(The following article has been authored by a non-lawyer, and does not constitute a legal opinion on the part of Newsmax. It is not an endorsement of any candidate or political party by Newsmax.)
Conservative legal experts have convinced a lot of folks that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's indictment of former President Donald Trump was deeply flawed and that he he's unlikely to win a conviction on the merits.
Numerous potential liberal prosecutors looked at the case but turned it down on the grounds that it couldn't be won, including Mr. Bragg's predecessor: Cyrus Vance, Jr.
Bragg himself wouldn't take the case at one point. Brad Smith, a former Federal Election Commission Chairman, said the core of Bragg's decision to prosecute, that paying hush money to a woman who accuses a man of having an affair with her, is as common as clay.
"The criminal case against Donald Trump," he remarked, "lacks a necessary element: there is no federal campaign finance violation."
Though Bragg went through multiple legal hoops to try to establish one.
Even prominent liberal lawyers say he never proved his allegations.
Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard lawyer who voted for Hillary twice, was dumbstruck by the indictment's incompetence: "I have never seen a case in my 60 years of practice which has so many holes in it."
Not only did Bragg base his decision on the testimony of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who clearly wove a number of misrepresentations into his testimony against Trump, but he brought the case after the statute of limitations had tolled.
"I don't see how," Dershowitz remarked,"you can twist and turn to make the statute of limitations disappear."
Bragg's pledge to "Get Trump" if elected District Attorney, he said, was also a major violation of legal ethics which could get him disbarred.
He and others also noted the irony of Bragg, who stretched the law to put Trump behind bars, favors letting known violent criiminals out of jail.
The left-leaning publication Politico.com noted that even Bragg's allies thought he had botched the indictment.
Why, some of them wondered, had he revived a case he had left for dead just months ago?
And why, as Dershowitz noted, was he bringing charges against the former president six years after the statute of limitations had expired?
Conservatives have been convincing in arguing that Bragg's successful effort to persuade a grand jury to charge Trump with a federal campaign finance violation doesn't make sense.
Especially when former Federal Election Commission Chairman Smith says no such violation exists in the federal law.
(Nor does anyone, including Bragg, appear to have successfully challenged Smith's claim.)
Conservatives appear to have won the argument among most legal experts about why the indictment never should have been brought.
But this writer likes to check out what Ruth Marcus, the top legal columnist for The Washington Post, has to say; to see if those I agree with have overlooked an important point they haven't considered.
Marcus is liberal and anti-Trump.
But, she appears more committed to telling the reader whether the charges launched by a prosecutor are legally valid, rather than taking a partisan slap at the accused to help out her ideological allies.
Marcus has also sided with conservatives who believed Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland wouldn't prosecute Trump for the march which took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, because there was no proof Trump had broken any law.
The Bragg indictment, Marcus points out, accuses the ex-president of having engaged in 34 felonies. Counts which claim violation of New York's election laws.
Our 45th president's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified that he, at Trump's request, paid Stormy Daniels off, then secured reimbursement for the $130,000 in hush money by falsely describing the payments as legal retainers.
Bragg stressed that these are "felony crimes in New York state no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct."
Conduct, he said, which makes it a "crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means." But, is it clear, as Bragg contends, that Trump violated the criminal law, which is particularly important, as these are the first criminal charges ever lodged against a former president?
"On that front," Marcus says, the Bragg indictment "is disturbingly unilluminating and the theory on which it rests is debatable at worst."
She also notes how the serious charges against Trump, if they were worthy of a felony indictment, weren't pursued after Trump left office. (A sitting president can't be charged.)
And how did what is clearly a misdemeanor under state law transmogrify into a felony
Citing experts on state and federal election laws, Marcus contends that federal election law overrides state law. "The federal law states explicitly that its rules 'supersede and preempt any provision of State law with respect to election to Federal office'."
And that, of course, is what Trump's lawyers will argue.
Her final verdict after meticulously analyzing Bragg's indictment:
This feels "like a dangerous weapon on the highest of wires."
Her view can't be comforting to the "Get Trump" crowd.
(A related story may be found here.)
Alan H. Ryskind, along with Thomas Winter, owned an ran Human Events, Ronald Reagan's a publicaiton Ronald Reagan read, for three decades. He is the author of "Hollywood Traitors," on how the Communist Party came close to capturing the movie industry.
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