Renowned Lawyer Destroys Bragg’s Case Against Trump, Says Bragg ‘Is Dreaming’ With Absurd Legal Theory

Tom Crist, a lawyer, wrote a defense of Donald Trump and blasted the Manhattan DA’s case against him as “wrong” on the law and self-contradictory in its alleged facts in an article at The Federalist. The general basis of the article is that any reasonable person ought to find that the Statutes of Limitations, contrary to Alvin Bragg’s claim, has passed to press such a case against the former president and that Mr. Bragg has no case in general.

Mr. Crist excoriated the DA’s office as checking “some of their basic knowledge of the law at the door” in his piece. He noted that the Statute of Limitations in New York holds that misdemeanors must be prosecuted within 2 years and felonies within 5 years. The case against Trump is elevating an alleged misdemeanor into a felony in order to achieve “the left’s fever dream for Trump” of jailing the Republican. Crist then lists all the governmental agencies from the Federal Elections Commission to federal prosecutors who passed on the chance to charge Trump with said crimes. Still, Bragg charging Mr. Trump in 2023 is a problem given that more than 5 years have elapsed since 2016 (or 2017).

Crist then asked how may Bragg circumvent this fact. Bragg may argue that the time Trump spent in the White House in Washington DC and his switch of residency to Florida in 2019 meant that the statute can be extended. Crist writes that “[t]his is dreaming and relies on only part of the statute while ignoring the rest. New York law, in fact, addresses this concept in its Rules of Criminal Procedure, which provide that if the defendant was ‘continuously outside’ the state or ‘the whereabouts of the defendant were continuously unknown and continuously unascertainable by the exercise of reasonable diligence,’ the time for the state to bring charges against a person may be extended.”

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In effect, only if Trump had fled Manhattan, avoided extradition until the Statute of Limitations expired by continuously staying out of Manhattan, and then came back to Manhattan would Bragg have a case to extend the timeline to indict Trump. Yet, as Crist rightly argued “He [Trump] was not hiding from anyone. He did not evade Bragg…Trump routinely visited New York City over the last several years and maintains at least one home and business assets there. If Bragg could not figure out where Trump was from 2016 to 2022, he has bigger problems than this weak indictment.”

The lawyer added that “Based on Bragg’s own timeline in the indictment he prepared, the charges he has conferred against Trump are time-barred with no basis for leeway.”

Mr. Crist noted that Bragg’s theory that “bookkeeping fraud influenced the 2016 election” is absurd given that “the indictment contends the fraudulent ledger entry occurred in 2017, post-election. A person cannot retroactively affect an election.”

Mr. Crist revealed that Bragg was caught by his own contradictions. “On one hand, Bragg has alleged a factually unprovable charge (a post-election, election interference) to try to reach a more favorable time limit for charges. On the other, he has charged crimes that are plainly time-barred based on the chronology he wrote and published. Either way, he loses badly. The push and pull are tearing apart Bragg’s indictment, leaving him nothing on which to proceed” wrote the lawyer.

The Trump indictment and possible conviction on such weak charges are symbolic of “a dual system of justice controlled by the left.” An honest judge given this set of facts ought to have no trouble in dismissing the case. It sadly remains to be seen whether honest justice can prevail.