Bragg to Merchan: How About Freezies No Erasies?

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Just when one might have thought that Alvin Bragg couldn’t get more shameless, he astounds us once again. Fresh off a corrupt attempt to rescue his prosecution of Daniel Penny by dismissing a charge after deliberations had already begun, Bragg’s office wants to rescue its conviction of Donald Trump by colluding with the judge to prevent an appellate court from reviewing it. 

Unfortunately, this is no joke. Bragg’s prosecutors offered a motion to get around the issue of presidential immunity by treating Trump as if he’d died before sentencing:

Prosecutors are urging a judge not to throw out President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money criminal conviction but suggesting a willingness to end the case in a way that would preserve the verdict while avoiding punishment or a protracted legal fight.

In court papers made public on Tuesday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office proposed an array of options for keeping the historic conviction on the books, including asking Judge Juan M. Merchan to consider treating the case the way he would when a defendant dies.

That would effectively put the case into a permanent state of suspended animation. Trump’s conviction would stand, but everything would freeze, including any appeal action. It is unclear if that option is viable under New York law.

“As applied here, this Court could similarly terminate the criminal proceeding by placing a notation in the record that the jury verdict removed the presumption of innocence; that defendant was never sentenced; and that his conviction was neither affirmed nor reversed on appeal because of presidential immunity,” prosecutors wrote in an 82-page filing.

To put it mildly, this is absurd. The court has a real issue to resolve in the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, not just in sentencing but in the conviction itself — even apart from the corrupt indictment Bragg presented. The ruling in Trump v US ruled that official acts cannot be used to create a criminal case against a president, and Bragg’s presentation included official acts. Merchan could rule that those didn’t impact the jury or that the other evidence outweighed those references, but he has to rule one way or the other on it and bring the case to a conclusion.

Bragg clearly wants to avoid that, however, even though without a resolution the conviction cannot be made official. Bragg wants to prevent any review of this trial and especially the indictment, most likely because he knows how absurd it is even apart from the issue of presidential immunity. Bragg took routine non-disclosure agreement payments and attempted to enforce a federal law on election financing by transforming 34 allegedly misleading ledger entries from misdemeanors into felonies because orange man bad.  

It’s no surprise that Bragg doesn’t want an appeals court to review this case. Merchan may not want a review of his handling of this trial either, although one suspects that Judge Arthur Engoron might be a wee bit more concerned about his gross manipulations in the Letitia James lawsuit against Trump and his outrageous penalty of nearly a half-billion dollars for alleged fraud that never cost anyone a dime. That case is already under review by the New York appellate court, which seemed very skeptical in oral arguments about the case as well as the award. 

But at least that case was allowed to proceed to review. That is a key right of due process for every American, from presidents to peasants and all stations in between. To freeze this case without allowing the defendant to seek review and challenge the rulings made is to impose a strange form of prosecutorial and judicial tyranny of a kind we have not seen in the US. Just raising this as a possibility speaks volumes about the political motives of Alvin Bragg in pursuing this case, as well as his trepidation at having anyone other than Merchan review it.

If Bragg doesn’t want Trump to appeal the verdict, then Bragg should move to dismiss the case. If not, then Judge Merchan should dismiss it for him and put an end to this ludicrous prosecution once and for all. Freezies No Erasies has no place in American justice.