Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Wednesday that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump hinges on a claim that Trump “stole” the 2016 election by not disclosing an alleged payment to a porn star.
Bragg secured a grand jury indictment against Trump in March 2023 centered around an alleged $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, during Trump’s successful run for the White House. McCarthy said that Bragg’s theory was that Trump’s failure to disclose the payments to Daniels affected the 2016 election, but noted that under campaign finance laws, Trump did not have to disclose the payment prior to the election. (RELATED: ‘Get Bad Convictions’: Alan Dershowitz Outlines Dems’ Strategy With Trump Indictments)
“It’s a Constitutional problem, because the president and the executive branch of the federal government are charged by law to enforce the campaign finance laws, which are federal. So to the extent that Bragg, a state prosecutor, purports to do that, he’s actually invading what is the proper legal realm of presidential decision making,” McCarthy told Salem Radio Network talk show host Hugh Hewitt. “There’s two different federal bureaucracies that enforce these laws – the FEC and the Justice Department. Both of them looked at this and decided not to enforce against Trump. Even if the campaign finance laws applied, Trump as a candidate is subject to different limitations than, say, a Michael Cohen, who was a supporter. So there’s even less of a basis to try to bring an action against Trump.”
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McCarthy also noted that Bragg was also making a political argument in the case. Trump pled not guilty to all charges during his April 4, 2023 appearance in court.
“The other thing that hits me like a thud, Hugh, is that, I’m sorry, Bragg’s theory is that Trump stole the election,” McCarthy told Hewitt. “It was a very tight election with Hillary, and by concealing these payments, if voters had known about these payments, what Bragg’s theory is, is that Hillary would have won the election.”
“Even if you indulge the fiction that this was a campaign expense that had to be booked and had to be disclosed, the next disclosure period after Cohen paid this money would have been in the first quarter of 2017,” McCarthy added. “That is to say that even if this was under the campaign finance laws, it wouldn’t have been disclosed by law prior to the election. So the whole theory is wrong.”
Bragg did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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