Former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) slammed the highly controversial verdict against former President Donald Trump this week by saying it was the only time that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has ever been excited to prosecute someone — a reference to his soft-on-crime policies.
The verdict was the culmination of a weeks-long courtroom battle in which Trump said that he was the target of a “political persecution” — a point that was seemingly validated when President Joe Biden sent his re-campaign to hold a political event outside the courthouse this week. The former president was found guilty on all 34 charges brought in the hush-money trial.
“The best revenge is success. If you want a justice system that doesn’t elect a District Attorney who promises to go after a political opponent, then you need to win at the ballot box,” Gowdy said. “Alvin Bragg, name me another crime that he’s gotten really, really excited about. It’s not shoplifting, it’s not stealing, it’s not hitting people on the street, it is alleged hush-money to keep someone quiet about a sexual encounter. That’s what really gets his attention.”
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Even CNN’s top legal expert Elie Honig dismantled the case this week following the verdict, saying that just because the jury convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts does, it not mean that justice was carried out because the case should have never been brought.
“Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess,” he said. “Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. 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.”
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In his lengthy piece, Honig noted that the judge in the case broke the law by having donated to a pro-Biden and overtly anti-Trump political operation, the district attorney who brought the case campaigned on getting Trump, the case pushed the outer limits of the law and due process, and numerous aspects of the case were crafted in a special manner just to get Trump.
“The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented,” he said. “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.”
