveted and they want you to wear it around your neck or append it to your clothing, I absolutely refuse to do so because what is it?
Like what am I supposed to do?
Walk around with this badge like, excuse me, press, press.
And everyone's supposed to like part like the red sea.
- Pump your chest. - Because, oh, a journalist is coming through.
You must make way for the journalist.
But yeah, they love those credentials so much.
I think that's one of the things that animates the most about their job. - How embarrassed to wear them 'cause there are times when you have to wear them to be approved for access to certain venues.
- Right, then you just take it out of your pocket or your backpack or whatever and show it.
But the other thing is, you know, there's this kind of thing where whenever you have like a, you know, a kind of white supremacist rally or a Proud Boys gathering, you always assume that the majority of people present are FBI agents or other law enforcement agents in the federal government.
I think a lot of disclosures over the past several years have borne out that suspicion.
And I think With incidents like this you have like a couple hundred or a couple dozen Trump supporters and Trump opponents screaming at one another or maybe conversing and then hundreds, like hordes, of journalists.
It's mostly like just an event for journalists and I just wonder what you make of this.
It was clearly, you know, one of the reasons why Trump was successful in 2016 was because the press gave him hundreds of millions of dollars of free media.
I mean, the CNN would, you know, keep their camera trained on his empty podium.
They would take, they would always film his plane whenever he was going anywhere.
You know, Morning Joe had him on all the time, even let him call in by phone, sort of the Today Show, because he, as Megyn Kelly has pointed out many times.
Owners, they were calling.
I mean, who lets candidates come up here by phone on major television shows because he was so good for ratings?
He saved huge numbers of jobs.
He saved entire outlets.
And so you have this paradox where they really do, on the one hand, genuinely hate Trump.
They hate him.
But on the other hand, they need him, they crave him, they're desperate for his return and for him to remain relevant.
How is that dynamic, do you think, gonna work in this campaign? - Well, I think you see the reemergence of a theory that was first originated in the 2016 primaries where Democrats convinced themselves and liberal media puttits convinced themselves that it was in their interest to promote Trump and amplify I think you see the reemergence of a theory that was first originated in the 2016 primaries where Democrats convinced themselves and liberal media puttits convinced themselves that it was in
So they thought that having Trump as the face of the Republican Party discredited the Republican Party and also Trump would be an extraordinarily weak candidate because he wasn't presidential in the general election against Hillary Clinton or what have you.
And they've always convinced themselves of another version of that argument, where, oh, because Trump has now these legal problems and because he has lots of baggage from his presidency, then it's best if he's the Republican nominee again as opposed to a DeSantis or somebody else.
Because that means that the Democratic nominee, presumably Joe Biden, is a shoo-in.
I think that logic doesn't particularly hold up.
I mean, just in a political prognostication sense, Trump received the most votes ever of all time in 2020, second only to Joe Biden, who won.
And the margin of victory was something like 40,000 votes in three states.
So, you know, if a few things shift in another direction, and Trump potentially wins, so... Yeah, you can go back... It's a re-instantiation of this, like, political logic that they think they've settled on, where they can benefit from Trump's visibility, while also benefiting from him politically, in that he'll empower the Democrat to ultimately prevail.
Yeah, you can go back to 2016 and you can find, you can just go search it, people like Jamel Bowie, who is now at the New York Times, but was at Slate, Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine, I believe Matt Yglesias was included in this group too.
People explicitly arguing that they hope Trump would be the nominee, sometimes on the ground that he would be the easiest to beat, but other times they would even say that... What's that?
David Korn made a version of that argument. - Exactly, but some of them were actually saying that they thought Trump was the better candidate in a sense that he was more moderate than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or there was a lot of that as well.
I think there's this constant downplaying of how much populist appeal there is.
I saw that in Brazil, where for months, everybody was 100% certain that Lula was going to defeat Bolsonaro and defeat him by a large amount.
Polls throughout the year showed him leading by 10, 15, 20 points.
And even with all the problems Bolsonaro faced from COVID, from the economic devastation globally and in Brazil that it caused with the supposed popularity of Lula, who did leave office back in 2010, very popular, Lula barely won.
I mean, he won by less than two points.
It was extremely tightly contested.
And in 2020, we were talking about this the other night, Trump also faced COVID.
You know, it is true the economy was doing extremely well and then it was devastated from all the lockdowns and the shutdowns and the isolation and the collapsing of small businesses and restaurants and the like.
And even with that, even facing what Time Magazine described as an unprecedented Kind of collusion on the part of all establishment institution of authority.
As you say, even if you disbelieve the voting record and believe the voting tallies and believe Trump won or whatever, even if you're somebody in that camp, the official tally showed that Biden won by a very small amount.
As you said, 40 to 60 or 70,000 votes in just a few states.
So why people are so sure that When Trump goes to run again in 2024 and faces an 82-year-old Joe Biden, who will have the burden now of being the defender and the representative of the status quo, why are they so sure again that Trump is going to be easily defeated?
Especially if there's another economic downturn, which seems like a very plausible possibility with the spate of bank failures recently and whatnot.
I mean, it's hard to say with any certitude, but it certainly doesn't seem like a given that the economy is going to remain in good straits for the next two years or so.
You know, another thing is that there's a Republican version of this same argument Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell kind of person.
who are sick of Trump, maybe never supported him in the first place, but came around sort of begrudgingly.
I'm not talking about never Trump Republicans like a Bill Kristol or a David French, right?
I'm talking about a Republican who's just sort of like a generic Republican.
Like a Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell kind of person.
Or people who are just tired of Trump.
Yeah, well, or who maybe see some value in sort of continuing even like the policy legacy of Trump or in not abandoning America first as like the guiding principle of the party, but don't want Trump himself as the emblem of the party any longer because but don't want Trump himself as the emblem of the party any longer because of the baggage and because of his own And who maybe favors somebody like a DeSantis as a substitute.
You could see, you see them sort of grimacing and being irritated by this amplification of Trump and his increase in publicity around this legal snafu that he's in.
And they accuse the Democrats of doing it because Democrats know that Trump is the weaker candidate.
And they themselves, being the Republicans who prefer a different Republican nominee, they agree that Trump is the weaker candidate.
That's why they're desperate to have a DeSantis in.
And I think their certitude is also a bit misplaced as to Trump being a weaker candidate than a DeSantis.
What grounds does anyone have empirically that Ron DeSantis stands a greater chance of winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin than Donald Trump, who actually did win those states?
For the first time, any Republican won them since 1988.
I mean, maybe DeSantis would be a better candidate, maybe he wouldn't, I don't think, but it seems like there's just a lot of sort of mumbo-jumbo that leads to this, I think, unestablished certainty around that being the case, when Trump actually has continued unique assets in just being this outsized figure who can activate segments of the electorate
Who otherwise would not be drawn to virtually any other Republican because no other Republican just by nature could have the same kind of stature in terms of celebrity, in terms of personal appeal, in terms of generating excitement and even like negative partisanship and the whole bundle of other
Yeah, I mean, you're somebody, I'm interested in that because you're somebody who spent a good amount of time in 2016 and even beyond it, various Trump rallies and the like, and got a good feel for the kinds of people who go to them, exactly, 2020 as well.
To me, what this points to is this growing breach between elite classes and everybody else in the United States, which is larger than ever.
So if you are a, let's say, a conservative elite, somebody who pays a lot of attention to politics, who's very well educated, who has a kind of more like white collar job, you spend a lot of time connected to the news cycle, you're reading political journals and the like, like that kind of person, I completely understand why they think Ron DeSantis like that kind of person, I completely understand why they think Ron DeSantis is the better candidate because he's somebody who is probably capable of morphing into First candidate You're seeing hints of that already.
He knows, he's very shrewd, he knows what the Republican Party primary voter wants to hear and he's capable of delivering that.
Who knows, maybe some of his information is even a little bit genuine, some of his kind of signs that he's sending on Ukraine that would be very out of character for him, say compared to five, six years ago when he was in the House voting very similarly to say Mike Pompeo on foreign policy.
So I get why he appeals.
He's no drama.
He is very polished.
He went to Yale.
He's somebody who speaks well.
And I totally understand why, to a conservative elite, that is somebody who would be more appealing.
And you say, just plug in the Trumpian politics into him, and we'll get the best of both worlds.
We'll get Trump's unorthodox politics combined with this more competent, kind of sleeker, less You know, drama-laden figure.
And it does seem like that just completely omits what people found so compelling and find so compelling about Trump, which is just his personal charisma.
The things that code to conservative elites as messiness and as drama and as a breaking of norms and as embarrassing is precisely what, I think at least, tell me if I'm wrong, the people who are so attracted to Trump find very appealing.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Sorry to do a pretty inartful pivot, but I wanted to ask you about a detail of the indictment, if that's alright.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about the subject of the case.
Let's go ahead and do that.
Okay, yeah.
Well, something that I'm not clear on, and I've just read the statement of fact as well as the indictment itself, is that the theory that Bragg seems to be going with is that the payments made over the course of 2017, while Trump was president, to Cohen, to essentially reimburse Cohen for the payment of the $130,000 to Stormy Daniels in October of 2016.
Those were all misclassified illegally in internal Trump organization ledgers because they were characterized by Cohen and then the CFO Weisselberg and then Trump himself in some sort of conspiracy, although actually a conspiracy is not a ledger.
I saw lots of speculation that Bragg actually might allege some conspiracy.
When he didn't, he just alleged 34 separate transactions of the same, which constitute the same offense, right?
So he didn't broaden that out into any kind of conspiracy.
But the theory is that it was illegal for those records to be inputted into the Trump Organization database because they falsely characterized the nature of those payments.
I'm not clear on that, because the theory seems to hinge on there not being a retainer agreement between Cohen and the Trump Organization.
Which it asserts, which the documents assert that there was no monthly.
In other words, they decided to pay Michael Cohen in equal amounts, not only to compensate him for those Stormy Daniels payments, but they had to increase the payments because those payments would result in him incurring tax liability.
And part of what Michael Cohen ended up pleading guilty to was tax evasion.
He was very slippery with the IRS with how he did his taxes.
He was convicted of bank fraud as well.
He had financial difficulties, so he was very concerned that that money not be classified only, that if they were going to classify it as payments to him, that it also, they had to increase the payments and they were also essentially paying his taxes that he would incur on these payments.
But the argument was that if Michael Cohen had a retainer agreement where he was getting paid that monthly amount each month then it would be true.
Trump would have a very strong claim for saying those payments to Michael Cohen were pursuant to a retainer agreement.
So the document does, the charging document does assert that there was no retainer agreement between Trump and Michael Cohen in order to negate the possibility that Trump could claim those payments were pursuant to some retainer that he had Michael Cohen on. - Right, but my question would the charging document does assert that there was no retainer agreement between Trump and Michael Cohen in order to negate the possibility that Trump could claim those payments were pursuant to some Implicit.
So, in other words, when Cohen was working for Trump as a so-called fixer from 2007 onward, before Trump was even in sort of any kind of political contention, was there a formal retainer agreement?
I actually don't know the facts on that.
But on top of that, couldn't you see a viable contestation of the notion that it was false to characterize those payments as in service of uh legal services as related to legal services because cohen actually did perform what you could characterize as a legal service in effectuating the non-disclosure agreement with stormy daniels right it's not illegal unto itself to effectuate a non-disclosure agreement that then gets cast in sort of more crass terms
as a hush money payment hush money is not like the hush money payment is not even not even remotely illegal no this is a good point let me Let me mention this point because this illustrates just how dubious this entire case is, how weak and rickety it is.
Ordinarily, if we were involved in any other kind of a prosecution, and I were to go and explain to people the major weakness, the most glaring weakness of the prosecutor's case here, I would start with the fact that the entire thing hinges on the testimony of Michael Cohen, somebody who went to prison because he pled guilty to lying to investigators and lying to Congress.
So he is a proven lying felon.
He went to prison for lying.
Not only that, if you read the sentencing memo that the Southern District of New York submitted when Combs was up for sentencing, they argued against any leniency in his sentencing because they claim that even after conviction, he was continuing not to be forthcoming about his full knowledge of potential criminal wrongdoing, which he's required to disclose under sentencing guidelines in totality.
Exactly.
This is what's amazing is, right, I started off, I maybe devoted 10 minutes to describing the events of today and the indictment, and then I spent, I don't know, maybe 25 to 30 minutes explaining the vulnerabilities of this case, the reason why it looks so, you know, so weak.
It's just a case that should never have been brought.
This is the reason why no one has brought this case until now.
In order to prosecute the case, you have to prove that Trump paid these payments to Michael Cohen not for genuine legal services but as reimbursement to the Stormy Daniels hush money payments and that Trump was aware of that.
The only way to prove either of those things is by putting Michael Cohen on the stand and having him testify that those things were true.
So, if your entire case depends upon convincing a jury to believe the word, the unproven word, he doesn't have any tapes, he doesn't have any written documents proving this, it's just the word of Michael Cohen that the jury is going to have to not just believe, but believe beyond a reasonable doubt when that person wasn't just a felon, but is a felon because he lied under oath repeatedly.
That is something that almost no lawyer would ever want to bring a case when faced with, let alone all the other multiple vulnerabilities that I spent 30 minutes detailing.
That shows you how horrible this case is that I didn't even get to that one, that very kind of standard, more pedestrian weakness in the case.
And another question I have for you on the statute of limitations issue, because my understanding is that Probably among the first considerations that Trump's lawyers will choose to focus on will have to do with statute of limitations.
For sure.
Those could be the most expedited rulings that the judge would have to take into account, right?
Whereas the sort of legal theory underlying the charges would take more time to, you know, litigate.
You said before that the operating theory is that although the five-year statute of limitation has passed for a classy felony in New York, Out of New York.
Out of New York.
The recent transaction alleged is December 7th, 2017, so we're now five years and four months on from that, which is past the scope of the statute of limitations.
But you're saying that they're claiming that that final transaction somehow extended into 2018?
I thought that the theory as to how they could get around the statute of limitations was that they can claim that the statute of limitations was actually, quote, "told" because Trump spent a, quote, continuous- Out of New York.
Out of New York.
Outside of the state of New York.
That's one way.
Because he had to be in Washington, D.C. to be president.
I mean, there are theories that say that if you can't serve the person with any kind of legal process because they're not present in the state of New York, then the statute of limitation basically freezes.
I don't know exactly how the statute of limitation works in this case, whether it The trigger is when you convene the grand jury, but I believe that the theory is, and we'll have to check on this, is, and I didn't go into detail about it because I don't know exactly what their theory is because they haven't yet explained it.
Alvin Bragg hasn't yet explained why it's within the statute of limitations because Trump hasn't asked for dismissal on this ground yet.
Surely you're right, they will.
And then they'll have to come up with a theory.
I heard a legal expert within the last, I think, 48 hours saying that Even though it's not a formal conspiracy, under New York law, it is alleging an effective conspiracy that multiple people openly spoke about committing a crime together.
And when there is a effective conspiracy, even if you're not accusing somebody formally of conspiracy, as long as the last act is within the statute of limitations, all the other proceeding acts go within the statute of limitations because it's part of the same conspiracy.
But then your question still stands of how is it that even the last act makes it within the five-year statute of limitations.
They're definitely going to rely on his absence from New York, but I believe there's a question as well as to when the last act was and what triggers it.
Is it the indictment?
Is it the convening of the grand jury?
Seeking in the indictment?
I don't know the answer to that.
But there's definitely a statute of limitations problem.
Because there have been advocacy organizations like CREW, C-R-E-W, the acronym, that have been agitating for the bringing of these charges for some time.
And so they've put out these sort of policy mechanisms Memoranda, or these theory documents justifying how it is that the DA could move forward with the charges, notwithstanding any statute of limitations, or impediments.
And the theory that I just saw that Crewe has been advocating for a long time, as well as this guy Norm Eisen, remember him?
He wrote a whole paper on this for the Brookings Institution, basically calling that serves as what seems like the blueprint for the actual prosecution.
This is from a few years ago now.
I think it was from 2021 actually.
Norm Eisen at the Brookings Institution put out a paper, I might have the year wrong, but he did write author a paper that laid out the legal framework for how the prosecutors could get around statute of limitations concerns and what have you.
And it does seem like those advocacy organizations, as best I can tell, and if it is true that they sort of provided some of the blueprint for the prosecution, It seems like they are hinging their statute of limitations advisory around this tolling argument, which...
opens up a whole new can of worms because Trump was obligated not to be in New York for a quote continuous amount of time because he was the President of the United States.
Yeah, I mean.
His residence was moved to Washington.
The reason why you're seeing all of these like elaborate complex theories, and we have to go because I have to be on a different program in just a couple minutes, but the reason why there's all these complex, very important, I'm very much in demand, These complex legal theories are being constructed is because the reality is there's multiple significant impediments to this case, and they were just desperate to indict Trump.
So all of this proves just how political this is, the fact that all these liberal advocacy groups are working so hard to convince the prosecutor, the district attorney, that's ultimately what it's about, that he can win this case, because he originally concluded That he couldn't.
All right, Michael, thank you so much for your live, on-the-ground, on-the-scene reporting.
That's Roving Independent Journalist.
Why do you sound sarcastic?
Michael, Tracy, I don't know.
I think you're just hearing it that way.
I'm just being very neutral in describing what you've done.
We really appreciate it as always.
You're coming on the show.
Thanks so much.
See you.
Oh, and actually, tell everybody where to find your Substack, as well, where you do a lot of your reporting, as well.
mtracy on Twitter, mtracy.substack.com, etc.
I mean, it's not that hard to find.
Alright, thank you, Michael.
Thank you.
This is an opportunity for you to promote your work.
Alright, have a nice night.
So, that concludes our show for this evening.
As I said, ordinarily, Tuesday and Thursday, we have our live after show on Rumble, on Locals, rather.
Tonight, we're not going to do that because I'll be on Dr. Karl's program in just a few minutes talking about the proceedings of today.
As a result, we will be back there tomorrow night instead of tonight.
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