A top law professor said on March 19 that it’s likely that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation against former President Donald Trump will never see a jury and that Trump could easily beat the charges.
Yoo, a Bush-era deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, noted that the timing of the investigation and reports of Trump’s possible arrest was suspicious, coming just months after the former president announced a 2024 bid for the White House. Going after Trump while he’s in the midst of a presidential campaign appears to be a politically motivated move to damage his chances of reelection, he suggested.
“I have strong doubts whether this will ever get to a jury,” he said. “I have strong doubts whether this will lead to the conviction of President Trump. He could easily get off all these charges and be declared innocent.”
Since Trump’s Truth Social post announcing that he may be arrested on March 21, the former president and others have noted that Bragg, a Democrat, received campaign cash from a group linked to controversial Hungarian-born billionaire investor George Soros. Twitter owner Elon Musk wrote that Soros “figured out a clever arbitrage opportunity” and that “many small political contests, such as DAs & judges, have much higher impact per dollar spent than the big races, so it is far easier to sway the outcome.”
“When you have a prosecutor who is not prosecuting serious crimes in New York City and is twisting and stretching the law” to investigate Trump for something that occurred six or seven years ago, it undermines Americans’ faith in the justice system, Yoo said. Trump isn’t being investigated for making a payment to Stormy Daniels but for allegedly misclassifying it during the 2016 campaign.
Historically, the United States has an “important norm” for not targeting current and former presidents because they have to make “some of the toughest, most difficult decisions in the country,” Yoo said. Prosecuting a former president who has broad support will also set a dangerous precedent, he said.
“But to bring a case like this ... it’s not important enough” to break the norm of not pursuing a former president, he said of Bragg’s investigation. No current or former president has ever been arrested since the country’s founding nearly 250 years ago.
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Late last week, alleged unnamed court sources told multiple media outlets that Trump could be indicted soon, while those reports alleged that a grand jury in New York has been empaneled and may be seeking his indictment.“While we still do not know the specific state charges in the anticipated indictment, the most-discussed would fall under Section 175 for falsifying business records, based on the claim that Trump used legal expenses to conceal the alleged hush-payments that were supposedly used to violate federal election laws,” Turley wrote. “While some legal experts have insisted such concealment is clearly a criminal matter that must be charged, they were conspicuously silent when Hillary Clinton faced a not-dissimilar campaign-finance allegation.”
Regardless of the outcome, if Trump is indicted, it could require the 45th president to travel to the district attorney’s office in downtown New York to surrender. In some white-collar cases, the defendant’s lawyers and prosecutors often agree to a set date and time—instead of arresting the individual at their home or elsewhere.
