Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy said that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not proved former President Donald Trump “defrauded anyone.”
Closing arguments took place on Tuesday in Trump’s trial regarding an indictment on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records secured by Bragg in March 2023. McCarthy said that Bragg’s team was “making up” a fraud crime without proving “that he actually defrauded anyone of anything.”
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“I just think it’s so astonishing in the United States to be through one summation and we are still not even clear on what the charge is, and I think the greater problem that comes out of that is that, you know, we’ve all had our eyes on this campaign finance crime and when will they get to it and when are they going to plant their feet?” McCarthy said. “I actually think what’s going on here is it is almost pretextual. They’re essentially making up a crime against Trump as they go along, a fraud crime, and they are trying to bring it home without having proof that he actually defrauded anyone of anything and without having proved that he did anything that was unlawful.”
“The way I read the draft fraud instruction that I saw, you could convict, for example, Joe Biden comes out and says ‘inflation was 9% when I became president,’ and he keeps saying it, that’s deceptive, we all know it’s not true,” McCarthy continued. “Under Bragg’s theory, I think he could be indicted for fraud on that. I don’t see anything in the instructions that would cut against the idea that a jury could convict him of that and that’s a crime they are making up on the fly.”
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McCarthy previously accused New York Judge Juan Merchan of depriving former President Donald Trump of “a fair process” by allowing prosecutors to not reveal who they were going to call next as witnesses, saying it hampered Trump’s attorneys’ ability to prepare to cross-examine them.
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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